Television audiences have been obsessed with multiple births for years now.Early on it was just a wacky family with a set of quintuplets featured on the evening news.  When reality TV became hugely popular, viewers were treated to constant recordings families with up to 15 children.While at this point it may seem like trash TV, these families are reflections of what US fertility used to be and are also perfect negatives of what it has become.For those who haven’t had the urge to watch TLC or somehow avoided national TV news, Jon and Kate Gosselin, The Duggars and The Octomom are people that are all famous for having a mess of kids.But stopping after two or three kids would have been uncommon a century and a half ago. Families were significantly larger In those days, and it’s easy to think that people were just having more kids, but that’s an incredibly simplistic and incorrect view. Population fertility is a complicated and somewhat fragile affair that has deep implications for society.Population fertility isn’t just how many babies people are having — it’s actually an indicator of a population’s growth and sustainability.The most common measure of fertility is the general fertility rate.  The rate is composed of the number of children born in a year divided by the female population aged 16 to 49 — which is the estimated number of viable mothers.The general rate isn’t the most precise measure of population fertility, but it does give an idea of how a population is reproducing. Furthermore population reproduction is most effectively viewed in the context of death. A population’s number of births must exceed the number of deaths to truly increase. The number of births and deaths have been close to even in the US since the Baby Boom, but that wasn’t always the case. Like many popular urban myths the family, life history and fertility of our recent ancestors is a bit cloudy.We’d all like to believe that large families lived together in handmade cabins and had their meals around a fire.  Within that mythic structure, people only seemed to die in wars.But that’s just not true. Back in those days, people died pretty frequently.Historic evidence from France and the U.S. shows parents often died shortly after their children reached maturity and older generations rarely existed in the same time frame as younger ones. Most children never met their grandparents in this time period.The idea of having large families wasn’t about lust, accidents and the heady musk of an unwashed lover — it was a war of attrition waged against nature. But that was the olden days.  Those days are long gone and we no longer really worry about populating the country through sheer numbers and hoping that our kids make it to 30. Infant mortality in the modern world is fairly stable, outside of developing nations. Children born in the US have an excellent chance of making it to old age.Even though the world is a much safer place for kids than it was 150 years ago, replacement fertility is still a major issue, but the situation has changed a bit.In fact, it’s flipped completely.Developed countries don’t have to worry about kids dying anymore — they have to worry about children not being born at all.For many years now the number of births in the U.S. has remained fairly constant and maintained replacement levels.  But the levels in Western Europe have dropped well below replacement.The reasoning behind these drops are fairly complicated and, according to most demographers, involve later marriages, increased cohabitation among couples, a shift in family focus from children to adults, and the widespread and easy acquisition of contraceptives.The point is people are having less kids than before, which brings me back to the Duggars, Jon and Kate and the Octomom.The media seems to treat these people as circus freaks. And they are “freaks” to some extent. They all stand out because they have a larger number of children than what is considered normal today.For me, the issue of whether they should be on TV is nearly irrelevant. These families are great examples of the way ideas about something as fundamental as fertility can shift and change over time. It’s important to be reflexive about our lives and social world. Even the simplest things are not what they seem.After all once the zombie apocalypse comes and mankind is forced to repopulate, our families may look just like Jon and Kate’s — hopefully without the snarky comments and fertility drugs.Skylar Gremillion is a 26-year-old sociology graduate student from Plaucheville.
 
 
 
—–Contact Skylar Gremillion at [email protected]