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 21st 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 Movementxxiv 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 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 documentsxlix 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 planningli 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-ons, 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:
i “Experts sound the alarm on declining birth rates among younger generations: ‘It’s a crisis,’” CBS News, March 3, 2021.
ii Ibid.
iii Damien Cave, Emma Bubola and Choe Sang-Hun, “Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications,” International New York Times, May 24, 2021 and Michael Cook, “What does the world’s ‘low-fertility’ future look like?” BioEdge, March 28, 2024.
iv CBS News, “Experts sound.”
v “Why is our country going down the drain?” ad for The Malthus Program.
vi Neil G. Ruiz, “World’s population is projected to nearly stop growing by the end of the century,” the Pew Research Center’s population survey, 2019.
viii Niall Ferguson, “Global Population Crash Isn’t Sci-Fi Anymore,” Bloomberg Report, March 9, 2024.
ix Ibid.
x Neil Ruiz, “World’s population.”
xi The Czech prime minister, Andrej Babis, said it best: “I don’t wish to scare anyone, but we must discuss the issue that we are facing extinction.” [Shaun Walker, “‘Baby machines’: eastern Europe’s answer to depopulation,” The Guardian, March 4, 2020.]
Prime Minister Meloni, sharing the dais with Pope Francis, underlined the immediate and ongoing attention her nation must give to boosting Italian fertility, the lowest in all of Europe. Francis echoed her warning: “[w]e must not accept that our society gives up on generating life and degenerates into sadness, . . . which is an ugly and gray sickness.” [Anna Matranga, “Pope Francis calls on Italy to boost birth rates as Europe weathers a ‘demographic winter.’” CBS News, May 12, 2023.]
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared that his country’s plummeting birthrate left Japan “standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.” [Greg Ip, Janet Adamy, “Suddenly There Aren’t Enough Babies,” Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2024.]
In hopes of resuscitating South Korea’s plunging fertility rate, President Yoon Suk Yeol prioritized immediate action: “We will mobilize all of the nation’s capabilities to overcome the low birth rate, which can be considered a national emergency.” [“Would You Have a Baby If You Won the Lottery,” Atlantic: Web Edition, March 30, 2023.]
xii Ron Lesthaeghe, “The second demographic transition: A concise overview of its development,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, December 1, 2014.
xiii Ibid.
xiv Ibid.
xv Daily Press, “The lowering birth rate in the U.S,” in The Mining Journal, Marquette, MI, 2024.
xvi Ibid.
xvii Emma Waters, “Pro-natalism is not enough,” First Things, August 26, 2024.
xviii Renee Mirkes, “Social Media, Tweens, and Teens: Data, Consequences, Solutions,” Catholic World Report, February, 2024.
xix As Pope Francis frequently warns: social media is a digital opiate that leaves youth with “brain rot.”
xx Daily Press, “The lowering birth rate.”
xxi Andrew Van Dam, “Seriously, why aren’t millennials having kids?” Washington Post, November 3, 2023.
xxiii Michael Nehls, “Endgame,” chapter 6 of The Indoctrinated Brain, 171-78.
xxiv Two Finnish bioethicists praise VHEMT’s anti-natalist goals with this argument published in the premier journal Bioethics: “By adopting anti-natalism through voluntary human extinction, all of humanity’s problems could be solved. . . . The honorable things for our species to do is deny our programming. Stop reproducing. Walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight. Brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.” [Michael Cook, “Is it better never to have been born?” Mercator, May 8, 2021.]
xxv Anna Matranga, “Pope Francis calls on Italy.”
xxvi The end game of Ismail’s “age of decay”—a world bleak, somber, and wiped clean of mankind—was eerily forecast in this Time Traveler’s account of the world in 30,000,000 A.D. from H.G. Wells’ 1895 novel, The Time Machine: “Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over. . . . I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.” [Michael Cook, “No people, no suffering—antinatalism at its best,” BioEdge, November 2, 2023.]
xxvii Michael Cook, “Are we entering an age of decay as birthrates fall?” Mercator, October 31, 2024.
xxviii Ibid.
xxix Luke Lyman, “Why Millennials Aren’t Having Children,” First Things, Sept. 29, 2024.
xxx Ibid.
xxxi Damien Cave, “Long Slide Looms.”
xxxii Two stories from Italy demonstrate what pessimism looks like in real time. In Capracotta, a small town in southern Italy, a red sign on an 18th century building reads: “Home of School Kindergarten.” Today, the building is a nursing home. Concetta D’Andrea who used to teach at the school reminisces: “There were so many families, so many children. Now there is no one.”
In the nearby town of Agnone, the maternity ward was closed a decade ago because it birthed fewer babies than the 500 required to stay open. Only six babies were born in 2021. According to Enrica Sciullo, a nurse who helped with births previously but now cares for the elderly, assesses things funereally: “Once you could hear the babies in the nursery cry and it was like music. Now there is silence and a feeling of emptiness.” [Ibid.]
xxxiii “Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences,” The Economist, June 1, 2023.
xxxiv “Declining enrollments spark talks of school mergers, building closures, and sports consolidation,” FingerLakes1.com, October 7, 2024.
xxxv Madeleine Kearns, “Why Are People Cheering Plummeting Birth Rates?” National Review, August 27, 2023.
xxxvi Greg Ip and Janet Adamy, “Suddenly There Aren’t Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed,” Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2024.
xxxvii Ismail pictures bleak scenarios for small, poor countries like Albania. Eva, a widow with one unmarried son, lives on the seventh floor of a leaky block of flats. The elevator doesn’t work because there’s nobody to maintain it. Navigating seven flights of stairs makes shopping a near impossibility. And when Eva does manage to buy groceries, the shelves are often empty because there’s a shortage of truck drivers. The streets are potholed because the city has run out of money. Small shops have closed for lack of business. We are entering, Ismail forecasts, “the Age of Decay.” [Michael Cook, “Are we entering an age of decay?”]
xxxviii Pearson tells the story of Lydia Birk, a mother of three who has kept her favorite copy of The Velveteen Rabbit since her adult children were young. Birk “loved being a stay-at-home mother,” and she looked forward to the day she could share her favorite stories with her grandchildren. But her three children are not planning on having children. Birk said that the decision is “right for them,” even though it breaks her heart. . . . [Grace Porto, “NYT highlights ‘unspoken grief’ of not having grandchildren,” Catholic Vote, November 13, 2024.]
Therapist Claire Bidwell Smith argues: when people don’t get to experience being a grandparent, there’s a real grief that comes with it. [Madalaine Elhabbal, “The Wall Street Journal raises alarm over rapidly declining global birth rates,” Catholic Vote, May 14, 2024.]
xxxix We can see the “bare branches” phenomenon is already well underway in East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—all places where marriage and childbearing are in free fall. A harrowing NYT story recently explained how in Japan the bare-branched elderly are often dying alone, living in “extreme isolation,” often left to themselves for weeks on end, even in death. In fact, the “extreme isolation of elderly Japanese is so common that an entire industry has emerged around it, specializing in cleaning out apartments where decomposing remains are found.” [Damian Cave, “Long Slide Looms.”]
xl A recent Pew Research Center’s analysis of population data from the United Nations concludes the same. Plummeting birth rates at the end of this century will literally halt growth of the world’s population. [Neil Ruiz, “World’s population.”]
xli Michael Cook, “What does the world’s ‘low-fertility’ future look like?” BioEdge, March 28,2024.
xlii Louis T. March, “Thank goodness for the Population Research Institute. Somebody is telling us the truth about the world birth dearth,” Mercator, September 2, 2024.
xliii Nicole Winfield and Paolo Santalucia, “Pope joins in urging Italians to have more kids, not just pets,” Los Angeles Times, May 12, 2023.
xlv “JD Vance went viral for ‘cat lady’ comments. The centuries-old trope has a long tail,” NPR, July 29, 2024.
xlvi Jeremy Engle, “Should Stay-at-Home Parents Be Paid?” The New York Times, October 10, 2019.
xlvii Jay P. Greene and Lindsey M. Burke, “Here’s How To Actually Reverse The Baby Bust,” Heritage Foundation, December 2, 2024.
xlviii Ibid.
xlix Humanae Vitae, Familiaris consortio, Donum Vitae and Dignitas Humanae
l How about some spiritually revolutionized young politicians running on “Let’s Make America Marriage- and Baby-friendly Again?”
li The Saint Paul VI Institute is the home for premier family planning, the Creighton Model FertilityCare system, and family-, baby-, and woman-friendly healthcare, NaProTechnology. Cf. saintpaulvi.com
lii Kimberly Ells, “Mary, Baby Jesus, and that other guy,” Mercator, December 13, 2024.
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Birth Gap by Stephen Shaw:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6s8QlIGanA&t=1506s
Here’s another excellent video.
BBC HARDtalk – Stephen J Shaw Data Scientist and Demographer 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsLn_uwcymo
These two excellent videos document the rise of “childlessness” among individuals, and NOT any shrinking of the average family size by those who choose early enough to be mothers and fathers. Childlessness is dramatically on the rise, partly due to noted economic disruptions (the concurrent oil crisis of 1973, the global economic crisis of 2008, etc.) and a resulting universal culture of uncertainty, and career first.
Not mentioned is the simultaneous role of “the pill” and the license toward uncommitted sexual promiscuity, due to the amputation of the sexual act–between procreation and what has become a merely (and too often transitory) sexual experience. Instead, might we suppose that Pope Paul VI knew what he was talking about in Humanae Vitae (1968)? And, that the Demographic Winter can be laid also at the feet of his public and uncontested betrayal by dissident/bogus theologians?
Yeah, well, at this late date, why not just bless homosexual “couples” as such? That, and some navel-gazing synodality stuff about Church governance. Just move along folks, there’s nothing to see here…
I applaud the article and agree with your response and would like to add that another possibility as a cause for Christians not having children happened in the late 1990s/early 2000s, when the “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” movement, propagated by Evangelical Protestant Christians and a very young man (he was 18 at the time) named Joshua Harris swept the Evangelical Protestant churches.
My late husband and I were active members of one of these churches, in which the youth pastor mandated that teen boys and girls were not allowed to sit with girlfriends or boyfriends in church, Sunday School, or youth group meetings. My late husband and I vehemently disagreed with this and challenged him–we started dating when I was 16 and he was 15 and were encouraged by our churches to work on projects together (especially church events like VBS, weekly children’s clubs, choirs and other musical outreaches, etc.) and to pray and study the Bible together. The experience of being involved in ministries with each other was one of the many things that deepened our love for each other and for God. We continued to date through high school and college and married when we graduated from college. Our marriage lasted for 41 years until he died of COVID in 2020–and we had two daughters who have grown up to be faith-filled women (one is married, the other is not).
We told the youth pastor that our daughter and her boyfriend would continue to sit together and if he didn’t allow it, we would excuse her from attending youth group meetings. (We believed and I still believe that parents are responsible for their own children and others can advise but not circumvent parental decisions about behavior.)
Our decision to buck the “Kiss Dating Goodbye” movement eventually was the reason why we were kicked out of that church–a horrific event that involved a meeting that we were invited to attend, without any advance knowledge that a “tribunal” of church men would be present with the purpose of confronting us with our “rebellious sins” and the edict that we either change our ways or be ousted from the church. We literally ran out of that church and for a year, did not attend any church–I was too afraid! Our daughters joined with us (solidarity!)–and it was a year later that I finally told my husband, “We should be attending a church.” That led to our attending the Catholic Church down the road from our house and the eventual conversion of our entire family, including our daughter’s boyfriend (who is now her husband!) to Catholicism!
Meanwhile, sadly, Joshua Harris has turned his back on Christianity. But I think it’s possible that the damage he did with his twisted teachings (supposedly Biblically based) about dating possibly led to many young women and men from that generation avoiding dating and eventually ending up single/childless. At this point many of them are in their 40s, at which point fertility (at least in women) has begun to wane. I’m also thinking that there are probably Protestant churches who still keep this book available and teach that it is “Christian teaching.”
Harris’ book had nothing whatsoever to do with having children. He was basically arguing that people should court one another and not be physically intimate before marriage.
Yes, that’s what I remembered about Kiss Dating Goodbye. Courtship vs dating.
so what you’re basically saying is that death is unacceptable. so why are you thankful for it then?
The cynicism and hypocrisy of a nun pontificating about people not marrying and having kids is breathtaking. If childbearing is so vital then the author should do it herself. The population will, by your own stats, continue to increase for 40 more years, to 10 billion. More people and that will completely destroy the natural world.
Don’t be silly. Catholics pray for a good death, which is aimed at the state of one’s soul. In life one has a duty to live a good life, again this refers to the life of the soul, to spiritual growth. A Catholic has material responsibilities to fulfil but this has to be done within the faith. There is no preoccupation with death per se.
Man always seems to want to play God…too many offspring…too few offspring…we know better than God in all things.
It would be a better world if everyone understood some basic ideas and adhered to them:
1. God made us male and female.
2. God made one man for one woman so that two could become one in marriage.
3. Man should wait until marriage to have sex with another person – that person being his/her spouse.
4. Man (meaning both males and females) should refrain from having sex with oneself and should avoid all pornography because that will interfere with the love of one’s spouse in marriage.
5. Marriage is for life and until the death of one of the spouses.
6. Married couples should be open new life because God intended marriage to be fruitful. No contraceptive should ever be used. And abortion is contrary to God’s will.
If priests, bishops and rven the Pope himself would preach these simple truths, the world would be a better place.
Sr. Mirkes makes passing reference to the obsolescence of the Ehrlich forecast, and points now to the forecasted Demographic Winter, plus the kind of human culture that must be reaffirmed for future generations (if there be future generations).
In inadequate response and support, yours truly proposes more food for thought…Five points:
FIRST, in response to industrialization, in 1891 Pope Leo XIII applied an embryonic Catholic Social Teaching (CST) by affirming the human person and the family above both the Marxist reductionism and the ethics of the “capitalist” robber barons (Rerum Novarum).
SECOND, the cited Paul Ehrlich “Population Bomb” was part of a broader mix in the 1960s, ranging from Barry Commoner who traced ecological endangerment more to various technologies (e.g., synthetics) rather than the underlying human numbers; and Rachel Carlson gave us “The Silent Spring;” and Apollo 8 gave us the unifying photo of the precious, blue-green spaceship earth during its “earth rise” over the lunar surface (our world as a global amniotic sac).
THIRD, after the ideological dislocations of the 20th Century, St. John Paul II indicated a path forward into the 21st Century (Centesimus Annus, 1991), commenting in part, about the culture of saline abortions: “[we are] poisoning the lives of millions of defenseless human beings, as if in a form of ‘chemical warfare.” Likewise, Mifepristone and maybe even ubiquitous Endocrine Disruptive Chemicals (EDCs, likely damaging to fetal development), and externally, the very ambivalent consequences of industrially splitting the atom as in 1945.
FOURTH, about today’s atheism, of which the Demographic Winter is one consequence, also in the 1960s, Rev. Jean Danielou gave us “Prayer as a Political Problem” in which he identified our current predicament: “atheism is no more than a transitional phase, a momentary crisis, located as it is between the paganism of the rural civilizations of yesterday and the paganism of the industrial civilization of tomorrow.” But, exactly what kind of industrial civilization?
FIFTH, long before CST and the moral conundrums of modern Technocracy, the increasingly relevance of pre-modern St. Augustine: “[the passions] are more easily mortified finally in those who love God, than satisfied, even for a time, in those who love the world.”
SUMMARY, during Danieloou’s “transitional phase,” and with Sr. Mirkes, what should the perennial Catholic Church be saying clearly to celebrate the very singular and central event of the Incarnation in all of universal human history, plus the moral absolutes as defended inVeritatis Splendor (and therefore the richness of the Theology of the Body), plus all of the broad and intergenerational challenges of our shared Common Good? How to truly evangelize in what is once again a stark Apostolic Time?
With G.K. Chesterton: “[T]he Catholic Church is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.”
A key requirement for a pro-natalist policy is a guarantee of a livelihood and a family wage for as many men as possible. In my country the UK, we have 1.5 million unemployed and 11 million economically inactive (either did not seek work during the past 4 weeks or are not ready to start work within the next 2). If anything, the United Kingdom is overpopulated relative to its ability to create wealth.
I have family in the UK & there’s also something like an “inability to work” for certain folks. All those “economically inactive” aren’t created equal. And we have the same kind of problem here in the States.
There is no such thing as “inability to work.” Everyone is, in fact, created equal.
You are simply making excuses for and defending laziness.
Equal in value, not equal in ability. Some folks can’t work or function without significant help, or even if the help is available.
I wasn’t being literal Miss Nicole. That’s why I used the quotation marks.
Some people do have genuine disabilities though.
In large part, the problems of the UK are created by the welfare state and the unfettered invasion of it.
What “living wage” advocates seem to forget is a wage is a price for a good, and they never address that part of the equation.
Demanding as a individual or a government, that the renumeration received for work meet some “guarantee of livelihood” without demanding that services received in return meet some qualitative and quantitative requirements is folly and doomed to failure.
The best way to ensure a fair wage is to ensure healthy labor markets that brutally punish those that might shortchange their employees with the threat of mass or unexpected resignation. Flooding your country with unskilled illiterates disorders the labor market.
However, it is to be expected as most people are obsessed with money, not so much with work.
Those of us who are spiritually inclined toward loving worship of an infinite good, God, knows that love draws us outward toward life, the lives of others, the desire for newborn life as an extension of ourselves, whereas judgment of the death of God draws us to our private concerns. Morals are now focused inwardly [conscientiously subjective].
Friedrich Nietzsche was quite insightful when he postulated that God is a human invention [his false premise], and that the loss of faith is due to moral uncertainty [his correct premise]. Sr Mirkes affirms that with her usual excellent research and credible primary, secondary sources. Dark warnings of extinction by world leaders Babis, Kushida, Meloni sound an unfortunate silent alarm the world deaf.
Wherein then might we choose a milestone if not the birth of a pill [add progressivism and the rage against Humanae Vitae] that by nature of design and human moral frailty purposed the dearth of births. When in Rome what one must do to live the process of birthlessness was seen in the abundance of shiny Alfa Romeo’s, Armani suits, wonderful restaurants. Husband and wife, or intimate strolling at night not a child in sight.
Yes! This! Thank you Father!
There are 8 billion and counting people in the world. There is NO “birth dearth” anyone who says there is has questionable ulterior motives.
Eight billion is a big number, but you miss the point.
And, about the “and counting” (your wording), the population replacement level is inflecting, such that in the decades ahead we will live in a world where the elderly vastly outnumber the young replacements. And the overall national totals will very likely diminish, seriously…
Social Security, for example, is a Ponzi scheme based on the assumption that the bottom of the demographic pyramid can support the top. But, the pyramid is becoming inverted. More at the top than at the bottom. Many other implications. That’s what the real “and counting” is all about. A lot of new questions, but “questionable ulterior motives”?
Perhaps if we had an audit and took a picture of it; you’d understand the situation better.
Eight billion people means eight billion births in the 100 years or so. Unless the human population is continually replenished, that number will decline, and as its composition ages, the potential to reverse it drops, since only the young reproduce. See Japan, where adult diapers outsell infant diapers.
Your attempt to muddle the issue belies questionable ulterior motives,
There’s not a population dearth at the moment Miss Nicole but there’s definitely a birth dearth in the entire developed world & falling fertility rates even in those nations with historically higher birthrates.
It’s an issue based upon Math & demographic data, not ideological motives.
Thank you.
Perhaps preachers can support the movement by linking the emerging crisis with the failure to heed Pope St. Paul VI’s encyclical. Pope Paul spoke up when the “population bomb” theorists were gathering momentum. He was prophetic in seeing use of artificial contraception bringing about increased abortions. Sr. Mirkes closes the circle by indicating that artificial contraception also is harbinger of a waning population and culture.
It is time to call Paul Erlich a fraudster of the first and worst order; a peddler of recycled Malthusian nonsense. Give the devil his due-there is no shortage of doom porn smut peddlers relying on Malthus.
Erlich’s father was a shirt salesman-he unfortunately doesn’t sell anything so useful.
Interestingly, Erlich is now in his 90’s and shows no sign of following Scrooge’s idea that if he is to die, he “had better do it, and decrease the surplus population”.
Unfortunately, Julian Simon died relatively early and is largely forgotten.
Looking at the current statistics worldwide I see that every day there are twice as many people born as die. https://www.worldometers.info/
Assuming that is accurate; it still tells you nothing about the long term.
One theme of this article is the lack of accountability for the role of patriarchy in the relationship crisis. Marriage is first and foremost a spiritual ministry. It is not something to just keep the population going. Men are to be the spiritual head of the family because each family is supposed to be a church, but most have ignored their spiritual responsibilities (leaving the women to pick them up) and instead focused on mammon: capitalism, sexual promiscuity, chasing glory, all at the expense of the commodification women and children. In this modern age where women have more choice, they would not choose to be married because they’ve witnessed their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers suffer spiritually, mentally, physically, and financially from their marriages to men. These days, marriage is not about couples sharpening each other spiritually and raising children in the spirit, but about managing women as property and exploiting their children for economic gain (hello family influencers on social media!). This is why the US Church is supportive of politicians who work to take away the free choice of women to marry by making it harder for them to get higher education and denying paid parental leave to working mothers, because they know that the concept of patriarchal “marriage” they push today violates the dignity women. Instead, they distract women with the optics of the extravagant wedding that lasts for one day which does not prepare them for the lifetime of marriage.
When I took pre-Cana classes, the couple who taught the class owned a mansion with lots of farmland in a very rich town. They had 7 kids in 7 years. My fiancée at the time and I were poor graduate students living paycheck to paycheck. I remember how disheartened we felt after taking the classes. This couple’s SES was not reflecting what most young couples were going through. Lord, have mercy on us.
The tone of this article also reveals a projection of a fundamental fear among white Western nations: The world population will continue to increase. However, since population is declining among white people and is increasing in non-white people, the demographic will shift to Africa/Southeast Asia. Someone else made a comment that pointed out how specific non-white countries are overpopulated and don’t need any more people. I would argue that by land mass alone, Europe is overpopulated and Africa is underpopulated. This “fear” is why white supremacy is rearing its head again (it never left) in the western Catholic Church.
Sometimes it’s the more financially comfortable who can spare the time to volunteer for programs at church. We shouldn’t envy or resent their blessings. And 7 children are a huge blessing indeed.
If the more affluent are out of touch with the working class, that’s another issue. You can find that, too.
Lambeth 1930.
Yes, Miss Cleo.
There are countries that are overpopulated. Bangladesh, Egypt, India and Pakistan. They do not need more people.
Define “overpopulated” or is that merely some visceral reaction of effete snobbery we are supposed to accept without question.
It’s always amusing the people complaining the bus is overcrowded show no eagerness to exit it at the first available stop.
Effete snobbery? What do you mean by that? The countries that I listed are indeed overpopulated. Bangladesh had 180,000,000 people in an area the size of Wisconsin. How many people can you support in that land mass? Why do you insist that there is no overpopulation? Some countries, like the US are not overpopulated, but India and Bangladesh are overpopulated. You don’t have to be an effete snob to see this.
“Why do you insist that there is no overpopulation?”
Because the most vociferous proponents of that idea have failed to do what they can to address it. -1
You doubled down on your visceral reaction, Malthus.
Birthrates are falling across the globe Mr. William. It’s not so much about population numbers that’s worrying, it’s the large age imbalance we will face in the future: many elderly & fewer & fewer young people in the workforce.
Egypt’s fertility rate is just above the replacement level but when you factor in higher mortality rates, you need slightly more than 2 children per couple for replacement.
Finally, Sr. Renee Mirkes has broken thorough the ambiguous thought of our population myths. I hear people saying that we have too many people in the world. Others, we are doomed without a significant increase of babies/children in the world. New life is a must. Sr. Mirkes research and clarity of thought, brings hope and confidence that we are able to change “The Birth Dearth.
Cohabitation, facilitated by contraception, while ostensibly entered into as a prelude to marriage, in fact postpones and undermines marriage and childbearing.
And nobody says a word.
Absolutely Miss Cleo. In the past that wasn’t as much the case. Couples shacking up might have many children & in places like Latin America, common law marriage situations were frequent amongst those of lower income. They still are in some locations.
Today with contraception use women can waste their entire fertile years with a boyfriend who won’t commit to marriage & family. He can move on & form a new relationship with a younger woman & father children if he chooses. But a woman’s fertility is much more finite.
Sr. Renee is prophetic in calling attention to this existential need for more children. She identifies the many causes of the birth dearth; she explains the dire consequences; and most importantly, she offers cures for demographic winter. Catholic priests have with her article factual and socially compelling material for a Sunday homily. We need to promote openness to the blessing of a child, and to the large family as a blessing. Fr. William
Spot on Sr Renee! Well written and love how you put all the data into your conclusion of this crisis we are in. What I gained from this is to set a good example for my children to desire to get married and have children.!🙏🏼