The Solution to the Global Fertility Crisis

"If government subsidies and liberal immigration policies will not solve the fertility crisis, what will?" A return to the Church's doctrine!

From Crisis

By Richard Clements

Much has been written about the global fertility crisis, but almost all of the solutions to this crisis that have been proposed thus far are unlikely to be effective. What is the solution?

uch has been written about the global fertility crisis, but almost all of the solutions to this crisis that have been proposed thus far are unlikely to be effective. First, a few statistics to summarize the situation: Between 1950 and 2021, the global total fertility rate (TFR, defined as the number of children that women would bear across their lifetime if their rate of childbearing at each age matches today’s rates) fell by more than half, from 4.84 to 2.23. Replacement level is generally estimated to be a TFR of 2.1. As of 2021, less than half (46.1 percent) of the countries and territories around the world had a TFR that exceeded replacement level. That figure is predicted to decline to 24 percent by 2050 and 2.9 percent by 2100, with the global TFR falling to 1.83 and 1.59, respectively. Additional fertility statistics can be found here.

As a result of declining fertility rates, more and more countries will find themselves facing an inverted population pyramid, with increasing numbers of older people and decreasing numbers of people of working age. The growing elderly population will place increasing demands on health care services and social welfare programs (e.g., social security, government-subsidized health insurance, etc.), with fewer workers to provide those health-care services and pay taxes to keep the social-welfare programs solvent. Labor shortages may also lead to slower growth, or even decline, in a country’s GDP if productivity per worker does not increase at a rate that offsets the decrease in the working-age population. 

Various solutions to the fertility crisis have been proposed; most commonly, those proposed solutions focus on 1) the implementation of government policies aimed at increasing the fertility rate and/or 2) the adoption of a liberal immigration policy that will increase the size of a country’s working-age population (and also possibly increase a country’s overall TFR via the immigration of people from countries/cultures with a higher TFR). 

Let’s start with immigration. As Jason Richwine notes, immigration by itself cannot solve the fertility crisis. In the case of the United States, for example, native-born Americans had a TFR of 1.73 in 2023. If we adjust that calculation to include the immigrant TFR of 2.19, overall TFR for the U.S. rises only marginally, to 1.8, which still falls significantly short of the replacement level TFR of 2.1. Also, although immigration can increase the size of the working-age population in the country receiving those immigrants, such immigration obviously decreases the working-age population of the country from which those people are emigrating, thereby raising the possibility that the problem of a shrinking working-age population is merely shifted from one country to another (typically, from a richer country to a poorer country). 

Government policies aimed at increasing TFR have included direct cash transfers from the government to parents, tax incentives for bearing and raising children, government subsidies of childcare costs, extended parental leave, expansion of rights to be reemployed after leaving the workforce to care for children, and so on. Although such pro-natal policies are often welcome, empirical evidence indicates that these policies tend to increase a country’s TFR by no more than 0.2 live births per female—once again, not enough to raise most countries’ TFR back to replacement level. 

Why aren’t government policies aimed at increasing the fertility rate more effective? The best explanation seems to be that many people these days simply don’t want children at all (or only want one or two children at most), making it far less likely that financial incentives from the government to encourage childbearing will be large enough to persuade very many of these people to feel differently. In a 2023 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, 47 percent of childless adults between the ages of 18 and 49 indicated that it is unlikely that they will ever have children, which represents a significant increase over the 37 percent who had said this in a similar poll conducted only five years prior. 

In 2024, Pew surveyed U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 49 who do not have children and who say they are unlikely ever to have children. Survey participants were asked to respond to various possible reasons why they were unlikely to have children, with response options including “major reason,” “minor reason,” and “not a reason.” The most commonly endorsed “major reason” for not ever having children was that “They just don’t want to,” which was endorsed by 57 percent of participants. The next most commonly endorsed major reason was that “They want to focus on other things” (44 percent), followed by “Concerns about the state of the world” (38 percent), and only then by “Can’t afford to raise a child (36 percent). Twenty percent indicated that “They don’t really like children” as a major reason for their decision. 

If government subsidies and liberal immigration policies will not solve the fertility crisis, what will? Louise Perry has argued here and here that the fertility problem will eventually fix itself, but not before causing extensive changes in the socioeconomic structures of many of the richer nations. She predicts that welfare systems in those nations will “shrink and die” over time as aging populations increasingly outstrip the ability of working-age populations to support those welfare systems. She also contends that technological innovation has slowed in recent decades and will continue to slow in the future, as a declining global birth rate results in fewer of the people who tend to generate the most significant technological innovations (i.e., men ranging from their twenties through their early forties). 
“In the end,” Perry says, 

we will have to revert to the system that prevailed for all of human history, up until a century ago. The elderly will be cared for privately, mostly within the extended family, and mostly by women. Healthcare for the old will be mostly palliative, and the only safety net for the poor and lonely will be provided by charities. Lifespans will shorten. …[I]t is hyper-fertile groups like the Amish [and, one might add, other “hyper-fertile” groups, such as traditional Catholics, Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews, etc.] who will define the future of humanity. The world they create will look quite different from our own, but I suspect that it will look neither post-apocalyptic nor techno-utopian. Rather, it will probably look much the way human societies have always looked: static, parochial, low-tech, clannish, religious, and dependent on sunlight and muscle. 

Perry explains the extent to which low fertility rates could produce such dramatic socioeconomic changes by emphasizing the fact that the effects of low fertility on total population advance in a geometric progression. As fewer children are born, fewer potential parents are then available to give birth to children in the future, and so on, eventually causing a precipitous decline in a country’s population. She illustrates this phenomenon by using South Korea, the country with the lowest TFR in the world (a staggeringly low 0.7), as an example. 

Based on South Korea’s current TFR, the number of babies born in that country in 2100 is likely to be 93 to 98 percent lower than the number of babies born in that country in 2024. Perry notes that “No disease or invading army has ever managed to destroy a country so thoroughly, and the word that springs to my mind, when contemplating such an event, is ‘biblical.’” This “biblical” characterization, when considered in the context of her overarching thesis that the fertility crisis will cause modernity to self-destruct as “modern people” choose not to reproduce themselves at anywhere near replacement level, leads Perry to engage in a bit of theological speculation: “Is it possible that there is indeed a God, and that he does not want us to be modern?”

Well, first of all, there is indeed a God. And as to the second part of the question: God may or may not want us to be “modern,” depending on how one defines that term (and, honestly, some aspects of a return to a more traditional society can sound downright appealing), but God certainly wants us to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28). Failing to do God’s will in this regard for the last several decades is what produced the fertility crisis in the first place. Obviously, we human beings got ourselves into this situation by choosing to significantly restrict our fertility via artificial contraception, voluntary sterilization, elective abortion, and so on. 

As Bishop Robert Barron has observed, the precipitous decline in global fertility is not just an economic or a social crisis; ultimately, it is a spiritual crisis. Therefore, the primary solution to this crisis must be a spiritual one as well. Bishop Barron points to a variety of spiritual issues that have contributed to declining birth rates, including a coarsening of our attitudes toward the value of human life and the value of transmitting human life, an increasing tendency to choose the gratification of one’s own desires over the demands (and rewards!) of self-sacrificial love, and a loss of hope in the future, which, in turn, tends to stem from a loss of belief in God. 

Bishop Barron’s solution to the global fertility crisis is for the Catholic Church and all of its members to keep proclaiming the Gospel of life, and to do so with renewed fervor. He is, of course, absolutely right about that. And Sr. Renée Mirkes, who directs the Center for NaProEthics at the Saint Paul VI Institute, has given us several concrete suggestions for promoting the Gospel of life in today’s culture. 

In the meantime, I must admit that I rather like the sound of Louise Perry’s prediction that “hyper-fertile groups”—such as traditional Catholics—“will define the future of humanity.”