Why Are People Cheering Plummeting Birth Rates?

F or most of human history, people could agree that children were a blessing. Religion reinforced the idea, borne out by experience. In the past, shorter life expectancies, higher rates of childhood mortality, brutal living conditions, and the absence of social-welfare programs made it harder to take family for granted.

Yet for as long as this pro-natalist culture has existed, so too have political forces seeking to undermine it. The overpopulation anxiety is hardly new. Nevertheless, a new form of anti-natalist thinking is creeping into the minds of Western policy-makers. As birth rates plummet across the developed world, some are cheering on this development as positive, even necessary.

The justification for their misanthropy is climate alarmism. Sarah Harper, founder and director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and a former government adviser, recently told the Telegraph that falling birth rates in the West were “good for general overall consumption that we have at the moment and our planet.” The population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity, writing in the Scientific American, argued that “we should all be celebrating population decline,” since human activity has “driven wildlife from their homes and destroyed irreplaceable ecosystems.”

Framed this way, this kind of thinking is little more than elitist contempt for the masses. After all, don’t 1 percent of the world’s wealthiest humans have nearly double the carbon footprint of the poorest 50 percent? As for where this supposed overpopulation is happening, it’s mainly African countries that have the highest birth rates. Betsy Hartman, author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control, quoted in the Washington Post, says “in this ideology of ‘too many people’ it’s always certain people who are ‘too many.’” Indeed.

Besides, even if you were to grant the premise that overpopulation is causing climate crises, celebrating demographic decline overlooks serious economic and social problems that come with a shrinking population, which cause crises of their own. America and Europe, along with most of the developed world, now have fertility rates below the replacement level. So too do China and India.

Fewer young people means less innovation, a smaller labor force, a more vulnerable military, as well as less tax revenue to support pensions and health-care costs. This results in greater pressure on the existing population. Earlier this year in France, protests ensued after the retirement age was raised from 62 to 64 years old. Think of the public’s reaction when there’s cause to push it to 70, or even higher. That’s where we are headed.

“Many economists believe that a smaller working population will push down interest rates in real terms (meaning, after accounting for inflation), because there will be fewer investment opportunities and a large stock of savings accumulated by those in or near retirement,” the Economist warns.

One of the lessons we should have learned from Covid is that life is too short and too important to be spent on mitigating disaster. The connections we share with one another as families, friends, and wider communities are what make life worth living. Civilizational survival and the passing of our cultural inheritance depends on a healthy birth rate. The absence of big families can be felt in smaller, everyday ways, too.

A large, thriving community lends support and security to its members. When a family brings home a new baby or suffers a disruptive event, other families in the community support it by, for example, organizing a “meal train” and taking turns to bring round meals for the family. Child-care arrangements emerge between families. Children find natural playmates in their siblings, cousins, and family friends. Old people are properly looked after.

I recently visited the American cemetery in Normandy, the resting place of thousands of American soldiers killed in action during the Second World War. It felt fitting that, a few hundred yards away, on the same beaches where some of those men gave their lives, there were children and families playing freely in the sun.

Make no mistake, our ancestors had crises of their own — plagues, famines, world wars. They got through not by attacking our humanity but by treasuring it as the motivation to persevere. On this, they were wiser. There is a great deal in life that’s beyond our control. The best we can do is keep the flame of our humanity alive and pass the baton to the next generation.