Why reproduction is a need.
Reproduction may not seem important because of the large populations today, but it is a basic need that we aren’t meeting here in the United States. Corning lists it as one of the fourteen basic needs because it is crucial for the survival of the species and will cause a variety of harms if it is not satisfied. It’s common knowledge that in order for a species to survive, it must reproduce itself. This applies to the human race as well. In the long-term, consequences of not enough reproduction could be extinction as we know it. However, more realistically, in the short term, it is essential for normal day-to-day and economic productivity. If there aren’t enough people around in your age group due to low reproduction, social relations become difficult, and so does communication. Economically, if there aren’t enough people participating in the market, then it will grow unstable. On an individual level, once a child is raised in a family, there will be an economic return in them providing for that individual later. This could be accomplished through direct interaction from child to parent, or from someone receiving benefits from someone else’s child from the Social Security Administration after retirement. That is the focus here. If we cannot successfully reproduce over the next generation, then there won’t be enough workers to attend to the retirees from the previous generation that rely on Social Security. This makes reproduction a need.
Why it isn’t being met in the United States.
In the United States, we have a very slim rate of population growth, and that number is steadily and consecutively declining. Population growth can come in two forms, internal growth and immigration. As for internal growth, as of 2013, according to the World Bank Group (2015), the birth rate per one-thousand people was 12.5. This means that only 13 or so