The Global Birth Dearth: A Primer

Rewind. It’s 1970, and Walter Conkrite sounds this demographic siren on CBS Nightly News: “The stakes in this battle are far greater than any other we have ever fought. . . . The experts we interviewed told us population is the fundamental crisis.”ⁱ Nobody better to turn to, Conkrite advises, than biologist Paul Ehrlich. His recent book, The Population Bomb, portends: “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come—and by the end, I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.” In sum, Conkrite concludes, the verdict is in. Unless we limit births, overpopulation is going to ruin humanity.

Fast forward. In a 2021 interview on CBS This Morning, Professor Dowell Myers, a renowned demographer at the University of Southern California, made this unnerving correction. “The trouble is we overshot and we dropped [the population] down too much.”ⁱⁱ

Backgound

There you have it. In just over fifty years, Ehrlich’s dream of zero population growth has morphed into the nightmare of a baby bust.ⁱⁱⁱ Spoiler alert: we are careening toward a population implosion that is incapable of sustaining global humanity.

As a major Lancet study predicts: though the population will still grow in the first two quarters of the 21^st century, it will peak in 2064 and then cascade a billion people by the end of the century—and continue to fall—and almost all from one root cause: the worldwide birth dearth, baby bust, birthrate collapse—call it what you will.^iv

It appears many population scientists were asleep at the wheel.^v They certainly understood the premier demographic principle at play: in order to sustain long-term generational replacement of their population, countries need to have at least a total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1 children per woman. Yet, not many of them forecasted this fertility collapse.

Even fewer predicted it would spread to every corner of the globe—Asia, Europe, South America, North America, China, India—until by 2100, 97% of the world’s countries and territories (195 out of 204) will have fertility rates below what is necessary to sustain population size over time. And the other 3%? According to a U.N. study, by 2100, six countries are predicted to account for more than half of the world’s population and five of those are in Africa (Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Angola).^vi

Only a handful of population scientists correctly predicted how low the TFR would go, and how, from its 1970 rate of approximately 5 children per woman, it would spiral down exponentially to 2024 levels: Macao, 0.6764; Hong Kong, 0.7265 (as in less than 1 child per woman); Italy, 1.032; South Korea, 1.12; Poland, 1.32; Japan, 1.4; England, 1.755; the U.S., 1.786, and Russia, 1.826 (as in one child per woman).^vii

And most experts missed what Dean Spears describes in his New York Times piece as an avalanche-style demographic momentum:

. . . most pundits struggle to grasp that, when the human population begins to fall, it will do so not gradually, but almost as steeply as it once rose. Humanity will not reach a plateau and then stabilize, it will begin an unprecedented decline . . . If the world’s fertility rate (after 2100) were the same as in the U.S. today, then the global population would fall from a peak of around 10 billion to [less than] 2 billion about 300 years later, over perhaps 10 generations. And if family sizes remained small, the number of human beings on planet earth would continue declining.^viii

Finally, almost everyone failed to tally how many demographic categories would be bulldozed by declining fertility: Christian/Islamic; Catholic/Protestant; East/West; North/South.^ix Turns out, population decline, like death, is the great equalizer.

Understandably, governmental leaders across the globe are in a panic over the threat of plunging birth rates. President Donald Trump has frequently referred to collapsing fertility as “a bigger threat to Western civilization than China or Russia.” And Vice-President JD Vance warns: “If your society is not having enough children to replace itself, that is a profoundly dangerous and destabilizing thing.”^x For comments from other world leaders read this:^xi

Causes: How did we get to this demographic winter?

The most obvious cause: a sustained sub-replacement fertility rate that women of reproductive age around the globe either intentionally chose (they just didn’t want children) or acquired by default—they never found a spouse or, if married, never conceived because they either had infertility issues or waited too long.^xii

We live in a world where youth are marinated in individualism and hedonism, a lethal cocktail producing a self-absorption that takes your breath away, all the while nixing the possibility of marriage and family-building.

Maslow’s theory of changing needs shed some light here. As people become wealthier and better educated, they shift their attention away from “survival, security, and solidarity” and concentrate, instead, on “individual self-realization.”^xiii In the minds of many Gen-Zers and Millennials, that focal shift demands the freedom of childlessness. As Jenna Johnson—proponent of the ‘children-are-quintessentially-burdensome’ theory—explains:

I get to do all sorts of things: buy an unnecessary beautiful object, plan trips with our aging parents, sleep in, spend a day without speaking to a single person . . . , go out for drinks with a friend on the spur of the moment. . . . My plans professionally, daily, long-term, even just for vacation—are free from all the contingencies that come with children.^xiv

The notion that having kids is a choice and not an expectation leads more and more women to choose competing life goals over having children. They look at the idea of kids versus a childless lifestyle as a zero-sum proposition.^xv

Major cities, to which many women are attracted in pursuit of their professional careers, are increasingly becoming childless wastelands. When these women, day in and day out, see their neighbors single and childless—and ostensibly satisfied, they become proportionately disenchanted with the idea of both marriage and procreation.^xvi

There’s a marriage recession. In 1965, five out of six adults, ages 19-34 were, or had been, married.^xvii Since 1970, the marriage rate has fallen by sixty percent. And today, approximately one-third of GenZers look like they’ll never tie the knot. There are other options for 19–34-year-olds, of course. Cohabitation, hook-up culture, robotic and pornographic sex—options rendered childless by ‘safe sex,’ sterilization, abortion or default.

The atomizing, addicting force of technology, especially a “social” media that, ironically, isolates young people of reproductive age one from the other, leaves them sad, lacking in person-to-person contact and, oftentimes, in a wake of depression.^xviii xix

Having and raising kids is just too expensive. Data complicates the legitimacy of this reason. Stats reveal, although millennials were behind economically for a time, they’re now surpassing former generations in various income and wealth metrics. Moreover, how do you explain the fact that, in countries like Norway and Finland where women are given very generous financial support for conceiving and rearing children, “the fertility rate has dropped below that of the U.S. in recent years?”^xx

We’re not ready to have kids. Nineteen to thirty-four-year-olds admit they’re far from meeting pre-marital, pre-procreation cultural requisites: finishing school, having a decent job, making a reasonable income, living on your own or, even, owning your own home. Overwhelmed by these cultural dictates, they feel like they’re never going to be ready for marriage and children.^xxi

“Better” education leads to better jobs/careers that lead to the ready availability of contraception and its back-up, abortion. Russia is a glaring example. Its TFR was plunging to a dismal 1.826 in 2024 at the same time its very professional female population managed to surgically abort approximately 1.5 million babies.^xxii

Climate fear is driving the BirthStrike Movement where “40 percent of 10,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 24 do not want to have children because of climate change.”^xxiii Behind its philosophy of refusing to reproduce in order to reduce one’s carbon footprint lies its deceptive objective: “you can protect children and fight climate change . . . simultaneously by refusing to procreate.” High profile “influencers” like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Prince Harry, and Miley Cyrus have converged on this question: Is it morally acceptable to conceive and raise children amidst a climate catastrophe? And don’t forget the thousands of members who have joined the anti-natalist ranks of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement^xxiv whose title explains its raison d’etre.

Religiosity and church attendance has plummeted with morality close behind. God’s command to be “fruitful and multiply” or the responsibility to “fill the earth” is considered completely gauche, burdensome, and out-of-date, especially by many 19-42-year-old self-declared “nones” (those who answer polls about religious affiliation with ‘none’). While Catholics and those who frequently attend religious services favor larger families, people who do not claim Church membership are less likely to want any family or, at best, a smaller one. And that’s a cultural mindset that doesn’t rhyme with having kids.^xxv

Concerns: What consequences follow from an ongoing global fertility freefall?

What’s the future for a world with fewer and fewer babies and more and more elderly? According to Shamil Ismail, things will be pretty grim. ^xxvi The title of his book says it all: The Age of Decay: How Aging and Shrinking Populations Could Usher in the Decline of Civilization.^xxvii

To be specific: Our future with fewer young people and more elderly will mean:

• a global economic downturn. As they run out of people, governments will run out of money. Shrinking populations will have immense implications for the resultant reconfiguration of the global economy. Plunging birthrates could make the 2020s a second consecutive “lost decade” for global economic growth. Since population in America is already below replacement level, there are fewer working-age young people to support our otherwise rapidly ageing population. Imagine entire regions of the U.S. where everyone will be 70 or older. We’ll lack sufficient numbers of employable people to carry the disproportionate load of senior citizens who not only will live thirty years beyond their retirement but also deserve their healthcare entitlements and pensions. Consequentially, now and in the future, we could see higher taxes, later retirements, and possible government budget crises.^xxviii

• massive sociological changes. In rural America, the birth dearth is already producing an economic shift that intimidates community well-being and the possibility of a sustainable future. Many young adults are moving out of rural towns and their business centers leaving an ageing, retired population in the midst of a depopulated area.^xxix On the other side, the trend of people moving from cities into the suburbs leaves irremediable social, economic and policy challenges behind them. Population loss means a city’s underutilized infrastructure will be poorly maintained, and could eventually lead to disruption in basic transit, water, electricity, and internet access.^xxx In real time: (1) maternity wards in Italy are already shutting down; (2) ghost cities haunt northeastern China; (3) universities in South Korea can’t recruit enough students, and (4) in Germany, hundreds of thousands of razed family homes have been turned into parks.^xxxi For more real-time examples that will tug at your heart, read this:^xxxii

• less innovation. Fewer babies mean less human genius. Psychologists point to a more “fluid intelligence” in the young and less of it in the elderly. Young people can more readily think on their feet and solve problems in novel ways. This youthful dynamism complements the accumulated knowledge of older colleagues and brings positive change to the workplace. Sadly, all that ingenuity will slow dramatically as society struggles to keep the lights on and the water running.^xxxiii

• declining student populations. Schools and colleges in depressed demographic areas are struggling to fill their classrooms. Wayne County school districts of New York state, for example, are grappling with declining student populations as birth rates and family size shrink. When student enrollment decreases, districts are forced to face serious decisions about merging schools, closing buildings, cutting back on class offerings and consolidation of sports teams.^xxxiv

• greater pressure on the existing working population. In 2023, French protests ensued after the retirement age was raised from 62 to 64 years. Think of the public’s reaction when there’s cause to push it to 70, or even higher. That’s where we’re headed.^xxxv

• a realignment of geo-political power structures. Larger countries with shrinking populations will face the prospect of their diminished global clout and an international imbalance of power. That will raise questions particularly for the United States, China, and Russia, regarding their long-term standing as superpowers.^xxxvi

• massive labor shortages around the world. When the number of workers equals the number of aged, 45 percent of the workforce will be needed in essential services to keep society operational. Without these regiments of unseen workers, society crumbles. If we learned anything from Covid, it’s this: society requires a minimum number of essential workers—nurses, doctors, truck drivers, shelf stockers, nursing home cooks, plumbers, garbage collectors, and builders. Forget about robots and AI. They can neither fix leaks in water mains or maintain elevators in high-rise billings, nor can they keep the lights on or fix potholes. Here’s a real-time instance:^xxxvii

Fewer young people deciding not to have children will mean:

• parents will experience the unspoken grief of not having grandchildren. Journalist Catherine Pearson wrote: “A growing number of Americans are choosing not to have children. Their parents are grappling with what that means for them.” Pearson explained that in 2014, 60% of adults 50 and older had at least one grandchild. In 2021, that rate fell to slightly over 50%. For real time stories, read this:^xxxviii

• a growing segment of prime-aged adults (18-55) will not have immediate kin. The Chinese call them “bare branches.” Starting in 2019—for the first time in American history—the share of prime-aged adults who do not have immediate kin exceeded the number of those who are married with children. For a real-time instance, read this:^xxxix

• a sociological debit of pessimism. Hopeful, positive people have babies. When cynical Americans or Italians or South Koreans of reproductive age are not procreating, their pessimism slowly infects their respective cultures. In the final decades of this century, free-falling birth rates spiraling down exponentially are projected to make funerals and empty homes more common than first-year birthday parties and full households; coffins more common than cradles.^xl

• a global demographic divide. The world will be in a “baby boom” in some countries, and a “baby bust” in others. The 2021 study, Global Burdens of Disease, Injuries, and Risk Factors, explains:

As most of the world contends with the serious challenges to the economic growth of a shrinking workforce and how to care for and pay for ageing populations many of the most resource-limited countries in sub-Saharan Africa will be grappling with how to support the youngest, fastest-growing population on the planet in some of the most politically and economically unstable, heat-stressed, and health system-strained places on earth.^xli

Cures: How can we avert human extinction?

Louis March insists we’ve got to stop beating around the bush when it comes to solving the world’s collapsing population. “Nothing short of a social revolution is required to turn things around. . . . a reordering of values and priorities towards a family-centric rather than a profit-centric world.”^xlii That paradigmatic value shift will only happen with a yeoman effort on the part of parents, friends and family, government, and the Church.

Parents should dedicate a good chunk of their time preparing their kids for parenthood, showing them by word and example how being a father or a mother and building a family are fulfilling life projects that, despite enormous challenges, make Moms and Dads happy. They should model for their kids how to “plant the future with hope”^xliii by their own willingness to have children, and by their acceptance of a newborn no matter his or her cognitive or physical health.

It would be so smart if parents would enroll their children in a Catholic program like “Virtue=Strength.”^xliv Here, kids learn how faith—and the virtues that foster faith and family life—can become a centripetal force that seeps into and shapes every aspect of their lives. The virtue of charity or benevolent love—the glue holding a family together—enables each member to will the good of the other. The virtue of hospitality teaches already existing kids to welcome new siblings as blessings, as gifts, as one more visible expression of their parents’—and God’s—love. And the good habit of patience teaches respect for every member of the family, allowing each room to grow.

In age-appropriate ways, parents could do no better than introducing their children to John Paul II’s theology of the body. One of its central tenets, education in chastity, helps each child to better understand and appreciate the beauty of sexuality and a man-woman marriage, the duty to bring a baby into the world within marriage, and the blessing and protection of the family that forms around that nascent human life.

Family members, friends, and neighbors have a critical role in promoting marriage and family and keeping the flame of humanity alive by passing the baton to the next generation.

There’s is much that family members could do—especially grandparents—by way of practical support to new parents and their kids. Take turns helping with household chores, running errands, buying groceries, bringing in a home cooked meal, or volunteering to babysit so the original parents can take a break, go to appointments, and just catch their breath! What a service when grandma and grandpa encourage their grandkids to find natural playmates and friends among their siblings, cousins, and neighbors.

When couples experience infertility or in times of loss of new human life—miscarriage, stillbirth, child or infant death—friends, family and neighbors should, in the name of Jesus and as a witness to the sanctity of every life, circle their wagons around the grieving parents and family.

A government’s first policy goal has got to be to prevent further birthrate depression and achieve, instead, an upward trajectory. To clearly demonstrate to their constituents why, in the not-so-distant future, conventional wisdom will indisputably recognize babies as the ultimate resource. Toward that end, U.S. state and federal legislators have pushed the “carrot” of childcare subsidies and parental leave. Trump has backed “baby bonuses,” and legislators on both sides of the aisle have endorsed the idea. In the past, Vance has promoted the “stick” of higher taxes and fewer voting rights for adults without children.^xlv Might the U.S. be the first country to pass laws reimbursing stay-at-home moms/dads according to real-time market prices for all the at-home jobs they do while caring for their children?^xlvi

But creating financial incentives for people to conceive and rear children is not “the only arrow in the policy quiver.”^xlvii Federal and State governments must also initiate corrective measures that abet the free market to both remove obstacles to marriage and help young people to wed earlier and stick together “till death do they part.” That means aiding the free market to solve problems like overly expensive housing, exorbitant rental fees, insufficient wages, and a work environment that makes earning a living and family-building mutually exclusive.

In American education policies, we need to abrogate two contemporary strategies that are thoroughly anti-natalist. First, policies that furnish enormous incentives for young people to attend university, take longer to complete their degrees, and advance to masters and doctoral programs at much higher rates than if these policies did not exist. These are all “carrots” that move young people to delay marriage and family until they’re much older. The problem with these incentives? They create an “artificially extended adolescence” that, again, does not rhyme with marriage and family. 42.9 percent of women with a college degree have their first baby when they are 30 or older while only 8.5 percent of women with high school diplomas wait until they are 30 to conceive their first baby.^xlviii

Discouraging parents from securing religious education for their children is the second educational policy that suppresses birthrates. How so? Studies show children who receive a religious education are more likely to hold stronger religious beliefs, and stronger religious beliefs prompts these emerging adults to have bigger families. The legislative solution, then, is to pass laws throughout the U.S. that allow school choice. States that have already done so prove that many more parents will choose religion-based schools for their kids than they did without government aid. And this policy will rhyme with marriage and bigger families.

Recent global history proves government and its legislators can only partially counteract the ongoing recession of marriage and procreation. That makes sense. The fertility rate is fundamentally not an economic or civil issue. It’s an existential one. Political forces cannot inspire the correct philosophy of life, the internal reformation of mind, will and emotions that’s necessary to revive people’s understanding and love of God’s plan for marriage and human procreation. Nor can presidential fiats and state and federal laws, on their own, secure the right of every child to be conceived, gestated, born into, and reared within, a committed heterosexual marriage.

The Catholic Church is equipped to be the perfect gatekeeper for the spiritual revolution—one Catholic at a time—required to turn our demographic winter into spring. With a plethora of marriage, family, and family planning ministries on one side and the sacraments, Scripture and salient ancillary documents^xlix on the other, the Church—aided by every faithful Catholic in it—stands properly armed to:

• Reinstate God and Christianity in the public square. Our culture is demographically sick, maybe even dying. The way to revive it is to restore Christianity—the basis of Western culture—and to assign its foundational institutions of marriage and family their pivotal place within society. Holy Mother Church persistently teaches how and why a Christo-centric, love-giving culture of life leads to happiness and families. And why a woke-centric, abortive culture of death pilots us to a gloomy society bereft of children.

How about if staunch Catholics everywhere pray baptized “nones” back to their Catholic faith, Sunday Mass, and a personal relationship with Christ? With this homecoming, they can once again anchor themselves in His illuminative truth whose light will guide them to fully appreciate marriage and family. To courageously appropriate the kenosis of the crucified Christ—the total gift of self—the primary requisite for repentance and reformation, forming them into future marriage partners and parents worthy of the name.^l

• Help our youth embrace the beauty of childbearing as an essential dimension of human genius. Reconnect them to their basic human instinct to be fruitful and multiply. Help youth discover the beauty and mystery of their fertility and their capacity to love without counting the cost. Teach them why motherhood, fatherhood, and family life are self-fulfilling goals. How about plugging our teens and young adults into Humanae Vitae’s reconceptualization of marriage and family planning seen through the lens of Christian anthropology, tradition, and Scripture? How about lionizing heterosexual parenting? How about demonstrating why childlessness or the “one and done” theory are personally and socially bankrupt?

• Promote parental formation. Teach Gen-Zers and Millennials how to battle vigorously against the culture of autonomous individualism. Prepare them for marriage and family by shifting their thinking and choosing for “me” to thinking and choosing for “we.” Be brave enough to challenge younger people already married: “Why not have another baby?” Design webinars that examine the fundamentals of parenting, including discussions of how natural systems of family planning^li not only provide husbands and wives a moral means of fertility regulation but also rejuvenate their marriage with the spirit of the law of the gift.

• Underscore the importance of fathers within marriage and family. Correcting the culture’s dictum that a woman does not need a man, the Church proclaims that fathers are not mere add-0ns, but a necessity to marriage and family. Joseph is not just a male figure in our Nativity sets, but a principal player in Jesus’s birth and family life, confirming that a mother’s work is best accomplished if supported by the work of a father. Reminiscent of the institution of marriage in Genesis: the Church defends the perennial truth that, from the beginning, God intended “every woman would have a guardian, a worker, a comforter, a defender, a provider at her side.”^lii

Conclusion

Gainsaying Conkrite and Ehrlich, the verdict of contemporary population experts is in. Unless we increase birth rates, the ongoing population collapse will ruin humanity.

The reader’s mission? Do everything in your respective spheres to guarantee that young people, anchored in the self-gifting mindset of heterosexual marriage and larger families, will hand on the torch of life.

Endnotes: