The British fertility rate fell to its lowest level on record in 2024 after falling for three straight years as the native public continues to delay or refrain from having children.
Figures released on Wednesday from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that the total fertility rate (TFR) stood at 1.41 children per woman in 2024 for England and Wales.
If humanity’s existence were threatened by plague, nuclear war or environmental catastrophe, people would surely demand action.
But what if the threat came from our own, passive acceptance of decline? This is not some theoretical curiosity: It is a reasonable extrapolation of globally declining fertility rates.
People aren’t demanding action. In fact, some think a smaller population is actually a good thing.
Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, economists at the University of Texas at Austin specializing in demographics, want to change that. Their book “After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People” is a deep dive into the facts and consequences of depopulation, and an impassioned argument against letting it happen.
They rest their argument not on the familiar need for workers to propel economic growth or shore up Social Security but on a more fundamental proposition: More people is a good thing in and of itself.
You can’t have a country without children.
Forget pandemics. Forget war. South Korea is dying by choice. Not a bomb, not a plague, not even bad luck. A slow, quiet vanishing. It’s not falling to enemies; it’s falling to itself.
Over the next century, South Korea’s population is projected to decline to just 7.5 million. That’s not a typo. That’s an 85 percent collapse: 51 million people, down to seven and a half. Picture America with the population of California, minus everyone else. Now imagine that across the entire continent. Ghost cities. Empty homes. Schools boarded up. Airports with no flights. Subways running on time — for no one. It sounds like dystopian fiction. Sadly, though, it’s a reality that has already begun.
A cultural sickness is causing women to not have children.
The U.S. faces a crisis that has yet to make itself widely known: Women are having fewer and fewer children with each passing year. Whereas in 2007 the U.S. averaged 2.12 births per woman, that number has continuously fallen ever since, decreasing in 2023 to reach another record low of 1.62 births per woman. That’s well, well below replacement levels.
The fertility crisis has yet to make a significant impact on the U.S. economy, but according to a report released this week by Pew, we are beginning to see the first effects of the crisis on state budgets.
It was easy to miss a minor blip in the cacophonous “great give-away” during this year’s federal election: the Liberal Party’s promise to expand financial support for in vitro fertilization (IVF) under the umbrella of its “Pathways to Parenthood” plan, which earmarked $400 million to ease access to the service. The monies will be disbursed through a series of payments (up to $20,000 per person) for a single round of treatment. The goal is, in part, to make IVF equally accessible across the nation.
But the government is also responding to the increasingly well-documented disparity between people’s desire for children and their ability to fulfill these aspirations. In an economic context often cited as hostile to childbearing, relieving any financial barriers to family life is as good a place to start as any when it comes to framing family-forward policy.
The 21st century is going to be overshadowed by a crisis that human beings have never faced before. I don’t mean war, pestilence, famine or climate change. Those are perennial troubles. Yes, even climate change, despite the hype, is nothing new as anyone who’s heard of the Roman Warm Period, the Mediaeval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age will know. Climate change and the others are certainly problems, but they aren’t new.
But the crisis that’s coming is new.
One day, sooner than we think, we will have to choose: societies that permit and even pay for abortion, or societies that prize and incentivize children. In the long run, we cannot have both. We cannot have a future and kill our children.
THE White British will become a minority by the year 2063. The foreign-born and their descendants will become a majority by 2079. And by the year 2100, at least one in five people on these islands will be following the Islamic faith, up from roughly one in every 14 today.
These are just a few of the bombshell findings from my latest research report, which received extensive media coverage.
Population projections are notoriously difficult.
In all countries, 39% of people said financial limitations prevented them from having a child.
Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.
But it always comes back to one question: ‘Can we afford it?’
She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one child are already overwhelming – school fees, the school bus, swimming lessons, even going to the GP is expensive.
It was different when Namrata was growing up. “We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do.”
The country has had nine consecutive years of declining births despite government efforts to halt the demographic crisis
It was a story of extraordinary national renewal. After decades in the grip of military imperial rule, millions dead in a war that traversed oceans and two cities flattened by atom bombs, the Japanese people picked themselves up and made babies.
Between 1945 and 1965, a nascent democracy flourished, the economy boomed and Japan’s population rocketed from 72 million to almost 100 million. By the turn of the millennium, the mountainous archipelago, the vast majority of whose population is squeezed into lower-lying coastal areas, was home to 127 million people, four times the population of Canada, which is 26 times larger.
Los Angeles-born and Ivy League-educated, Peachy Keenan isn’t the typical picture of a pro-natalist.
Yet the married, mother of five is part of a growing movement of mostly Catholic, well-educated women in deep blue California inspired by Donald Trump’s calls to have more children.
“To save the country, we need to get out and push the babies out, and to do it in mass scale,” she said.
For the better part of five decades, we told Americans — implicitly and explicitly — that children were a burden. We built a culture that prizes career over commitment, convenience over continuity, and freedom from ties over the joys of rootedness. We told women that motherhood was a trap, that marriage could wait (or be skipped entirely), and that the future would take care of itself. Now, with birthrates scraping historic lows, we act shocked. We clutch our pearls, roll out baby bonuses, and pretend this was all some mysterious accident of economics.
It wasn’t. It was a choice — repeated, reinforced, and rewarded at every level of modern society.
While cost-of-living issues and U.S. trade tensions have dominated discussions during the federal election campaign, a long-simmering issue is drawing concern among some experts who say the potential consequences warrant greater federal attention: Canada’s declining fertility rate and its long-term implications for population growth.
Canada’s birth rate has for decades been below the level needed to replace the population, with an even steeper decline in recent years, according to a recent report published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute titled “Baby Steps: How to reverse Canada’s falling fertility rates.”
While declining fertility is a global trend seen in other developed countries like the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, Canada now lags behind many of its peers in fertility.
To keep Canada off Trump’s authoritarian path, we must reject pronatalism and protect women’s rights
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s recent talking point commiserating with couples in their late 30s whose fertility window is closing and who can’t afford to start families touched a nerve. While it’s true that some couples are starting families later or having fewer children, and Canada’s fertility rate is declining, Poilievre’s rhetoric about women’s biological clocks running out is offensive. Liberals and the NDP rightly condemned it.
While he meant to sound sympathetic, Poilievre calling women’s wombs into service as a means towards political ends should be seen for what it is: Canada’s own brand of pronatalism — societal and institutional pressures on women (mostly from men) to have children. It mirrors U.S President Donald Trump, the self-professed “fertilization president” who uses pronatalism as a cover for rolling back reproductive rights and gender equality.
Where does the Star find these extremist loons?
How Did Having Babies Become Right-Wing?
Michelle Sabari always wanted to have six children. She started dating her husband in university and told him her plan — and he was game. By age 30, they were both finally done with school, had jobs and felt stable enough to start a family. Three kids came in four years, and they took a pause to regain their footing. But she didn’t feel “done” — not even close.
The comments on the Tweet are as you’d expect …
Despite generous public supports, Canada now has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. We need to find other ways to address ithttps://t.co/1YEDo8hUiG
— National Post (@nationalpost) April 14, 2025
