The world’s richest countries must prepare for a ‘low-fertility future’

Governments are understandably alarmed by falling birth rates, but their efforts to incentivise parenthood through subsidies and handouts — while often valuable as poverty-reduction measures — are founded on a “false diagnosis” of the problem, The Economist argued, since the bulk of the decline comes from younger, poorer women delaying motherhood and therefore having fewer children overall. Illiberal governments such as those in Hungary and Russia might have no qualms about rolling back decades of efforts to curb teenage pregnancy and encourage women into work, but there’s still the practical problem that few citizens are productive enough to offset the exorbitant costs of baby-boosting policies. Societies need to instead adapt to this new, aging reality, the outlet added.

Global population totals have increased despite below-growth fertility rates across the world since the 1970s, thanks largely to migration, according to the UN’s Population Fund. Crisis talk about birth rates may quietly betray a more ominous logic: “[T]hat if certain birth rates are too low, then others may be too high,” the formulation behind the far-right’s “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, a columnist wrote in Current Affairs. That higher immigration is rarely considered a solution suggests concerns are ultimately less economic than they are ethno-nationalist, she added.

Incentivising birth to fulfill certain collective objectives risks turning women’s bodies into “mere conduits to meet macro demographic targets,” a professor of sociology argued in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs: As an alternative, “[a] reproductive justice framework… provides a useful lens to think about low birth rate as a social issue, beyond the narratives of heroic mothers saving nations and civilisations,” she added.