Demography

A filmmaker and data analyst warned that the falling birth rate crisis across the globe couldn’t be “any worse.”

Stephen Shaw, who interviewed people around the world to investigate plummeting birthrates for his documentary Birthgap, recently told podcaster Brendan O’Neill that population collapse is a uniquely dangerous problem. This is because unlike the dangers of, say, nuclear proliferation and environmental issues, there are no known solutions to declining birth rates, according to Shaw.

Environmentalists used to warn that there are ‘too many people on the planet’. In The Population Bomb (1968), the late Paul Ehrlich warned that ‘overpopulation’ would lead to mass starvation by the 1970s, to US life expectancy plummeting to just 42 by the 1980s, and by the year 2000, England would cease to exist. We now know that the world faces the precise opposite challenge – of unprecedented demographic collapse in the face of falling birth rates.

There has been a growing shift in the kind of clients Dr. Kim Garbedian, a reproductive endocrinologist, has been seeing at Pollin Fertility clinic in Toronto recently: younger couples in their twenties, looking to make sure their reproductive health allows them to have children later in life.

“Fertility awareness has increased a lot. We’re specifically seeing young women coming in their twenties and early thirties, who know they want to have children and desire to have them but they’re not really right there, right now,” said Dr. Garbedian in an interview with CTV News Saturday.

“But they’re coming in, whether it’s just testing or freezing their eggs.”

Nestled below street-level and hidden behind a dense wall of emerald shrubbery, Michelangelo Playground feels like a small miracle. Standing in the San Francisco park on a good day, when the weather is just right, you can see wild parrots visit from Telegraph Hill and lemons that hang like jewels from trees – even hear the sound of sea lions barking from down by the marina.

It’s quarter past 11 on a Sunday morning, and the park is eerily empty. It’s that time of the weekend when kids have been cooped up for too long, and parents are desperate to get them outside, to do something, anything. Yet, all four of the slides on this morning sit unused. The tire swing hangs perfectly still. There are no children shouting or shrieking or singing nonsense, no thumping of a basketball against the lifeless court. There’s only silence.

It’s a beautiful day in a beautiful playground. But where are all the children?

As we know in Canada importing the 3rd World is not a solution to demographic decline just a worse problem.