The Birth Dearth

Why fewer people are being born, and what happens when they aren't.

Atlanta, GA

July 7, 2025

Is there a pernicious plot to depopulate the planet?

I don’t know.

But among global “elites”, political opportunists, and weather wackos, there’s a general consensus that there are too many people. Yet while much of “the West” frets about an influx of foreigners, most countries are culling themselves.

Around the globe…behind the scenes in plain sight…people are pruning their progeny. In ways subtle and sly, overt and obvious, we’re consistently nudged to reduce reproduction.

The propaganda is thick. A drumbeat of popular culture and major media pounds home the high cost of kids and how tough they are to raise. But we rarely hear about the immense joy they bring, which usually lasts a lifetime… and lingers long after the challenges of their childhood slip from memory.

Why? Cui bono?

Phenomenon of Fruitlessness

Family (which is prioritized before government) and religion (which lies above it) are the two great obstacles to an all-encompassing State. For more than a century, ruling regimes have implemented policies that undermine both.

Contraception, abortion, no-fault divorce, same-sex “marriage”, and an alphabet soup of aggrieved deviants are among the relentless brigades suppressing births.

From central banks, diluted dollars diminish future-orientation. Flabby with the empty calories of fiat money, few in the West plan beyond next Wednesday. Insecurity rises as savings suffer and wealth erodes. Reduced purchasing power delays marriage and defers maternity, perhaps permanently.

Potential parents are urged to “wait till they’re ready”, as if that moment ever really arrives. There’s almost always some reason to postpone having kids. As often as not, the best time is “now”.

Additionally, under the warped influences of our narcissistic age, couples are discouraged from (or chastised for) wanting to bring children into this “rotten world”… as if we weren’t living in the easiest era to ever be alive.

Much of the phenomenon of fruitlessness derives from our high time-preference society. Family and faith, Church and children, are intrinsically long-term, low time-preference endeavors reaching beyond the realm of our earthly lives.

Multi-generational families were once required not only to help raise infants, but to care for elders. With the advent of state-run medical “insurance” and Ponzi “pension” schemes, children are perceived as less necessary to prospective parents who now expect to be supported by frayed nets until they die.

For decades, women have been subtly coaxed to have fewer kids. And many men are urged to avoid marriage as a pointless endeavor doomed to fail.

Artificial contraception…once broadly considered abhorrent…is now taken for granted, and actively encouraged. The pill, initially lauded as a capsule of “liberation”, has become the suicide tablet of a decadent West.

Abortion, universally reviled till late last century, is widely accepted as a licit way to “terminate a pregnancy.” Meanwhile, most countries that once comprised Christendom have legitimized relationships from which conception is impossible.

Unplanned Childlessness

Reduced fertility doesn’t derive primarily from more people wanting smaller families. It comes mostly from fewer women having kids. But it’s not that they don’t want children. They just don’t want them yet.

The percentage of “childless by choice” women is rising. Almost half of Millennial women will exit their fertile years without giving birth. But regret often sneaks up on them.

How?

Materialistically, many of them find it hard to justify having kids. Education is among the strongest correlates with reduced fertility. Statistically, going to college pushes women below replacement.

Women with degrees tend to participate in the two-income system, especially if they’ve racked up debt. Working women (and the childcare workers they require) also benefit the State by increasing the number of taxpayers.

Female careers consume time and displace other interests. Which may be fine. But many women won’t realize what they’ve lost till it’s gone. Yet the proportion of them who (say they) don’t want kids… or “want children, but not now”… continues to rise.

For various reasons they don’t anticipate, many will regret waiting. According to some demographers, most childless women didn’t plan (or want) to be without kids.

The most common cause of unplanned childlessness is lack of a “suitable” husband. Women tend to want guys who make more money and are better educated than they are. But such men are harder to find as female incomes rise.

Although it’s happening later in that decade, their twenties is still when most women get married and have kids. But that’s also the time they launch their careers. Even into their mid-30s, many ambitious women still want to wait five years to start a family.

This is possible. But often unrealistic. Socially and physiologically, it’s usually too late. Meeting the right man takes time (especially as women get older). Getting to know him takes longer. And female fertility declines with age. If a woman is childless at 30, it’s as likely as not she always will be.

Empty Train

Most people have no idea how big, broad, or consequential the implications of sub-replacement birth rates are. Why would they? For decades, they’ve been convinced fewer kids are a viable “solution” to some purported “problem”.

But even among those who acknowledge the calamity of an approaching cliff, applying the brakes can seem pointless. There’s little anyone can do about it, at least for the foreseeable future.

Even if a baby boom began tomorrow, we can’t make more five year-olds appear today, or create more thirty year-olds a quarter century from now. An empty train is steaming down the track, with brakes out and wheels greased. A deficit is coming whatever we do.

And it almost doesn’t matter where we look.

Seventy percent of the world’s population lives in a country with declining replacement population. Africa is the only continent where it’s increasing, and most of that is south of the Sahara:

Source: World Bank (World Population Review)

The total fertility rate (TFR) tells a more ominous tale. The TFR assumes the total number of babies born this year will be the same every year from now thru the rest of each woman’s life. It then projects how many children each woman will have.

Aside from Sub-Saharan Africa, parts of the Middle East, some of central Asia, and swaths of India, the world is below the 2.1 TFR required to replace population. Even in Latin America…the ostensible reservoir for an evaporating US…the tide is going out.

In many places, metrics are especially foreboding.

The “birth-gap” compares the number of fifty year-olds to the number of newborns, who in a couple decades could (presumably) care for their elders.

In Japan that ratio is 2:1. Italy there are 56% fewer newborns than fifty year-olds. In South Korea, where sixty percent of people are over forty, it’s 70%. The TFR in Korea is under 0.8, implying only six great-grandchildren for every 100 current Koreans.

This portends a reduction of Koreans comparable to the Black Death in Europe or akin to the decimation of American Indians from imported disease. Without immigration, Italy’s population will halve by the end of the century. The song is the same throughout most of Europe, and the overture is sounding in the United States.

But this decline doesn’t merely imply similar demographics with fewer people. Countries will be much older, more infirm, and less able to provide necessary support to those who need it.

Receding Tsunami

The Rising Sun sheds some light. For three decades, Japanese growth has stagnated, and debt soared. The Nikkei still hasn’t eclipsed its bubble peak in 1989.

The Nipponese archipelago has 8.5 million abandoned homes. As taxes rise, working hours go up…and wages fall. And a declining population has difficulty sustaining a surplus of seniors.

And now this receding tsunami is crossing the Pacific.

In 2040 the United States will have more nursing homes than day cares. By 2080, more Americans will die than be born. In the US, about half of all women over thirty will be single and childless at the end of this decade.

The decline is about twenty years behind the collapse in Korea. If US fertility maintains the rate from the last decade, there will be about four great grandchildren for every hundred Americans alive today.

Leaving aside cultural implications (even assuming the economic ones made sense), importing people isn’t a solution. To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, the problem with relying on immigration to solve the problem is you eventually run out of other people’s people.

Immigrants are also reproducing below replacement. As the tide recedes on both sides of the border, new arrivals can’t refill the pond.

Even if they could, by backfilling the decline with an inundation of outsiders, native cultures will soon disappear. Without Italians, Italy won’t be Italy. Sweden sans Swedes isn’t Sweden. There’s no France without the French. And absent Americans, the United States go away.

An Open Door

In most of these places, this is becoming obvious already. It’s almost as if cultural destruction is the true intent. By opening the gates, denigrating traditions, eradicating history, and discouraging fertility, it’s like Western countries are hiring foreign mercenaries to conquer themselves. Because, in many cases, they are.

To many of our overlords, that’s OK. Many of them admit they want billions of people to disappear. And I’m sure they do, even if they never volunteer to go first. After all, they don’t like the hoi polloi trekking the Tetons, meandering Machu Picchu, or skiing in Gstaad.

But after half a century of anti-human propaganda, they’re now pushing on an open door. Not that they didn’t do all they could to lift the latch.

Our anointed busybodies aren’t shy about implying “the planet” is over-burdened with people. Or, rather, with other people. When the world-improvers wring their hands over too many mouths, it’s never their own faces over which they propose to press the pillow.

What they’re essentially saying, as PJ O’Rourke once put it, is there’s just the right amount of themselves…but way too much of everyone else.

Existential Crisis

To the extent US growth continues, it’s in the heartland. Coastal populations are dwindling. Crime, expenses, and wackiness are pushing people out of once appealing places like San Francisco, New York, and Chicago.

The average American aged 50 has only about $300K saved for retirement. But the median nest-egg is under $120K. Even at age 70, those figures are just $600K and $200K. Over a couple decades, this goes nowhere. And if (de)population trends continue, it’ll get there fast.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1cpc6hh/americas_retirement_saving_by_age/

About half of net household wealth is in real estate, and most of that is on leverage. What happens when most homes become depreciating assets, as is now happening in many places?

Currently, two US workers support one American elder. That will reverse by the end of this century. When it does, every couple will support four seniors. On this trajectory, either young people will be enserfed, or old ones will eat kibble.

Unlike hyped-up scams exploiting normal climate fluctuations, this is an existential crisis. It implies population declines more severe than during the devastation of Italy after the fall of Rome.

A millennium later, Italy recovered. But it was no longer Rome. Will America recover? Will Europe? When? And if they do, what will they be?

JD