Alongside war, AI, the economy (always the economy) one of the stories of the moment is the attention our collapsing fertility rate is generating. If you’re already bored of this topic I have bad news for you – this one won’t be going away for a generation or three. I’ve written several articles on this subject over the past few years (The world a decade on from ‘peak baby’; Should you care about population growth or decline? for example).

The evident crux of the issue, as I pointed out in the ‘peak baby’ article, is a conflict of stories. Stories of radical individual self-fulfilment, combined with economic pressures and the assumption that adulthood is primarily about career formation, have contributed to many young women delaying or avoiding marriage and children altogether. On the other side many young men seem increasingly pulled either toward resentment and withdrawal or toward aggressive hyper-masculinity — neither of which makes for healthy husbands or fathers.

The church has the potential to tell a better story about both the church family and the biological family and to create deep communities where young men and women of character can grow and develop, partners can be found & cherished and families can be nurtured and flourish all without resorting to a future that looks like something out of the Handmaiden’s Tale. And even more beautifully it is possible to build and encourage families while at the same including those who longed for marriage or children and did not receive them.

---

For two articles on how the church should think about this read Matt Hosier & Stephen McAlpine

But for now here is a collection of some of the latest stories and opinions on a world with fewer and fewer children:

Visualized

• Mapped: Birth Rates Around the World in 2025
• Mapped: Europe’s Birth Rate Collapse
• Mapped: Every Country’s Fertility Rate as Births Decline Worldwide
• Although internal politics is conspiring against and fuelling discontent, a lot of countries are going to need more people. You can see from the chart directly above where they might come from and here is where they’re currently going: Mapped: A Snapshot of Global Migration
• Here are 5 facts about Africa’s population growth (also see my post Is the future of Europe African? &

Explained?

The Financial Times recently published an article that looked at one reason that may have accelerated the fertility crash: smartphones. Here’s the debate.

• Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once (FT)
• Why I am skeptical on the relationship between smart phones and fertility (Tyler Cowen)
• Smartphones are an accelerator of deeper forces already at work (Jesús Fernández-Villaverde)
• John Burn-Murdoch responds on phones and fertility (JBM, obviously)