A tweet that recently went viral asked one simple question: “What’s your pet theory about the causes of birth rate decline?”
The answers that came back varied wildly.
“People everywhere have higher expectations for everything: their spouse, quality of life for kids, etc. it can really all be traced back to that.”
“Birth control + cost of living.”
“People are too stressed, overworked, and more focused on careers and personal goals.”
And, hilariously: “Men are mean and everything is too expensive.”
The immutable fact that people are having fewer babies is a subject that’s been steadily gaining attention. In the UK, the birth rate has been noticeably on the wane since 2010, with the average birth rate in England and Wales sinking to 1.49 children per woman in 2022 – the lowest rate on record. It’s well below the so-called “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman, the number of babies needed in developed countries to maintain a steady population.
But it’s not an issue peculiar to the UK; birth rates are falling the world over, other than in Sub-Saharan Africa. Two-thirds of the world’s countries now have childbirth rates below the replacement rate. The issue is particularly pronounced in Southeast Asian countries: Taiwan, China, Thailand and Japan are all towards the bottom of the fertility table.
There are two broad trends at work here, according to Prof Sarah Harper CBE, a professor of gerontology at the University of Oxford. The first is an extension of something that started in Europe 250 years ago: “When you improve women’s education and healthcare, it reduces the number of children she’ll have. That’s a very good thing – more women being healthy, educated and having access to family planning.”
The other trend has happened more dramatically over the last 30 years, and is particularly notable in Asia and Latin America. This second fall in fertility, where we’re seeing birth rates below 1.5 children, “seems to be driven by different dynamics”, says Prof Harper. “Responses from young women are the same in Southeast Asia as in Europe: yes, women are saying there are economic issues, insecure jobs or challenges with affordable housing. But they’re also saying, ‘I’m educated and I understand that if I have a child that will change my lifestyle. I want to consider when I have a child’.” They might decide to stay child-free, to delay having their first child, or to only have one.
South Korea, whose rate was already the world’s lowest, plunged again last year to a record nadir of 0.72. On the one hand, the country’s twenty and thirty-somethings seem more interested in spending what disposable income they have on fashion, restaurants and travel: “They are status hunting. Their high spending habits show young people are working on their own emblems of success online rather than focusing on the impossible goals of settling down and have children,” Jung Jae-hoon, a sociology professor at Seoul Women’s University, told Reuters.
On the other, a growing gap between the genders has prompted a fringe movement called 4B, in which women swear off heterosexual dating, sex, marriage and childbirth in response to the country’s deep-rooted misogyny. South Korea’s incidence of intimate-partner violence was found to be 41.5 per cent in a 2016 survey, compared to a global average of 30 per cent, and its gender pay gap is the largest in the developed world.
These circumstances are clearly very particular to South Korea, but the reality they speak to perhaps resonates further afield. It’s a world in which a kind of Peter Pan syndrome sets in and adults appease themselves with smaller luxuries as they feel powerless to afford life’s big milestones like houses, weddings and kids; one in which heterosexual, cis-gender men and women feel increasingly divided when it comes to ideology and emotional maturity.
When a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Daniel Cox, surveyed more than 5,000 people in the US about dating and relationships, nearly half of college-educated women said they were single because they struggled to find someone who met their expectations. Cox said his interviews with male participants were “dispiriting”; he found that the men were “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available”.
Yale anthropologist Marcia Inhorn also concluded in her book Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs that one of the main reasons educated women freeze their eggs is because they’re unable to find a suitable male partner. She charted the “frustration, hurt and disappointment” of women who were “almost without exception … ‘trying hard’ to find a loving partner” but came up short.
I see echoes of this suitability discrepancy when I think of my own status as a child-free 37-year-old woman. Not having kids feels less of a choice, more of an inevitability resulting from the dearth of potential partners prepared to put down roots and get serious about the responsibilities that come with a relationship. And, while there’s much I’d compromise on, I know I would only want children under a very specific set of circumstances: with a committed partner who I was certain would step up and share the load, 50/50, when it came to parenthood.
“Women are becoming more vocal about what they need and that it has to be egalitarian, it has to be equal,” agrees Prof Pragya Agarwal, author of (M)otherhood: On the choices of being a woman. “That it’s not just the woman’s responsibility to look after the children or to do certain things at home. There’s a wider conversation happening around emotional and mental labour that women have to perform. Many people who have held a higher position in the hierarchy, like men, haven’t acknowledged this notion that there was previously inequality and that they now need to step up. That is creating challenges in heterosexual relationships, where there is a gap between women’s and men’s expectations.”
What this means in practice is that, despite the fact that more women are actively opting out of having kids than in previous decades (and facing less stigma for doing so), some aren’t having them due to circumstance rather than choice.
“It’s fantastic that women are able to say, ‘this is the kind of life I want, I’m not prepared to compromise on that’,” she adds. “But some women are being forced to make this choice even when they want children, because the alternative is that they just take on all the burden, or they become mothers and then don’t progress in their careers. They don’t have the support in the workplace or at home, and they’re exhausted all the time: financially, emotionally, physically.”
There is no level of policy intervention that is likely to encourage childbearing
