The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) on Tuesday released its annual “State of World Population Report.” According to the report, the world is experiencing a fertility crisis and most of the policies implemented to fight it are ineffective.
“As policymakers and pundits raise the alarm about fertility rates, they often assume that if people are having children, it’s because they can and want to, and if they’re not it’s because they can’t or don’t want to,” UNFPA observed.
The report made the contrary argument, based on a survey of 14,000 people in 14 countries, that “most people want to have children,” but many of them feel “shut out of parenthood.” Over half of them cited “financial worries, including housing costs, childcare, and job insecurity” as reasons they were reluctant to have more children.
The report went on to lament that policies to combat this very problem – including “lump sum payments when a baby is born” and “short-term efforts to lower childcare or housing costs” – have been “ineffective and offer scant support.”
UNFPA’s solution was – in a bizarre demonstration of ideological rigidity over common sense – to make abortion easier and stop talking about population decline:
[C]ountries should be expanding reproductive choice, and supporting inclusive policies that empower and improve the welfare of all people.
That means improving access to reproductive health services for everyone, especially those currently left behind – disabled persons, ethnic minorities, migrants and more. It means supporting women who want to join, or stay in, the workforce without sacrificing the chance to become mothers. It means ending stigmas and workplace policies that discourage men from doing their share of childcare.
It can also mean expanding family support, including fertility and adoption services, to people who are too often excluded: those in the LGBTQIA+ community, single people, and women once considered “too old” to be suitable mothers. It also means respecting people who don’t want children at all – a valid, legitimate choice that should be equally protected from stigma and pressure.
There is considerable evidence that UNFPA is right about policies to financially incentivize childbirth having little effect. This is most clearly demonstrated by countries like China, South Korea, and Japan, which have devoted considerable resources to subsidizing childbirth and child-rearing, without much observable effect. South Korea did manage a modest uptick in birth rates last year, the first in nearly a decade, but its fertility rate remains far below the level needed for a stable population. In the same year, China’s birthrate continued to decline despite prodigious spending.
On the other hand, the nations with the highest fertility rates on Earth are not noted for their booming economies, extensive child care subsidies, or abundance of “reproductive health services”: Niger, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Benin, Chad, and Uganda.
Uganda has been excoriated for its hostility to the LGBTQIA+ community, but it still has a fertility rate of 5.17 births per woman. A nation needs 2.1 for population stability and not a single nation in the affluent, abortion-happy, exquisitely LGBT-friendly Western world can meet that threshold, unless you count Israel.
“Vast numbers of people are unable to create the families they want. The issue is lack of choice, not desire, with major consequences for individuals and societies. That is the real fertility crisis, and the answer lies in responding to what people say they need: paid family leave, affordable fertility care, and supportive partners,” argued UNFPA executive director Dr. Natalia Kanem.
And yet, the Asian countries experiencing sharp demographic decline have offered all of those things, without much impact on their demographic cataclysms.
What the UNFPA comes close to realizing is that in wealthy nations the opportunity cost of having children at a young age is enormous. Subsidizing hospital costs, providing generous maternity leave, or even providing cash benefits for new families does not approach the perceived loss of career opportunities, income, and social mobility for young mothers.
Population growth requires a substantial share of the female population to have multiple children, which usually means getting started on motherhood at the age women in advanced societies are graduating from school and planning their careers.
Stated simply, the population kill switch plaguing advanced societies is partly a consequence of their tendency to make not having children look like a very attractive option. As China, South Korea, and Japan have learned, not even the strong Asian cultural preference for marriage and family have been able to balance those scales.
On the other hand, the countries with high fertility rates do not have high opportunity costs for motherhood. To the contrary, remaining single past a certain age in those cultures and economies can be very unpleasant or dangerous. Toss in the strong urge for large families promoted by Islam – even as Judeo-Christian cultures have grown uncomfortable with “family values,” and autocratic states like China have trouble motivating women to bear more children for the glory of the State – and a great deal of the demographic conundrum is solved.
The UNFPA drifted close to this solution by noticing that South Koreans are more likely to cite financial difficulties as a reason not to have children than Swedes, who enjoy generous family leave policies – but both nations still have among the lowest birth rates in the world.
The report’s authors hypothesized that unintended pregnancies, which are common even in countries with very low birth rates, make it hard for people to carefully plan the large families they might otherwise have desired, but the report offered very little evidence that comprehensive access to abortion helps to resolve that hypothetical anxiety.
A more interesting conclusion was added to the report summary as a poetic flourish: “People need hope. They need hope for their own futures, and hope for the futures of the children they want to have. For that, policymakers must listen to what people need.”
Young people in much of the Western world have been taught to feel hopeless and alienated by their left-wing political elites, with everything from climate hysteria to heavy burdens of cultural and historical guilt. UNFPA suggested alarmism over population decline could create a doom loop by making young people nervous about having children – but those people have been taught to believe the Earth is overcrowded and exhausted, mankind is a threat to nature, and raising the carbon footprint of humanity is sinful.
“Hope for the future” is a huge and nebulous concept. Many different factors could make people feel hopeful, or hopeless. High unemployment rates have long been suggested as a reason people might not feel enough hope for the future to have kids – but some of the most fertile countries in the world suffer from perpetually high unemployment and offer dismal economic prospects to young people.
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