Fertility Rates Are in Crisis With Shrinking Populations

In a move that feels eerily similar to parents pressuring their children for grandchildren, governments around the world are devising schemes to address their shrinking populations. This includes everything from shaming child-free lifestyles and giving out baby bonuses or cash incentives for having kids, to implementing pro-natalist policies and (if you can believe it) promoting teen pregnancy.

But they haven’t filled up the maternity wards. So far, all these incentives have achieved is showing how out of touch governments are with real life.

The Real Fertility Crisis

Certainly, the world is facing a fertility rate crisis, but it’s a complex issue due to demographic diversity. In large parts of Africa, for example, the estimated fertility rate in 2024 was still high, at over five births per woman. Research published by the UN attributes this high rate to factors such as low contraception use, early childbearing, early and universal marriage, and high social values placed on childbearing in most African cultures.

Conversely, several Asian countries, such as Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, currently have the lowest fertility rates worldwide, with most at just over one birth per woman. In most European countries, a relatively low rate is maintained overall, with no countries above 2.0. In 2024, the U.S. fertility rate was at an all-time low, at fewer than 1.6 children per woman.

Cultural and economic factors

Changing cultural and economic elements tend to play the biggest role.

When countries develop economically, their fertility rate tends to fall. In Europe, it’s believed that socioeconomic incentives to delay childbearing, a lack of childcare or childcare becoming too expensive, shifting gender roles, and an overall decline in the desired number of children are behind the declining fertility rates. Experts also believe that elements such as access to reliable birth control and increased career and education opportunities for women play a role.

“Cultural expectations are designed to fit a way of living that doesn’t exist anymore,” says Matthias Doepke, an economist at the London School of Economics. “That is the root cause of these extremely low fertility rates that we have in rich countries.”

When women’s careers are prioritized, raising children generally takes a backseat until they’re in their 30s or 40s, at which point their most fertile years have passed. Consequently, many couples will require fertility treatments if they want to have children later on. Later childbearing also tends to result in fewer children per family.

Population replacement rates

Poh Lin Tan, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies in Singapore, explains that people no longer have children for the benefit of the direct economic value of their labor, or as an insurance policy, guaranteeing that they’d take care of their parents in their old age.

“We are at a place where having children is really a matter of pure joy, and a preference where you kind of have to pay for it and make some sacrifices in terms of your leisure and career advancement,”

Tan says. Then there’s the intriguing case of South Korea.

POPULATION REPLACEMENT RATE: Generally, this is defined as the level at which a given population replaces itself from one generation to the next. To maintain itself successfully, any given current population must maintain a fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman. Since the 1950s, global population has halved, from almost five children per woman to 2.3.

In the 1950s, the South Korean fertility rate was six births per woman. In 2024, it was less than one. A significant factor behind this is that the country now has too few adult women of childbearing age to support a healthy replacement rate.

Gender norms and the shifts in fertility rates

Cultural factors in many Asian countries have produced a long-standing, strong preference for sons over daughters. In the 1980s, the development of technology made prenatal gender selection possible. At the same time, prenatal female selective abortion and excess mortality of girls after birth contributed to significantly higher birth rates for boys in South Korea.

Furthermore, for South Korean girls reaching adulthood, a tough, misogynistic culture awaited. Between the 1960s and 1990s, significant numbers of women entered the workplace, but the country’s societal gender norms didn’t go along with the shift, and nothing changed at home. Men did little or nothing to balance their homes’ housework load or contribute to childcare. Subsequently, the women who were now required to pull double duty seemed to have made a collective decision: simply to have fewer children, or no children at all.

Dating apps, same sex marriages and child raising options

In 2024, the South Korean Ministry of Education reported that 157 elementary schools across the country had no new first-graders to enroll in March, while record-low numbers of new students were expected for the upcoming school year. And despite the government’s being hard at work throwing money at the problem, the country’s birth rate hasn’t risen. This is particularly worrisome for a country facing an aging population and a future without the necessary workers to support its pension system.

Other countries, such as the US, Russia, Vietnam, China, Italy, Japan, and Hungary, have similarly started to target birth rates by introducing direct cash transfers and childcare subsidies for couples who have babies. Other strategies that have been tested include promoting more weddings, launching dating apps, legalizing same-sex marriage, and addressing child-raising options for same-sex couples, and refashioning the workplace to allow employees to engage with their families.

Again, a few of these strategies have been particularly successful at producing more babies.

A question of finance

A new report from the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF) challenges the general assumption of most governments that young people simply aren’t interested in having children. Around 39% of respondents indicated that their finances prevented them from achieving their desired family size. Job insecurity and unemployment were other factors.

Moreover, current living costs are so high that, perhaps for the first time, couples opt to have smaller families or no children at all, simply because they can’t afford to raise them effectively. Ironically, in many developed countries, raising a child is made more difficult due to the costs of childcare, housing, medical care, food, education, and transport.

The Western world also seems to have lost the “village” supposedly required to raise a child. As a result, the parenting effort leaves individuals feeling overtaxed and under pressure.

“It is often assumed or implied that fertility rates are the result of free choice,” the report said. “Unfortunately, that is not the whole picture.”

The UNPF respondents were fairly unanimous. Most seem to want to have children, but feel that they lack the necessary circumstances to do so. Parenting is tough enough without trying to raise a child in times of war, or when the planet is in dire straits, or when living costs are so high. Until more favorable circumstances present themselves, they’d prefer not to take the chance.

Dr Natalia Kanem, head of the UNPF, recently suggested that it’s critical to get the answers to a very important question: “We need to ask what people want and need regarding their family-raising choices” – this should be the “first and most important inquiry when considering population issues”.

What about infertility?

Dr Mark Faesen is a specialist gynecologist and fertility specialist with the Clinical HIV Research Unit (CHRU) in Johannesburg. He explains that most couples shouldn’t have an issue getting pregnant.

“Only if there is no pregnancy after a year of trying and everything else is normal, only then do we start special investigations and possibly treatment. Medical technological developments aiding infertile couples, all in the realm of IVF, [include] better stimulation protocols, better egg-collection techniques, better egg selection, better sperm selection for fertilization, better techniques for egg freezing or embryo freezing,” he says.

Faesen explains that technologies such as egg freezing and sperm freezing are definitely helpful services for men and women who can’t or don’t want to embark on a pregnancy at the moment in their lives, or need to postpone their family planning for all sorts of reasons.

Some factors affecting fertility include:

• Rising rates of obesity, which can have an impact on ovulation in women and sperm production in men; and

• Rising rates of sexually transmitted diseases, which can cause damage to both male and female reproductive organs.

“We know without a shadow of a doubt that reproductive performance is directly linked to nutritional status,” says Faesen. “There is an ideal weight and an ideal nutritional status where everything functions optimally. For example, women who train excessively may stop ovulating and menstruating once a certain lower limit of body weight is reached. Anorexic women who stop menstruating and ovulating are another example of this.”

Then there’s the issue of paternal health. Research shows a father’s DNA contributes to placental health, affecting hormone production, nutrient exchange, and immune function. Placental issues are linked to poor fetal growth, preeclampsia, and low birth weight. Studies also indicate that a father’s gut microbiome influences child development and pregnancy health. Additionally, fathers with metabolic syndrome have a higher risk of preterm births, low birth weight, and NICU stays for their infants.

How toxic is the 21st century?

Faesen explains that, when comparing males of the 20th Century to those of the 21st, we’re seeing declining male fertility. “This is expressed as lower sperm counts, lower sperm concentrations, and lower sperm motility. This is a worldwide trend,” he says.

Declining sperm count and ovulation disturbances can be attributed to lifestyle factors such as poor diet, sedentary lifestyles, alcohol consumption, smoking, and stress. By following a healthy diet, getting more exercise, managing stress, limiting alcohol, and quitting smoking, both men and women can increase their chances of getting pregnant with a healthy baby.

Environmental factors also play a role. “Exposure to chemicals and pollutants in various consumer products, household items, and even air quality can negatively impact sperm quality and interfere with adequate hormone production, resulting in ovulation disturbances,” says Faesen. “These chemicals are called endocrine-disrupting chemical substances (EDCSs), and affect both female and male reproductive systems.”

To avoid EDCSs affecting fertility:

• Limit exposure to phthalate-heavy fragrances in cosmetics, personal-care, and cleaning products;
• Wash hands frequently to remove chemical residues;
• Reduce plastic use, especially when heating food, to prevent microplastic accumulation;
• Eat seasonal, organic, whole foods; and
• Filter drinking

Dear governments of the world, you’re getting this wrong

You’re not going to fix the problem with short-term incentives. Your citizens need long-term solutions that can build a more family-friendly world. Ideally, individuals should be able to decide freely whether or not to have children, without shame, and be able to raise children with sufficient support, quality healthcare, education, and financial security, free from fertility concerns.

Indeed, countries that have addressed these concerns (in Scandinavia, for example), have seen an uptick in their population growth.

These are some of the more successful strategies:

• Giving parents more affordable, trustworthy childcare;
• Making work more flexible, and making part-time work more available;
• Fighting poverty, and offering generous family and social benefits;
• Including more family-friendly practices in business;
• Offering paid parental leave, to be shared between parents; and
• Making IVF treatments more affordable and accesible.

Ultimately, policies should be about helping people to have the number of children they’d like, says Prof Anna Rotkirch, who advises the Finnish government on fertility.

“They influence child wellbeing and the wellbeing of people who have children. And that’s maybe the most important thing, that the children who are born have good lives.”

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