When Sarah and Ben Brewington got married, they expected the next step in life would be to have children. It just seemed the natural thing to do. Instead, they kept putting off their first child, focusing on their careers, enjoying trips and spending time with friends.
The Brewingtons, both 35 years old, say they understand they are part of a broader trend. Far more people in the US and around the world are choosing to have significantly fewer children or no children at all.
“I think it probably should be a concern for the government, the drop in the birth rate,” Sarah Brewington told NPR. “There will come a time when everyone is retiring and there won’t be a workforce.”
Many researchers believe this accelerated global shift is driven largely by a positive reality. Young couples, and women in particular, have far more freedom and economic independence. They are weighing their options and seem to be making very different choices about the role of children in their lives.
This shift in decision-making and behavior appears to be accelerating. New United Nations research found that the average number of children born per woman worldwide has hit the lowest point ever recorded. In every country and culture, women are having less than half the number of children they had in the 1960s.
“Especially in high-income countries, the birth rate has plummeted in a very rapid and sustained way,” Kearney said. “We are really facing the issue of depopulation.”
Many women are choosing to have fewer children – or no children at all
In the US, this shift is driven in part by a growing number of women who decide against motherhood. According to Kearney, half of American women now reach age 30 without having at least one child. That represents a dramatic increase from two decades ago, when only about one-third of American women were childless at that age. Many families are also choosing to have significantly fewer children.
“I remember at one point I thought: ‘I definitely want three kids.’ I thought: ‘It will be great.’ It was what my mom had. It was what I wanted to have,” Lusely Martinez, 35, told NPR.
A relatively simple way to track the scale of this change in human behavior is what’s known as the “total fertility rate.” It’s a measure that predicts how many children a woman will have over her lifetime.
To maintain a stable population – no growth, no decline – a woman needs to have about 2.1 children on average. In the US, the total fertility rate began falling below that 2.1 threshold decades ago, and after 2007, fertility rates plunged rapidly to a record low of about 1.6.
“I don’t have a number in mind at which, if we hit it, I’ll start to freak out,” said Kearney, an economist at the University of Notre Dame. “But I already look around and see so many young people meeting without children, and I worry that we’re doing something wrong as a society.”
The Population Bomb That Fizzled
The world’s rapid turn toward declining birth rates and older, smaller populations may seem dizzying, especially after decades of warnings about the environmental damage and quality-of-life impacts of growing populations.
In the 1960s and 1970s, scientist Paul Ehrlich popularized the idea that Earth was threatened by what he described as a population bomb.
“No intelligent and patriotic American family should have more than two children, and preferably only one,” Ehrlich said in a 1970 interview with WOI-TV, warning that crowded US cities faced a “fatal disease – called overpopulation.”
“The decline in teen birth rates has been, I’d say, one of the major success stories in global population health over the last three decades,” said Vladimíra Kantorová, the UN’s chief population scientist.
But as more women and couples delay parenthood, have fewer babies or no children at all, a growing number of nations around the world – more than 1 in 10 countries – have plunged into birth rates so low that many scientists are concerned.
“Relatively speaking, there are simply no children being born in South Korea,” said economist Phillip Levine of Wellesley College. According to UN data, by mid-century, 40% of South Korea’s population is expected to be 65 or older.
In part because people are living much longer, the global population is expected to continue growing for decades before these trends take hold, triggering a decline by the end of this century.
But many countries, including China, Italy, Japan, Russia and South Korea, have already seen their populations begin to shrink. China alone is projected to lose more than 780 million people, more than half its population, by 2100.
How Will the United States Navigate Much Lower Fertility?
So far, the US population has remained relatively stable despite record-low fertility, but new data from the US Census Bureau show the nation’s fabric is already changing. People aged 65 and older now outnumber children in 11 states. That has risen sharply from just three states five years ago.
A 2023 study from the Brookings Institution, meanwhile, found that without significant numbers of immigrants arriving in the US in the future, the country’s population would plummet by more than 100 million people this century.
“We would lose about a third of our population between now and 2100 if there were no immigration to the United States,” said the study’s author, William Frey.
“What will our workforce be going forward? What will our productivity be going forward?” Frey said. “We’ll have lots of jobs, and there will be no one to fill them. I think there will be a lot of pressure to increase immigration to the US.”
Lyman Stone, who leads the Pronatalist Initiative at the conservative Institute for Family Studies, says the US needs to do more to help families prioritize children, in part by making parenthood more affordable. He supports child tax credits and policies that allow parents to work from home.
Stone believes many young people would like to have more children but are struggling to achieve the milestones they consider necessary to start having kids.
Emma Waters of the conservative Heritage Foundation agrees it’s time for a national conversation about birth rates and the choices families are making. “We’ll have more adults than children to replace them, and that will strongly impact things like our military readiness, GDP and economic growth in the US.”
Kantorová, Levine, Kearney and others said these “crisis” narratives about population decline are overblown and misleading. In most countries, demographic changes will unfold over decades. Some nations, including France, have managed to stabilize declining fertility, though at relatively low levels.
Some progressives – as well as many population experts – also see conservative pronatalist policies, including opposition to reproductive rights and calls for a return to “traditional” family structures, as a threat to women.
“Some of these measures and policies can be deeply harmful, especially those related to health and sexual and reproductive choices and women’s empowerment – and that’s concerning,” said Kantorová of the UN.
But many of these same experts agree that declining birth rates are a real and urgent problem that must be addressed by thinkers and policymakers across the political spectrum.
While scientists and politicians grapple with the shrinking number of children, many of the couples and women interviewed by NPR said this issue is deeply personal, private and often difficult.
Annie Platt, 31, who lives in South Carolina, said she and her husband, Ryan Holley, 37, struggled with a choice that would redefine the rest of their lives.
“We’ve always been on the fence, like: ‘Oh, it would be nice to have kids, and those would be their names,’” Platt said. “But in recent years, it’s been leaning more toward no.”
Platt and other women said they see little role for the government in trying to encourage or incentivize their choices about parenthood.
“I find that disgusting,” Platt told NPR. “I get really uncomfortable, I think, when I hear people like JD Vance, Elon Musk, talking about their family values and, like, encouraging having kids.”
Platt added that she distrusts the motivations of right-wing political leaders. “I think they just want to use women to have babies, and maybe that also distracts mothers, or future mothers, from pursuing other things in life, maybe other career goals,” Platt said.
Sarah Brewington had similar feelings: “It seems unethical to tell people to go through an exhausting process because you want one more baby in the world.”
“It comes down to trusting individuals to make these decisions,” said Ben Brewington.
Lusely Martinez, who told NPR that she and her husband decided to have just one child, said she doesn’t believe the US will adopt the changes needed – from affordable housing and health care to child care and paid family leave – that families need to make their lives easier.
“My biggest concern is: what’s the big focus on us having kids when you’re not necessarily focused on what the rest of a person’s life is like?” Martinez said.
Activists and scientists across the political spectrum, including those who see population decline as a serious concern, agree it will be difficult and costly to create a culture and environment in which Americans go back to having significantly more children.
“Without a very dedicated response, I absolutely think it’s not only possible but likely that fertility rates will continue to fall,” Kearney said. “I’m a bit more worried about where we are than some other people, who are waiting to hit, say, a point of no return.”
Source: npr.org by Brian Mann & Sarah McCammon