On health and population

Gosh, fertility in Australia is down. Should we be concerned? No. Should Australian Governments be moved to spend vast amounts of scarce health money on IVF programs to turn the trend around? No.

Last week, the Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand rang the alarm bells at its annual conference in Perth.

“There is a drop in the Australian fertility rate. It is now 1.6. In order to just maintain the general population level in Australia, the fertility rate should sit around 2,” the president of the society, Professor Luk Rombauts, said.

Wrong. The Australian fertility rate could fall to zero tomorrow and the population would still grow because of the Federal Government’s out-of-control massive immigration policy. And even if Australia’s population fell, it would be a Good Thing, not a Bad Thing.

Even if you doubled the IVF rate it would only move the fertility rate to a tad less than 1.7. So even if you were determined to increase the fertility rate to 2, IVF would not help much.

The Fertility Society says it is a membership organisation. “Our members are fertility specialists, gynaecologists with a special interest in fertility, embryologists, fertility nurses, geneticists, fertility counsellors and endocrinologists,” it says.

Sure. But it is in fact an industry association. And like all industry associations is keen to redirect government funds and government policy its way.

The society’s president Petra Wale said a national plan would “remove some financial barriers to fertility treatments”. In other words get the government to pay more.

Yes, many anguished couples would like to have babies that they cannot conceive naturally. But there is absolutely no public interest in providing then the wherewithal to have a child at public expense. Indeed, it is against the public interest. Every child has to have health care, education and other publicly underwritten services.

IVF is essentially a private matter which should be funded privately. It would only become a public-interest matter if there were the prospect of a very substantial fall in population, and there is not. 

The only fertility rates we should be worried about are those of every species on earth except the human species and its domesticated animals.

Like most pressure groups, the Fertility Society has its hired guns. In this instance, a report co-authored by former Health Minister Greg Hunt was wheeled out.

And aren’t we sick of former politicians moving through the revolving door to paid positions and consultancies in industry. About a third of the roughly 600 registered federal lobbyists are former politicians, public servants or political staffers.

And industry groups have excellent public-relations skills. The shock, horror, “Australian fertility declining” message popped up all over the internet and news websites last week. Such is the state of internet-ravaged independent journalism that the rip-and-read media release from the FSANZ was replicated as news almost verbatim.

I saw about half a dozen sites with the heading: “Push for national fertility plan as birth rate dives.” Word for word.

While we have massive queues for basic health cover and large gap fees in Australia there is no case for greater IVF funding for designer babies. Leave off the plummeting-population scare campaign.

In the meantime, IVF and associated population questions have become issues in the US election. When the religious right peddled the idea that Donald Trump’s anti-abortion stand embraced bans on IVF because it involved embryo destruction, Trump had to back-pedal because so many people were invested in IVF.

He even promoted government funding for it at a time when so many Americans do not have decent health cover and when Trump himself had promised to repeal what little cover they have with only “the concept of an idea” of how to replace it. 

The two essential policy points in both countries are that health insurance and health services should be universal, affordable, targeted, and timely and that lack of population growth is not a problem. To the contrary, excessive population growth caused by immigration is.

On this score, the mildly progressive governments facing elections in both countries will cause their own downfall if they do not control immigration and reduce the infrastructure strains it causes. 

They, and many of their supporters, fear being branded racist if they seek lower immigration. But it should be purely an economic and environmental question. Indeed, proof that race should have nothing to do with it is shown by the fact that the one group that has the more to gain than most from lower immigration is that of recent migrants because they suffer most from infrastructure stress.

The progressives have handed the issue on a plate to the far right in the US who have used it in a disgracefully racist way. 

We may laugh or roll our eyes at Trump’s false accusation than Haitian migrants have been catching and eating pet dogs and cats in Ohio, but the sad fact is that it has done no harm to Trump’s polling in rust belt states, especially among poor whites with no college education.

Rich white politicians exploiting the fears and resentment of poor white constituents has been a feature of US politics for decades and progressive governments should not make it easier for them to do it.

As Bob Dylan sang 60 years ago:

And the poor white remains.

On the caboose of the train.

But it ain’t him to blame.

He’s only a pawn in their game.

Crispin Hull

This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 17 September 2024.