Governments are scrambling to stop the sharp decline in birth rates across the developed world; the pronatalist policies on offer don’t seem to have found a solution. They do, however, disproportionately target women, fuel culture wars and some very gendered propaganda. This is our International Women’s Day edition of the Standard Time talk show.
Birth rates are steadily decreasing worldwide for the first time since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Russia and China have been struggling with its effects for decades; Europe, India and South Korea have recently started to contend with this phenomenon.
Since 1804, the global population has grown from 1 billion to an astonishing 8 billion people, thanks in a large part to greater agricultural productivity and medical advancements. World population growth hit its peak of 2.1% annually in 1968 but has since slowed to 1.1%.
So now the demographic concern has shifted from a fear of overpopulation to a concern with haemorrhaging polities and pronatalism is on the rise once again. It’s been a pet theory of both Fascist and Communist dictatorships, who see population size as a means to amass greater power. More recently, tech oligarchs also started to hop on this bandwagon.
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Pronatalist policies could very well be a non-partisan issue when aimed well, Kristijan Fidanovski argues in his article titled The right policy for the wrong reasons. But the policies in vogue favour restrictive measures, such as opposing effective birth control and abortions, and curbing women’s opportunities. The discourse often features strong racial overtones as well, and class implications, quite like Elon Musk advocating for wealthy people to have more kids.
In a political and economic mindset tuned to the idea of perpetual growth and measuring national economies against one another, there is rising resistance against immigration, even in economies directly built on immigrant labour, quite like in Europe and North America.
Despite the questionable overtones, there are good reasons to be concerned. Most economies, especially in welfare states, are built on a model where active generations of wage earners provide for their contemporary dependents through an intricate system of taxes and dues that sustain health care systems, schools and pensions, and more.
Is there a way to remodel developed economies so that fewer people can provide for more dependents? Not only are birth rates decreasing, so is the relative taxation of the highest earners across much of the globe. Are we ever going to entertain the idea of taxing the rich?
This discourse focusses very heavily on gender norms, societal expectations and put a lot of pressure on the people who dare not utilize their wombs for reproduction. Sociologists Claudia Rahnfeld and Annkathrin Heuschkel conducted a deep study on the subject and found:
The decision to become childless is made much more on the basis of individual motives and not because of the framework conditions, which was previously assumed. The main reasons for women are a desire for self-realization, free time and more freedom. These motives are far ahead of other motives such as the ecological footprint.
Yet, the level of freedom and free time varies wildly across social strata and societies, depending on the availability and price of childcare, the quality of public education and health care systems. In some of the richest countries, such as the US and UK, parents have to spend a significant proportion of their income on childcare just to be able to go to work to have any income whatsoever.
It’s important to note a surprising fact: according to new research childless women have not only been ever present, and important pillar of our communities and wider society, but also rather numerous across the past century. For example in Austria they constituted 29.1% of the population in 1900.
Having children, or not having them is such a deeply intimate and personal question that many legitimately want policy makers to take a step back and instead of exerting pressure, rather provide circumstances so that the babies people want to have can actually be born and raised, respecting people’s individual lives and decisions.
In this Standard Time Episode we have invited three experts to talk about pronatalism, population decline and childcare!
Dr Regina Fuchs heads the Population Directorate at Statistics Austria. This is where statistics on demographics, health, the labour market, education, living conditions, research and digitalisation are compiled. She is also responsible for the Science Centre with the Austrian Micro Data Centre (AMDC).
Kristijan Fidanovski studied Politics and East European Studies at University College London, and Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies at Georgetown University. He is a doctoral candidate in Social Policy and Demography at the University of Oxford.
Mag. Dr. Gerlinde Mauerer, senior scientist at the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna, Austria. She primarily works in research on gender and family, empirical sociology, health and social inequalities, critical masculinities.
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This talk show is a Display Europe production: a ground-breaking media platform anchored in public values.
This programme is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the European Cultural Foundation.
Importantly, the views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and speakers only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them.
Published 7 March 2025
Original in English
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