Last month’s edition of Science ran a series of demographic
papers and special reports discussing current global population
issues. One of these discussed the Taiwanese government’s
population policies and the measures it has introduced to
encourage more women to give birth. These policies were also
compared with those of other Asian countries, such as Japan,
South Korea and Singapore. Last year, Taiwan’s total fertility
rate (TFR) for women was under 0.9, the lowest in the world. If
one were to take this TFR and convert it into the cohort
fertility rate for women in Taiwan — cohort here meaning other
individuals of shared circumstances within a given period of
time — to estimate the fertility rate for a woman throughout her
lifetime, then in the future about 20 percent of women in this
country will not have children. This is a rather startling
statistic and a future demographic trend that should not be
taken lightly. Demographic experts regard a TFR below the
critical threshold of 1.3 as the “lowest-low fert