A few years ago, I saw an American car advertisement that summed up the American attitude towards having children. A couple buys a sporty car but soon after finds out that they are pregnant. Ordinarily they would be stuck with their purchase, but the company was advertising an offer that allows customers to exchange the car for another within 30 days. So, they go back to the dealership and get a mini-van.

The unthinking rush to have children in our society is in stark contrast to Western attitudes. There, generally, the decision to have a child is thoughtfully planned, in terms of finances, resources, child-care, career impact, etc. Homes are baby-proofed, sedans are replaced with mini-vans/SUVs, apartments are given up for houses in good school districts, nurseries are set up, life insurance policies are bought. There are a lot more small- and big-ticket expenses, lest one be seen as an “irresponsible” parent. Those who can, start a 529 college savings plan.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the birth of a child is often accompanied with little forethought and planning and is chalked up to ‘God’s will’.

People have children for a variety of reasons; social, economic, religious, personal. In poor societies most people are usually unable to accumulate enough wealth during their working lives to generate a steady retirement income. This means, most families are forced to view their children, boys in particular, as their retirement plans, i.e. caretakers and providers in old age. In rural areas, children serve as farm hands adding to the labor pool. Naturally, such a view encourages having a larger number of children.

Numerous social pressures push many couples to have more children and before they are prepared to provide for them. This includes parental pressure, avoiding being labeled infertile, pressure to conform to societal norms, entrapment of one’s partner, personal fulfillment or a religious duty to be fruitful and multiply.

In Pakistan, there are not many reasons to have fewer children, but lots to have many. Pakistan is not unique in this respect. In societies with high population growth rates, we see various combinations of the same factors at work.

Beyond anecdotes, population pyramids (https://www.populationpyramid.net), that breaks up countries’ populations by gender (men on left, women on right) and age (young near bottom, old near top), reflect the net effect of these factors in various societies. Countries like China, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and others where boys are preferred over girls exhibit visibly skewed gender distributions. Countries that score better on the UNDP’s Gender Inequality Index (GII), e.g., Sweden, Iceland, France, Belgium, etc, exhibit no such unnatural skew across the sexes.

Beyond sex-selective abortions, country population pyramids also reflect the economic incentives / disincentives to have children in general. Developed countries with strong enough social safety nets indirectly disincentivise children and have visibly top-heavy population pyramids with large older populations and fewer younger, working-age people. In China, that top-heaviness is the result of its forced one-child policy, but in countries like Germany, South Korea, and Japan, despite government programmes providing financial support and other incentives, people have fewer reasons to raise children.

Melanie Dawn Channon’s 2017 study, Son Preference and Family Limitation in Pakistan, found that many respondents wanted at least two sons, while most also wanted a daughter. Absent the preference for having sons, contraceptive use in 2012-13 would have been 19 percent higher, which would have reduced population growth.

This preference is supported not only by the view of sons as assets to the family who receive investment in terms of education, but by local marriage customs which render girls a financial drain with no economic return. Regrettably, that makes the birth of a girl a double whammy.

The widespread availability of ultrasonography has put determining the sex of the fetus in reach of more people. The result is that Pakistan, together with China and India, is among the world’s top-three countries in terms of sex-selective abortions. According to Hudson and Den Boer (2010), Pakistan’s population is short 6 million girls. The natural sex ratio, number of boys born per 100 girls, is 105. According to the UN Population Fund (2012), in Pakistan that number is 110 and climbs to 112 in the Punjab. Multiple studies have concluded that Pakistan has the highest number of missing girls as a percentage of population. These are alarming figures with serious fallout.

In China, where the gender ratio has been severely skewed by decades of sex-selective abortions encouraged by its now abandoned one-child policy, the deficit of women has pushed men to finding brides in neighboring countries and is a contributing factor to the trafficking of women from vulnerable societies, like Vietnam, North Korea and, more recently, Pakistan.

In 2011, Thomson Reuters reported on Siyani, a small town in Gujarat, India, population 8,000. Siyani’s sex ratio is so severely skewed that 70 percent of men are bachelors. It could get worse. Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the London School of Economics researched that the more polygynous a society, the more frequently and extensively it experiences civil wars. Polygyny is not the same as a skewed sex-ratio at birth, but it has the same effect of reducing the number of marriageable women available to men in society.

Two decades ago, Pakistan’s population was roughly 120 million. Today it is 220.8 million. In 2015, 24.3 percent of our population was living below the national poverty line. Today, the numbers are estimated at 40 percent. 45 percent of children under age 5 are developmentally stunted due to malnourishment.

The ever-bulging population is rapidly urbanising annually at 3 percent. An uneducated (22.8 million out-of-school), under skilled, mostly young population competes for depleting resources and scarce jobs in a water stressed, increasingly food insecure country. While successive governments pat people on the back and tell them not to worry because we have an enviable “youth bulge”, the portrait is not flattering.

In addition to considerations of the immediate economic impact of having a child, another consideration that has not yet entered the Pakistani social conscience is the environmental impact of adding another human being to the world population, i.e., the impact in terms of carbon footprint, resource utilisation and environmental degradation. The world’s population stands near 7.8 billion today and is expected to grow further and plateau at 11 billion by 2100. As more people are lifted out of extreme poverty, and their consumption habits change, will the planet be able to absorb the impact on natural resources and the environment? Will Pakistan’s own resources be able to sustain a population of 400 million, almost twice its present population, projected for the end of this century?

The author is an independent education researcher and consultant. She has a PhD in education from Michigan State University. She can be reached at arazzaque@gmail.com