Where have all the babies gone?

A couple weeks ago, a story from NOTUS revealed that most Republicans in Congress “said they either didn’t realize birth rates are declining or said that they would need to read more into it.” They had better hurry up. A recent AEI report, “Rapid Fertility Decline is an Existential Crisis,” called the problem of impending demographic winter a “quadrillion-dollar problem” even if we looked narrowly at its impact on GDP—never mind the larger societal disruptions. But why is this happening? And can anything be done to stop it?

Last week, I was invited to Budapest for a gathering sponsored by the Danube Institute on “Family Formation and the Future” and dedicated to precisely these questions. At the opening reception, I found myself chatting with the ambassador from South Korea, a country that, with a birth rate approaching 0.7 per woman, has become the guinea pig that other nations are anxiously watching. He admitted that the country’s military is already struggling to fill its ranks, with the military-age population set to plunge by nearly half in coming years. Indeed, even if South Korea does not fall prey to a foreign invader in the coming decades, it is not hard to imagine a bleak future: its social security and healthcare systems certain to break down, its people to grow poorer, its cities to become wastelands.

Such a future seems plausible for most of the world, according to Louise Perry, one of the speakers and the author of the haunting recent essay, “Modernity’s Self-Destruct Button.” The data, she says, seem clear: Once societies pass a per capita income threshold around $10,000 per year, they begin to lose their will to reproduce themselves—children simply get in the way of too many material pleasures. Perhaps we are doomed to go into long-term decline until we become poor enough to rediscover the joys of childbearing. Catherine Pakaluk, an economist from The Catholic University of America, put a finer point on this theory: before modern technology, children were extremely useful to many human ends, but now, for any individual couple, they serve little purpose except emotional fulfillment. For many, that itch can be scratched by just one child—or perhaps even a dog instead.

Do we dare then accept that the desire to bear children is unnatural, and that humans will avoid it unless economic incentives drive them to it, as Pakaluk suggested? I do not think we need concede such a dire conclusion, even if she is right that very large families will be the exception, not the rule, in a technological age. For the reality is that when two people truly give themselves in committed love to one another, they have a natural desire to see this love bear fruit by bringing new life into the world. Brad Wilcox, a sociologist from the University of Virginia, pointed to consistent evidence that recent declines in birth rates are driven almost entirely by declines in marriage: married couples may not have as many children as in previous generations, but they are having enough to stave off demographic collapse, if only enough people were getting married.

So, then, why is marriage in decline? In part, Wilcox candidly asserted, because there are so few good men to marry these days. Far too many men lack the self-discipline to work hard and provide for wives, the strength and grit to protect them, and the focus to pay attention to them. Part of this is simply a feedback loop; society attacked masculinity and gave men an excuse to check out, so today’s young men have grown up without strong male exemplars, and they are now in danger of passing on their warped habits to the next generation—if there is a next generation. In part, however, it is a technology story, as many speakers observed. Wilcox singled out Big Tech’s business model of dopamine addiction, while Erika Bachiochi argued on the same panel that pornography in particular has perverted male sexuality and made women terrified of sexual relationships.

With so many and such complex causes, the birth dearth might seem to be an insoluble crisis. That said, many speakers were hopeful. There is some evidence, especially in Hungary, that aggressive government spending aimed at pro-family policies and pro-family messaging can at least nudge birth rates modestly higher. But attitudes are shaped by exemplars above all, and it stands to reason that if both politics and pop culture elevated single and childless people in public life for the past couple generations, putting children back in public, as J.D. Vance has in recent months, could subtly encourage more people to give parenthood a try. And introducing commonsense regulation into our corrosive tech regime is a must, if we are to raise children capable of raising their own.

Above all, a revival of faith is critical. All the data shows that religious families are far more likely to bear children, because they grasp the essential goodness of humanity and that there is more to life than personal pleasure. Thankfully, as the recent Pew survey suggested, the long decline of faith may not be predestined to continue; cultural trendlines can actually go up as well as down. Is it too much to hope that the trendlines toward demographic winter may yet be reversed as well?