The number of births has plunged almost 30% in March 2024, but the president decides that the framework of the discussion should be the legalization of abortion.
If anything could be expected from the generation that came to power with President Gabriel Boric, it was that they would bring original diagnoses and solutions. It hasn’t been like that. Time has proven the economist José Luis Daza right, who, in 2017, long before they came to power, described the Frente Amplio like this: “They are a group of people with old ideas, in young bodies. With ideas already tested and discarded, far from modern knowledge.”
Old ideas are not always bad. There are very good old ideas. Therefore, as Daza added, the problem is the bad ideas that were tried and discarded.
I thought that this phenomenon of old ideas in young bodies only had to do with solutions, but no, the president’s Public Account has shown me that it also affects the diagnosis of problems. That is to say, it is no longer that the solution to the security problem is the old solution of increasing the police contingent (which may be good or bad, but it is old), it is also that the diagnosis of the problems is outdated.
The clearest example is in Gabriel Boric’s promise to introduce a legal abortion bill during the second half of this year.. The president justifies this initiative by saying that it is necessary to have a democratic debate on sexual and reproductive rights in the country.
At first glance, I see two important issues: the president’s bias and timing.
The first has to do with the fact that before starting the debate, the president has already decided that we must move forward on the side of abortion. Not a mention of the country’s birth figures that anticipate that we have a somewhat more serious problem than the ‘demographic winter’ that rich societies in the northern hemisphere are experiencing. The problem is not how to facilitate the elimination of more children, but how to have them.
Chile’s fertility rate (average number of children per woman) in 2023 is estimated at 1.2 and is very close to that of Spain (1.16 in 2022), which is the lowest in Europe with the exception of Malta and The Vatican. Replacement fertility is estimated to be 2.1 children per woman.
But the changes seen in the short term in Chile are enormous. At the end of March, the National Institute of Statistics (INE) announced that it would publish preliminary data on the country’s vital statistics month by month. Although we do not know anything about the data for April and May, The numerical series from January to March 2024 defines an alarming reality. It is no longer that in Chile the phenomenon of ‘demographic winter’ has occurred in a very short space of time, but that the country’s fertility rate has collapsed. The same INE echoed in a press release on May 24 that births have fallen by almost 30% in March 2024 compared to the previous year.
If the data from January to March 2024 are extrapolated to the rest of the year, the Chilean fertility rate is below that of Spain. Chile may be the first country in Latin America to fall below the rate of 1 birth per woman, according to what the professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, told me. This should happen in 2024 or 2025 at the latest.
The second thing to note is opportunity. The president has decided that this issue must be debated now, when he has less than two years left in his term and, consequently, we are already in the preamble to the next presidential election. Boric knows that the issue of sexual and reproductive rights was key to his electoral victory. The young women secured their victory against Kast. He now wants to resurrect the issue for the next election to benefit his side. That this is pure electoral calculation by the president and not a genuine concern for women is demonstrated by the fact that this law was not brought to Congress in either his first or second year of government. Old tactics in young bodies.
