Not long ago, Sweden was the poster child for having children. Delegations from other nations that were struggling to sustain their birth rates flocked to Stockholm to pick the brains of local demographers and family policy experts.
As recently as 2010, Sweden’s total fertility rate (the estimated number of children a woman has in childbearing years) stood at 1.98, very close to the replacement rate of 2.1. But then fertility began tumbling year on year, now at a current low of 1.45.
Fertility has been declining in this region since 2010, says Sunnee Billingsley, a social demographer and a professor of sociology at Stockholm University. “No one knows why, but it’s widespread in all the Nordic countries, which had relatively high fertility in the last decade. So it’s a bit of a surprising situation here.”
If there is a silver lining for the Nordics in all this, it’s that they are far from alone.
Earlier this year, The Lancet, the world’s premier medical journal, predicted that the global total fertility rate will drop from 2.2 in 2021 to 1.8 in 2050 and 1.6 in 2100.
Demographers are now projecting that nearly every country outside of sub-Saharan Africa will soon be failing to replace their people. This will, in turn, leave them struggling with an inverted pyramid of care as fewer working people will pay into public programs that support aging populations who are living longer.
The Economist last year warned that human civilization faces a “dire demographic trajectory” with “profound economic consequences,” noting ominously that “the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death.”
Another Economist report published in May of this year lays out the stakes: “Sooner or later, therefore, every big economy will collide with a demographic wall. The bill from pensions and hospitals will pile on fiscal pressure. Sapped of workers and ideas, economic growth could collapse while public debt balloons. Just how catastrophic the situation becomes depends on whether policymakers … are willing to inflict pain on populations now in order to save future generations from more later on.”
Clearly, demographers and policymakers now face some tough questions. What is happening to the world’s birth rates? How far and how fast will this go? Should we panic? And what can be done?
The first step toward a solution is to simply start telling the truth. “There has been a willful denial of the facts.”
This isn’t the future we were warned about.
“Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” and “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate,” wrote Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 blockbuster book, “The Population Bomb.”
Ehrlich’s predicted dystopian future — deadly famine, depleted resources and debilitating pollution — stemmed from an out-of-control birth rate and helped spark an enduring preoccupation with population control in the early 1970s that spread over much of the world.
China jumped in with its notorious one-child policy, fixed in law from 1980 until 2015. Less remembered is that India launched a massive sterilization program. In 1976 alone, 6.2 million Indian men were forcibly sterilized.
Both China and India now have cause to regret their coercive reaction.
India’s fertility rate, now already below replacement level, is on a path to drop drastically further. The Lancet study predicts India will hit 1.0 total fertility by 2100 — more than 50 percent below replacement levels.
China is in an even tougher squeeze. Two years ago, its population fell for the first time since 1961 — which happened to be the last year of a disastrous famine. China’s population fell again in 2023, with its fertility rate dipping to new historic lows of around 1.23.
Elsewhere in the developed world, coercion to force fertility down has proven unnecessary. We now know that as health, wealth and education levels rise, fertility rates will fall of their own accord. The real question is whether it will ever stop.
“There seemed to be this idea that fertility was going to fall in the same way that mortality fell, and then we’re gonna hit this equilibrium,” says Ashley Larsen Gibby, a social demographer at Brigham Young University. But she says experts were surprised in the 1980s when fertility continued to fall, well past that elusive equilibrium point.
Something was happening that had nothing to do with falling infant mortality. A new explanation was needed to understand the ongoing decline.
This led to the theory of a second demographic transition, as formulated by Belgian demographer Ron Lesthaeghe, which Gibby describes as eroded barriers and new pathways that allowed for new ways of being human, and these new possibilities all competed with childbearing for time and space and money. Childbearing was now just one of many ways one could seek fulfillment in one’s 20s or 30s.
Children themselves now took on a very different meaning. “So instead of having children who could help you economically,” Gibby says, “we’re having children in a way where it’s going to be huge investments on your part that you probably won’t get back.”
Demographers project that nearly every country outside of sub-Saharan Africa will soon be failing to replace their people. This means fewer working people will pay into public programs that support aging populations.
Faced with this array of choices and priorities, women who did want children began to put off that fork in the road until much later in their lives, says Éva Beaujouan, a demographer at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna.
She studies the gap between women who desire to have a child and those who actually do. She spends a lot of time thinking about what precisely it means to want to have a child, and what variables would deter or encourage someone.
On the deterrent side, both Gibby and Beaujouan paint a picture in which perfect parenting is the natural flip side of an abundance of choices, with both driving toward postponement. There’s been a shift in the perceived prerequisites that people would need to achieve before they could have children, Beaujouan explains.
For those who are likely to only have one or two children, there seems to be pressure to mold the perfect child as an expression of oneself, as a kind of trophy child.
“In many countries,” she says, “there is an impression that you really need to be the perfect mother, the perfect father, and that then you need to have many, many things before you can have a child. And so you just wait and you wait and you wait and you wait. And then one day it’s too late.”
So what is to be done?
If Sweden still has anything left to teach us, it may be that solutions are elusive and cross-national comparisons are difficult.
The fertility pilgrims still come to Stockholm University, says Billingsley. But these days, the questions are more skeptical, the answers less glib. There is less swagger in Sweden.
Yet the social demographers soldier onward. Billingsley’s research focuses on subtle variations in child and family policy, trying to make useful cross-national comparisons out of a mishmash of usually incommensurate data.
She notes, for starters, that even though the Nordic states are generally seen as a homogenous bloc on family policy, there are great differences among them. Sweden prioritizes “reattaching” new parents back to the workforce after the first year, while Finland provides parental income replacement for even longer periods.
One concern with the Finnish approach is that potential mothers may balk at putting their skills on hold so long that their reentry to the workplace is stifled. “There’s a lot of research going on as to how this works later for her and how it affects her career,” she says, adding that her research is not focused on what prospective mothers ought to prefer, but what they in fact do prefer, and what policies might smooth or hinder the choice to become a parent.
But even if policy details were identical, Billingsley adds, cultural variables are hard to account for. In the early 2000s, both South Korea and Germany borrowed Swedish pro-natal policies. South Korea saw no benefit in birth rates. But Germany’s fertility rates rebounded, seemingly confirming the Swedish model that was now struggling at home. Why would a borrowed policy that took flight in Germany suddenly crash in its homeland?
One answer is that culture itself is fluid, notes Beaujouan. Sudden shifts in values and behavior driven by fears, uncertainties, new opportunities or even technology could silently, but seismically, shift the foundation of seemingly successful policy regimes or the cultures in which they lie.
“There is an impression that you really need to be the perfect mother, the perfect father, and that then you need to have many, many things before you can have a child. And so you just wait and you wait and you wait and you wait. And then one day it’s too late.”
There is some evidence of such shifts in the United States, and in some surprising places. Consider Utah. In 2008, the Beehive State’s total fertility rate of 2.6 led the nation, with the next closest state standing at 2.5. But by 2022, Utah had dropped to 1.85, fourth in the nation. In roughly half of one generation, Utah’s fertility fell nearly 29 percent, a sharper decline than all but two other American states.
There are multiple explanations for Utah’s shift. A strong economy during that period was accompanied by a spike in Utah’s formerly modest cost of living. Housing prices skyrocketed, likely sparking uncertainty for prospective parents entering the job market.
But there may be more involved, and Gibby at BYU shared some insight into other factors.
Brigham Young University is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has always put a high priority on family formation.
Yet Gibby told me that she has had repeated conversations with students who have felt pressure from parents, and even grandparents, to defer marriage and instead pursue more education and economic security.
Gibby, who herself graduated from BYU 10 years ago, describes a marked difference in the cultural tone in her day compared to the present. “When I was an undergrad, I felt a lot of pushback of me wanting to have a career,” she says. “And my students are experiencing the opposite, where if they want to stay home, they’re feeling a huge pushback against that.”
She cites multiple stories of students whose grandparents offered to pay for study abroad, in hopes of distancing them from a serious boyfriend. In other cases, parents told them that they would stop paying tuition if they got married.
BYU family life professor Dean Busby, who teaches classes on marriage and sexuality, confirms Gibby’s observations. There are multiple vectors pushing students to go slow on marriage and children, Busby notes, and education and economics do play a major role. But he says there has also clearly been a marked shift in the culture surrounding these students. This shift seems to reverberate across the world, cutting across national and subculture boundaries.
All the demographers I spoke with pointed back in some form to this generalized fear of the future — economic, geopolitical, environmental — which seems to have heightened markedly in the last generation. They pointed to intensive parenting expectations as an intimidating factor.
In Stockholm, Billingsley is no stranger to the uncertainty thesis. Swedish policy has always sought to minimize economic barriers to parenthood. But it is increasingly clear that something else is in play.
In Vienna, Beaujouan knows that many of those she studies would prefer to have at least one child. But there, again, she finds that pervasive uncertainty.
“I think that the uncertainty is much, much stronger today than it was in my generation,” she says. “They really think that they don’t know where the future will be. And for them, maybe it’s not even something they really want to think about, whether they want to have children now or not.”
Beaujouan, who is 46, says that studying such uncertainties is difficult. Demographers deal in numbers, data, probabilities. This, whatever it is, is amorphous. “It may be something that’s really just in the air,” she says. “And so they probably don’t relate it to their behavior because … they don’t perceive it enough to manage to grab it.”
The real question now is whether there are any answers at all.
The recent Lancet study duly modeled different fertility scenarios that give a predicted boost to countries that adopt “pro-natalist” policies. And yet, the authors acknowledge that those policies don’t derive from any evidence of efficacy. There is no such evidence, they say.
The authors tepidly conclude that “implementing pro-natal policies that support parents and children might provide a small boost to fertility rates.”
Darrell Bricker, a political scientist and chief executive officer of the opinion research firm Ipsos Public Affairs, isn’t so hopeful. “The truth is (those policies) don’t work anywhere,” he tells me, “because that’s not the reason people don’t want to have kids. The main reason is they just don’t want to have kids.”
In 2019, Bricker and John Ibbitson published “Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline,” where they predicted that the world’s human population would crest below 9 billion, and then begin falling sharply as soon as 2060 or 2050.
“But now it’s probably looking more like in the 2040s,” he says. “This is just over the horizon. It’s not like a century away. It’s about to happen. I mean the entire global baby boom is going to be 65 in 2030.”
The first step toward a solution is to simply start telling the truth, Bricker says. “There has been a willful denial of the facts.”
This story appears in the July/August 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.