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7. The Role of the Bishop in Promoting the Gospel of Life declining birth rates Oshima is a small Japanese island, thirty-two kilometers long, cradled between the large islands of Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu .There we can confront the future. In 2005, Japan had the oldest population in the world, because the Japanese are living longer and having fewer and fewer children. Their fertility rate fell to 1.33 in 2005, down from 1.39 in 2000 and well below the rate of 2.1 children per woman necessary to keep the population stable.1 Oshima is the Island of the Old, with the oldest population in the oldest country. When a Western journalist visited the island in 1999, the barber with the cutthroat razor was 84 years of age, as was the papergirl.The taxi driver was only 83 years old, and the policeman a sprightly 60 year-old. In the town of Towa, at the eastern end of the island, octogenarians outnumbered teenagers by more than three to one, septuagenarians by seven to one; half the population was over 65. Towa had a population of 20,600 in 1945; fiftyfive years later the population was 5,500.2 Although the trends in Oshima have been worsened by youth 102 This chapter was originally an address to the Linacre Centre International Conference, Queens College, University of Cambridge, 5 July 2000. It was subsequently published in Luke Gormally, ed., Culture of Life—Culture of Death: Proceedings of the International Conference on“The Great Jubilee and the Culture of Life” (London: Linacre Centre, 2002). All statistics cited have been updated to the latest available in 2006 wherever possible. 1. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population Prospects:The 2004 Revision (2005). 2. Richard Lloyd Parry, “OldWorld Order,”Australian Magazine,WeekendAustralian, 8–9 January 2000. emigration for work, Oshima is not a social aberration, a development that goes against the current. Following present patterns, Japan ’s population of 128 million will be reduced by two-thirds by the end of the twenty-first century3 —and Europe’s will be halved.4 Thirty years ago, when fears of uncontrollable population growth were at their height, the world’s population had already commenced its long and steady slide to zero population growth and to the negative population growth—that is, depopulation— that lies beyond that point. In the decade from 1965 to 1975, world birth rates decreased by 13 percent, with decline occurring in 127 countries.5 In 1996, and again in 2004, the United Nations forecast zero population growth for the world as a whole by 2040, with population peaking at 7.7 billion. World population would decline thereafter by 25 percent in each successive generation to yield an expected population in 2100 of 5.6 billion. This anticipated decline in population does not factor in the results of war, famine, environmental disaster, or epidemics (although the 2004 UN projections do take the AIDS epidemic into account).6 It is the role of the bishop 103 3. Official Japanese projections offer low, medium, and high variants, which put the country’s estimated population in 2100 at 46.4 million, 64.1 million, and 81.7 million respectively. See National Institute for Population and Social Security Research, Population Projections for Japan 2001–2050 (2003). 4. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population in 2300 (2004). In these UN studies projections are always given in the form of low, medium, and high variants.The low variants have been used in this paper, following the practice adopted in the expert commentary consulted in its preparation. The UN itself recommends the use of the medium variants, but describes each of the variants offered as “provid[ing] reasonable and plausible future trends.” 5. Ron Brunton, The End of the Overpopulation Crisis? (Melbourne: Institute of Public Affairs, 1998), 16. 6. Since 1980, 25 million people have died from AIDS, and 65 million have been infected with HIV. Because of AIDS, life expectancy in southern Africa has fallen from 61 years in 1985–90 to 48 years in 2000–2005. Sub-Saharan Africa had 64 percent of all people infected with HIV in 2005 (down from 70 percent in 1999), and 2 million dead from the disease (up from 1.9 million in 2003). In Asia there were 930,000 new infections in 2005 (down from 1.4 million in 1999), and 8.3 million people living with HIV...

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