Child mortality is falling
Significantly, child mortality has fallen dramatically.
This means that parents will engage in less ‘child replacement’ (Parents who experience the death of a child might deliberately pursue an additional birth to ‘replace’ the dead child) and ‘child hoarding’ (a family deciding to have more births than their desired number of children to protect themselves against the possibility of future mortality in the family). In an environment with high child mortality, women will give birth to more children than they want to buffer against the loss of children.
The following graph illustrates this clearly.
Source: Our World in Data
Overpopulation: Resource Depletion and Human Innovation
Overpopulation: Resource Depletion and Human Innovation
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