Reading science fiction in the 21st century sometimes feels a bit like reading a lineup of news headlines. It’s not that women have suddenly ceased to be able to have children the way they do in P.D. James’s 1992 novel Children of Men but, rather, that the novel seems to have been able to predict the principle of the thing: an epidemic of radical individualism.
Science fiction is frequently prophetic in the same way that some riddles are prophetic.
Making the argument that we live in a dystopian hellscape isn’t exactly difficult; one merely needs to study New York lawfare, observe Big Tech censorship, or watch five minutes of last weekend’s Eurovision competition. Unfortunately, our dystopia extends beyond the political. Far more telling (although less talked about) are the numbers that mark a cultural decline and predict an imminent “demographic winter.” (READ MORE: The Case for Marrying Young — From Someone Who Did)
Fertility rates around the world are falling — and they’re falling faster than anticipated. Some experts, including Jésus Fernández-Villaverde, an economist who specializes in demographics at the University of Pennsylvania, believe that if the global fertility rate isn’t already below the replacement rate, it will be soon.
It’s not that people in rich countries like the United States and Japan aren’t having kids, nor is it simply a problem in South Korea or Italy. Fertility rates are declining in regions that have historically resisted the global trend, like sub-Saharan Africa and India. The decline is slower, yes, but it’s still a decline.
People just don’t want babies.
The problem with writing about an issue like this one is that although most people instinctively understand that a shrinking population is probably a bad thing, the political impacts are of the garden variety and stretch so far in the future that it’s hard for us, living in 2024, to care.
In 2022, the U.N. predicted that world population would peak at 10.4 billion sometime around 2080. It’s worth pointing out that most of the people reading this article will either be dead or in nursing homes at that point. Of course, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington has an even more dire prediction, suggesting that the peak would occur in 2061 at 9.5 billion people.
It may be far out, but governments are certainly concerned about shrinking workforces (which is in the process of happening as baby boomers retire) leading to slowing economic growth, as well as the consequences of a society that is older — a phenomenon that’s currently playing out in Japan, where more adult diapers are sold than baby diapers.
Those same governments are starting to take some action, but nothing they’ve done seems to be working. Japan has launched marketing campaigns to convince its population to have kids. It made giving birth free, offered stipends to couples who have kids, instituted monthly allowances for those kids, offered free college for families with three or more children, instituted fully paid parental leave, and even created an entire holiday to celebrate children.
All to no avail. The fertility rate hasn’t waivered — or even slowed — in its decline.
In 2021, the University of Maryland tried to address this issue in a study and found (much to everyone’s surprise) that when comparing results between different states, government programs were hardly helpful. “[D]ifferences in parental abortion notification laws, unemployment, Medicaid availability, housing costs, contraceptive usage, religiosity, child-care costs and student debt” all fail to explain why people keep choosing not to have kids, the Wall Street Journal reports.
That same study found that the decline in birth rate, at least in the United States, is occurring among women in their 20s. “Birth rates among women 20 to 24 fell from 105.4 to 62.8 through 2020 and birth rates among women 25 to 29 fell from 118.1 to 90.0,” the study explains. “These trends are consistent with women having fewer children over their childbearing years, not merely delaying childbearing to older ages.”
In other words, young women today are finishing high school, going to college, pursuing a career, and working an office job into their 30s, all without getting married and having kids — and they’re profoundly unhappy doing so.
All of this should strike the reader as odd. It indicates that the declining fertility rate might just be the fault of more insidious factors: cultural attitudes that are impossible, or very difficult, to measure.
Last weekend, Pope Francis attended the fourth General States of Natality, an annual conference hosted by the Italian government that seeks to discuss solutions to the rapidly declining birthrate in that country. “There is no shortage of dogs and cats… These are not lacking,” the pope told his audience. “There is a shortage of children. The problem of our world is not the children who are born: it is selfishness consumerism and individualism, which make people satiated, lonely and unhappy.”
In the language of the scientists calling this the “second demographic transition” (the first occurred when women joined the workforce in the last century), there has been a “societywide reorientation toward individualism that puts less emphasis on marriage and parenthood, and makes fewer or no children more acceptable.”
It’s the phenomenon of the DINKS.
But it’s not just the dual-income no-kids couples. It’s those who choose to have just one child and take that child on Disney cruises when he’s lonely; it’s the women who are waiting well into their 30s to get married so that they can pursue a career before having a family, only to discover that it’s much harder to do so in your 30s than in your 20s. The issue is a cultural radical “individualism.”
Selfishness has existed since the beginning of time. Radical individualism, one of its forms, undermines everything in man’s nature that compels him to obey the divine order: “Be fruitful and multiply.” Instead, it’s put us on the fast track to create a society where children — and, with them, wonder and hope — are in short supply.
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