The Russian government is pouring money and a medal into efforts to shore up the country’s falling birth rate.
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree this week reinstating the “mother heroine” medal for women who have at least 10 children – not only at birth but also in raising them. And when the youngest child reaches their first birthday, the award is also given in cash.
The Russian government will provide 1 million Russian rubles, equivalent to $16,645, CNBC reported.
The title mother heroine is old and was awarded between 1944 and 1991 in the then Soviet Union. The award, a five-pointed star, ranks similarly to the Hero of the Russian Federation medal for bravery or the Hero of Labor Russian national service award.
The decree contains some rules:
- The children must have been adequately cared for, although details of how this is measured are not provided, the article said.
- All 10 children must still be alive, although there are exceptions for children killed in “military, civil service or community service or in a terrorist attack”.
Why a medal?
The revived award is likely a nod to a challenge facing most of the world, including the United States: stagnant or falling birth rates that could result in a pyramidal population, with a larger older population at the bottom and a pin-sized young one generation on top.
But others note that it is also used as a patriotic gesture. The medal was first introduced in the Stalin era as an aspect of a broader “pronatalist” effort at the end of World War II, Kristin Roth-Ey, associate professor in University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, told The Washington Post .
“It was about serving the fatherland,” said Roth-Ey, who said the return was “obviously a conscious echo of the Stalinist past.”
According to the article, “The revival of the Maternity Medal is part of a ‘patriotic campaign’ that has been intensifying in Russia since the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014, Roth-Ey added.”
The Moscow Times reported in late July that “Russia’s population shrank by a record average of 86,000 people per month between January and May,” citing statistics from the Rosstat agency. Despite migration effects, the number of deaths and births fell by 355,000 in the first five months of 2022.
The problem with too few births
But declining fertility itself is also a problem.
If you invert the pyramid mentioned above, it might take a smaller generation of young people to cover the safety nets of the large older population, struggle to fill the jobs needed to keep an economy running, and much more.
A near-global fertility decline is raising serious concerns about countries’ economic health and future growth potential.
As the Deseret News recently reported, the US birth rate continues to plummet to a new low. It is well below the replacement rate of an average of 2.1 births per woman of childbearing age with around 1.6 children each.
This trend has been going on for several years. What’s new is that one in four childless adults say they don’t want children, according to a report by the Institute for Family Studies.
The article noted that “three factors that typically influence childbearing — demographics, economics, and political changes — just don’t explain what’s happening to the birth rate in the US, according to a published opinion piece by Melissa Kearney, Phillip B. Levine, and Luke Pardue recently from MarketWatch, which is based on their study in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. They said the pattern of fewer births in lean times and more births in recovery is no longer holding.”
The decline in births has been constant since the Great Recession and has not recovered, reflecting “lower birth rates in successive cohorts,” according to Kearney, Levine, and Pardue.
Whatever the reason, economists, demographers, politicians and others believe there is cause for concern, the Deseret News reported last year.
Demographer Lyman Stone, a researcher with the American Enterprise Institute and the Institution for Family Studies, said women are not having the number of children they say they would like – which the article called “a kind of human tragedy that could also lead.” that people get lonelier and maybe poorer as they get older.”
Stone and Pamela S. Perlich, director of demographic research at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah, have identified risks posed by declining fertility in several areas: less robust economic growth, fewer entrepreneurs, less wealth accumulation, less innovation, Stock market and housing market challenges and more.
Countries including Russia and the United States are trying to find the best response to changing demographics, with some effort being made to let couples know they can afford to have children.
“Really, it is important to support young families and to restructure the institutions of work and life in a way that makes younger people feel economically secure when they have more children,” Perlich told Deseret News.
A medal could also bolster the family’s courage – as Russia seems ready to find out.