Birthrates are plummeting worldwide. Can governments turn the tide?
Nations are deploying baby bonuses, subsidised childcare and parental leave to try to reverse a rapidly declining fertility rate – largely to no avail
www.theguardian.com
Birthrates are plummeting worldwide. Can governments turn the tide?
A study by the University of Washington predicts that by 2100, 97% of 204 countries will be below the replacement rate of fertility. Illustration: Ben Sanders/The Guardian
Nations are deploying baby bonuses, subsidised childcare and parental leave to try to reverse a rapidly declining fertility rate – largely to no avail
Tory Shepherd
Sat 10 Aug 2024 10.00 EDTLast modified on Tue 13 Aug 2024 17.50 EDT
Birthrates are plummeting worldwide. Can governments turn the tide?
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Sophia and her partner have been thinking about having children for about five years. They are concerned about humanity’s impact on biodiversity loss and climate change and worried about what the future holds.
“Our conversation has two parts,” says Sophia, a communications specialist who preferred not to use her full name. “One is: what’s the contribution of a child to the global [climate] crisis? The second one is [about] what would their life be like.
“I live with heaps of grief about biodiversity collapse. I think about the future and what the future of a child would be like in that sense.”
The fear of climate change has led to couples having fewer babies; about one in five female climate scientists say they will have no children or fewer children because of the crisis.
It’s not the only reason for what governments and headlines are calling a baby crisis, a population crisis, a fertility crisis, a demographic crisis, an ageing crisis and an economic crisis. The cost of living, housing security and a lack of opportunity also play their part.
The upshot is that all over the world (nearly – but more on that in a bit), governments are concerned that women are simply not having enough babies.
Elon Musk thinks falling birthrates are a bigger risk to civilisation than global heating. There’s a burgeoning movement of pronatalists wanting to have “tons of kids” to save the world.
It’s fairly clear that, when women are more educated, more liberated, and more able to access contraception, they start having fewer children. What’s not clear is how to convince them to have more. Cheaper childcare? More flexible workplaces? More help from the menfolk? Affordable housing? More optimism about the future?
‘Low-fertility future’
Statistics show most countries are now below replacement rate – that’s 2.1 children per woman, enough to replace the existing population with a bit of a buffer.
Five decades ago, Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb sparked global fears of “mass starvation” on a “dying planet” because of overpopulation. Now, experts are warning the fertility crisis is set to leave a dwindling youth base supporting a swelling ageing population and panicked governments around the world are throwing money at the omnicrisis.
On 11 July, the United Nations released World Population Prospects 2024, a revision of their population estimates from 1950 to the present for 237 countries, with projections to the year 2100. The report said that “women today bear one child fewer, on average, than they did around 1990”, and that the world’s population is now expected to peak at about 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s (up from about 8.2 billion today) before starting to fall.
That peak will come earlier than expected for reasons including “lower-than-expected levels of fertility”, it found.
In March, an article published in the Lancet set off a new wave of headlines warning of catastrophe. A study titled global fertility in 204 countries and territories, 1950-2021, with forecasts to 2100: a comprehensive demographic analysis for the global burden of disease study 2021, by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), found the world was approaching a “low-fertility future”.
The IHME study said by 2050, more than three quarters of the countries will be below replacement rate. By 2100, it will be 97%.
The only countries projected to have more than 2.1 by then are Samoa, Somalia, Tonga, Niger, Chad and Tajikistan.
“Governments must plan for emerging threats to economies, food security, health, the environment and geopolitical security brought on by these demographic changes that are set to transform the way we live,” an accompanying press release said.
Low-income places with higher fertility rates – such as sub-Sarahan Africa, which is set to contribute over half the world’s births by 2100 – will need better access to contraceptives and female education, the researchers said.
Low-fertility, higher-income countries such as South Korea and Japan will need open immigration and policies to support parents.
The study also looked at pro-natal policies already in place, such as free childcare, better parental care leave, financial incentives and employment rights. But the findings suggested that even pro-natal policies could not boost fertility rates up to replacement levels, although “they may prevent some countries from dropping to extremely low fertility levels”.
Dr Natalia V Bhattacharjee, a co-lead author on the study, said the trends would “completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power and will necessitate reorganising societies”.
Bhattacharjee also warned that some countries might try to “justify more draconian measures” to limit reproductive rights.
Dr Liz Allen
Meanwhile, in Taiwan, where the fertility rate has now fallen to 0.865, they are closing schools. In Japan, where the rate is 1.21, sales of adult incontinence products have outstripped nappy sales. In Greece, where it’s 1.264, some villages have not seen a birth in years and people are being encouraged to work a six-day week. And in South Korea, where it’s 0.72, the population is expected to halve by 2100.
“But on balance we decided it was what we wanted for our lives.”
