Not that long ago, we were told to worry about the population bomb. The number of humans on the planet was rising so high and so rapidly that there was fear that all those extra billions of people would outstrip the planet’s resources.
Now, the new worry is a global phenomenon of declining birthrates and fertility that appears to be leading toward a drop in the world’s population that will cause chronic worker shortages, economic decline, and a severe imbalance between a smaller number of younger homo sapiens and a much higher number of the elderly.
In 1950, the global average was 4.86 children for each father and mother. By 2023, that average had dropped to 2.15, just below the replacement rate of 2.2 that would keep the Earth’s human population at an equilibrium. The numbers for economically advanced nations are starker. The birthrate per couple in the United States is 1.62. South Korea is the lowest at 0.72.
India has passed China as the country with the most people, yet India’s fertility rate is at less than replacement level. China’s fertility numbers have dropped dramatically. The same is the case in Europe and Japan. Mexico, which not that long ago had an average of seven kids per family, is now closer to two. Even in Africa, which has long had the highest birthrate of any continent, new babies are becoming markedly scarcer.
Why is this happening? Part of the answer is falling fertility. Environmental pollutants, such as plastics and pesticides, may very well be causing lower sperm counts in young men and other complications for young women. But perhaps the biggest factor is the medical and social revolution that has occurred in the past half-century that has freed women from circumscribed lives and changed people’s attitudes toward childbearing all across the planet.
Effective birth control has had a dramatic effect, from Tokyo, Seattle, London and Istanbul to the smallest villages in the most remote corners of the globe. More and more women have been given a choice about how many children they will bear and that has opened up avenues to different lives, less confined to motherhood and economic subservience to men.
Liberating the female half of the world’s population is a very good thing, but it has profoundly altered attitudes toward marriage and child-rearing. Through most of human history, marriage was a socio-economic arrangement which had little to do with love or compatibility. Children were an inevitable result of biological urges that no one could control. No longer is that true. Today, more and more women — and men — are marrying later, or not marrying at all, and are having fewer children, or none.
Marriage is tough. Raising kids is difficult. Both require sacrifice and self-denial. A lot of people are deciding it is not worth it; they have better things to do. And that is creating a brave new world that we are only beginning to perceive.
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