The world has many problems and it’s hard to know which one is the worst. Certainly war in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan are pressing problems. Economic stagnation, trade wars, climate change, democratic decline, the spectre of nuclear war and the rise of 21st century autocracy and tyranny certainly can all be justifiably be called problems. But there is one problem that, alongside climate change, is going to define the rest of this century and probably the one beyond that. And that is the collapse of global fertility.
A combination of gender equality and affluence has created a demographic time-bomb. The problem goes something like this. For decades western culture has been striving to tell women that they have a different destiny than motherhood and that motherhood is not a worthy vocation – the real satisfaction comes from having what the men have – careers, status, wealth and power – so have at it ladies. And they have.
As a result women, freed by and large from the burden of pregnancy wanted or otherwise, are able to choose if and when they will have children. The results is they are choosing fewer children and to have them much later in life. And so in every single country in the Western World has a birth rate below the replacement level. Populations everywhere are shrinking.
And the problem is spreading: “By 2100, the world is expected to have just six countries where births outweigh deaths – Samoa, Somalia, Tonga, Niger, Chad, and Tajikistan. The other 97% of nations are projected to have fertility rates below replacement levels (2.1 children per woman).”1
Population decline causes all sorts of problems especially when coupled with an ageing and unhealthy population. And because in a democracy you cannot force women to have children (and it’s proving difficult in non-democracies too) governments are resorting to the only other available option which is immigration. This solution, rightly or wrongly, is proving to be increasingly unpopular.
But this problem doesn’t feel like a problem compared with all the other problems we definitely do feel. Which is why we needs prophets and prophetesses to raise the alarm. Speaking of these voices from the wilderness Alfred Delp says,
They summon us to our last chance, because they can already feel the ground quaking and the rafters creaking; they can already see the firmest of mountains tottering and the very stars in heaven hanging in peril. They summon us to the opportunity of warding off, by the greater power of a converted heart, the shifting desert that will pounce upon us and bury us.
One of the few people who seems to me to fit this description is Louise Perry, the author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution2 and host of the Maiden, Mother, Matriarch Podcast.
To get a good intro into her thinking you should read her article, Modernity’s Self-Destruct Button in First Things.
Because the fertility crash really does pose an existential risk to modernity as such. A common assumption among people who are relaxed about low fertility in the rich world is that life will remain much the same, just with a smaller population. We will still enjoy all of the nice things we currently enjoy—a welfare system, hospitals, sophisticated infrastructure—but there will be fewer people around, and so less pressure on all of these resources. Advocates for population decline insist that we can keep the important parts of modernity and just trim the hedonistic fat.
They’re wrong about that.
Then below are just a few of the episodes she has devoted to looking at this problem from a variety of angles. I haven’t listened to all the other episodes but I’d be surprised if this issue doesn’t come up a lot more often. When the prophets, or in this case a prophetess speaks, we should take care to listen.
- Predicted Drop in Population Mightn’t Be Enough to Save The Environment After All [↩]
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