Birth Rates: Are We Running Out of Babies??

0:00Hi, I'm Blythe Terrell, filling in for Wendy Zuckerman, and you are listening to Science Versus. This is the show that pits facts against falling fertility.

0:14Today, we're talking about the claim that people are having fewer and fewer babies and that it could be bad news for humanity. We've actually been hearing about this fear for years, but recently it has made its way to the White House. President Donald Trump is pushing for a baby boom. We want more babies, to put it very nicely. I'll be known as the fertilization president. That's not bad. I've been called much worse. Vice President J.D. Vance has gone in on this too. So let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America. And it's not just the U.S. This idea that people need to have more babies has been popping up all over the world with headlines about low birth rates in parts of Europe.

1:00Italy is suffering through one of the worst demographic crises anywhere in the world. Spain's population is disappearing. Plus Japan and South Korea. The Korean population crisis has reached a new milestone. The nation's population could free fall by 85 % over the next century. China, which famously had a policy limiting couples to one child only, has done a 180. For the first time, Beijing has announced a nationwide child care subsidy policy in a bid to boost the country's birth rate. Meanwhile, in the U.S., there's actually a whole movement building around this of people called pro-natalists.

1:40And they seem to have the ear of President Trump. Some of the proposals we're hearing about to get more babies include stuff like$5 ,000 cash bonuses for parents, classes to teach women about their menstrual cycles, and even a grand prize for the most fertile among us. A National Medal of Motherhood for women with six or more children. So there's a few reasons that people are eager to turn this around. Like, we hear that a baby bust will totally mess up society and potentially tank the economy. And we also hear that it's actually an existential problem, that we might even be on our way to extinction as a species.

2:20So today we are asking, is that right? How worried should we be about this? And if you want to boost fertility rates, how do you do it? Because when it comes to fertility, there's a lot of... We want more babies to put it very nicely. But then there's science. Coming up after the break. Transcription by CastingWords

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3:41All right. Welcome back. This is Blythe Terrell. I'm the editor at Science Versus. I'm here with senior producer Rose Wimler. Hey, Rose. Hi, Blythe. Welcome. Welcome. Thanks. Actually, you told me I had to be here. No, but it's a very interesting topic. Although I've noticed, Blythe, that you in particular, you seem like particularly obsessed with it. So why? Why does this like grab you so much? Yeah. So I think what it is, is that there's like this motley crew of this, like, band of misfits, right, that are all interested in this. Raising the alarm. Yeah. Yeah, not that they're misfits, but, I mean, you have these sort of pronatalists, and you have, like, some, like, very techie people.

4:17You've got your Elon Musks and other tech bros. You have, like, that group of it. You've sort of got—you have, like, your sort of right-wing Christians on the same boat sometimes. Like, hey, we really got to, like, populate, populate the earth, you know? And it's just this interesting group together. and I just wanted to know, like, okay, so are they right? Like, is there something going on here? Yeah, I'd like to know that too. All right. So to start off here, just like right out of the gate, one thing that the pronatalists are right about is that in lots of places, birth rates are going down.

4:50Like, yes, people are having fewer kids on average, and that is true in basically every country in the world. Really? Yeah. Oh. Wow. I've shocked you already. I thought it was just like, I thought you're just going to say the U.S. and some parts of Europe. No, the trend, the downward trend for birth rates, for something called specifically total fertility rate, is happening almost everywhere. And it has been for decades. Okay, so if you take the U.S., the total fertility rate, which is basically like a snapshot of the kind of average number of kids one woman will have in her lifetime, is a shorthand for it.

5:26That average is right now 1.62 births per woman. Okay. And that's actually the lowest it's ever been. So the concern is that if you want the population to stay where it is, if you want it not to fall, the total fertility rate needs to be 2.1 kids per woman. Okay, and that's 2.1 because some of these pregnancies, the person who's born will die, won't have their own children. It's kind of like a little bit of an insurance policy, I guess. Exactly. And just to say, like this is talked about in terms of births per woman, but it's really per couple, per set of parents. because you're using that 2.1 births to replace those two people, whoever they may be.

6:03Right. Right. And it's just like it's easier to track what comes out of a uterus than what comes out of a fetus.

6:11Okay.

6:15I'm not sure I want to know where your mind went, but I can see you thinking about that.

6:25Let's move on. Let's move on. So the idea is for the population to be stable, to not go up or down, the total fertility rate needs to be 2.1. Okay. And according to the United Nations in 2024, the global total fertility rate was 2.2. Oh. So in the U.S., it's 1.62. As of right now, it's 2.2 worldwide. So it's above that replacement level. So if you're looking at the population of Earth, the human population of Earth, we're good. Yeah, at this moment. Uh-huh. But pretty consistently, it's going down. And so people are like, oh, even though at a global level, it's above this 2.1 replacement level right now, people are like, oh, well, it's probably going to go down if that's what it's been doing for decades.

7:11And so scientists do estimate that global population will peak in maybe like 60 years and then start to fall. Like that is what current estimates do show. Okay, but is that a bad thing? Because you used to hear a lot about people worrying about overpopulation. So is that good news? You know, that's a great question because, like, actually, even just talking about this out in the world, as you know I am, whenever I bring this up to people, they're like, oh, population might be going down. Like, isn't that good? Good for the environment. You fear people using up resources, spewing out trash, greenhouse gases, like all the crap that humans are currently doing.

7:48But a lot of scientists are like, actually, it's a little more complicated than that. They don't really think that this is going to be a climate solution. And that's basically because the population isn't expected to actually drop soon enough to like really reverse our climate problems, like to actually have as big of an impact as it would need to have to sort of save our asses. Basically saying the stuff we need to do to reduce emissions has to be done before we'd start to actually use fewer resources. That is exactly what people say. Okay, that does make sense. So it's not going to fix climate, scientists argue, to have fewer people, to have lower birth rates.

8:22Okay. And this also means that we are pretty far from the population dropping in a super extreme way, right? Like this idea that humans might go extinct. Yeah, okay. But there definitely is some nutty stuff that can start happening when your birth rates go really low. So let's talk about that. And I want to do that, Rose, by taking you to South Korea. Okay. Because South Korea is the country with the lowest total fertility rate in the world. What is it? It is 0.75. Oh, wow. That's, now that you told me what to, I understand that that's really low now. Yeah, yeah. So that is the 2024 number. And actually, I talked to this economist about it.

9:07It's a crazy number. It's a number that I think people, I mean, all Koreans know the number now because they saw it in the news so much. But it's still a number that it's difficult to imagine because we just never lived in a society with a 0.75 fertility rate. That is Jisoo Hwang. She is a professor studying economics at Seoul National University in South Korea. So basically a 0.75 birth rate means that if nothing else happens, your next generation in terms of people born is going to be less than half the size of your current generation. Right. So like every couple is producing less than one kid.

9:48Right. And so I wanted to talk to Jisoo because she did a whole bunch of work to figure out like how South Korea got here, what's going on. And there was a few things that contributed to this, but I'm going to zoom in on one of the biggies. Okay. So for Jisoo, her spidey sense on this started tingling about 10 years ago when she was a grad student. And she noticed something kind of surprising going on. More and more of the highly educated women were not getting married. And now that I think about it, that was like the precursor to all of this happening. So Jisoo noticed this with her friends, actually, she told me.

10:22She was like, oh, a lot of them have gone to college, maybe gotten good jobs, but they were staying single. And in Korea, there was actually a name for a woman like this. She was called a gold miss. So the term gold miss, I'm not the one who coined it. It was becoming a popular word in Korea to refer to women who are highly educated. So they're gold. They're highly educated and they have high potential earnings. They already have high paying jobs, but they're a miss. So they didn't get married. That's actually a very neutral, somewhat flattering term. So much better than like old maid or whatever.

10:59Yeah, right. So Jisoo, when she started digging into this, she realized that a lot of this trend of women not getting married, really low fertility. It seemed to be related to this massive change that had happened in South Korea's economy. Okay. So if you look back like 50 plus years ago, South Korea was a really, really poor country. But then it really shifted. Like the country starts building up its industry, starts exporting a ton of stuff. There's lots of South Korean companies that are super successful global companies. K-pop. Yes. Yeah. K-pop is a part of this. Definitely a part of this.

11:33So all of this economic growth, all this change, it also meant that like way more women started getting educated and getting jobs. In some cases, really demanding jobs, really long hours. So there was this like big shift in women's roles in the workforce, the workplace. Uh-huh. Okay. But Jisoo told me that as this education and workplace shift was happening, what they did not see was a huge shift in women's roles at home. And that's because, you know, our norms about, you know, what it means to be a good mother or a good wife or a good worker, you know, these kind of social norms, they can't change that quickly.

12:15So, you mean, you go to college, you get a higher education, you become a dentist or a lawyer or whatever, but then you still got to go home and like do all the cooking and cleaning and child caring? That's the expectation. Yeah. And obviously like painting with a really broad brush, right? But yes, so yes, Jisoo told me in Korea, women are still largely supposed to do the childcare, largely supposed to do most of the work around the house. And she said that it is bigger than like any one couple's attitude about this. So it's not like someone's fault. It's not like, so even if your husband is, for example, very supportive and he has very, you know, egalitarian gender attitudes, it may still not work.

12:51because like the whole society, all the institutions around us are not designed to, you know, operate with both mom and dad working full time. So for example, in Korea, elementary school, first grade, second grade, they come home at 1 p.m. So someone has to be home for the kid. Yes. There's like these barriers to having a kid. Yeah. If both parents are working, there's these huge barriers to having a kid. Which is true here as well. Yeah. I mean, we're talking about Korea because it has a distinct issue, but it's some of these issues. So far, the issues you're bringing up seem fairly broad. Like, these also seem like issues here in the U.S.

13:27They are. They are. And yet we're at 1.6. And we're at 1.6. We're smoking their asses. So, explain that. Actually, I can. The argument is that the speed mattered. Like, for example, Jisoo told me over there, women's education levels ramped up, like, extremely fast. So from a country where almost no women were college graduates, now more than half of the women are college graduates. Okay. They see that this change happened really fast. And in the U.S., it happened, but it just happened slower because the U.S. has been, like, stronger economically for longer. There's been more time for adjustments to be made.

14:10Right. A little easier. Yeah. Yeah. And there's other stuff that could be at play here, too, like cultural differences, things like that. Oh, yeah, yeah. But to zoom out, though, I will say, you know, in a lot of countries, as women get more education, better paying jobs, our time becomes more expensive. That was one thing that Jisoo kept pointing out. She's like, your time, if you can get a job that pays you more money, the cost-benefit changes for having a kid. Especially if you're going to be the one who's expected to stay home, especially if you don't have reliable child care, like all these things, right?

14:42And all of this like changes the calculus of having a kid. We are all given 24 hours a day. Something needs to give. So some women are choosing, you know what, then, you know, I don't think I can, you know, take this package of marriage and childcare. I'll just forego having children. I'll forego getting married. So it's not necessarily just that people are like, my job is way more fun than hanging out with a kid all day. No, no, no, no. No, it's not about that, right? Yeah, it's more about a calculation of what I can make happen in my life and feel good about doing. So a bigger picture, like even though there's other reasons people aren't having as many kids, some economists do argue that this gender shift in education and jobs and just overall more autonomy for women, it could be the biggest reason that we've seen this change worldwide.

15:37Women becoming more educated and more likely to work. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so that's a little bit about the why, like the how we got here. And now I want to stay in South Korea to talk about what can happen next. So, you know, using South Korea as like sort of a worst case scenario, what does it look like when your fertility rate goes so low? And I want to start with kids, because when you have fewer births, you have fewer kids. And there's a ton of headlines about this, actually. Like South Korea becoming basically like a kid desert. Have you seen these? No, but that was my first thought.

16:15Yeah. It's like, sounds a little sad. Yeah, and there's tons of reports around this. You know, this is happening. The population of kids is shrinking in ways that are like, that is actually noticeable. I mean, there's reports of hundreds and even thousands of schools just completely having to shut down. You know, tiny numbers of kids and classes. I saw a headline the other day about a primary school that opened with one first grader, Rose. Oh, wow. One first grader. Can you imagine being the only first grader in your class? That's so sad. There's reports of them turning the schools into other things, like old folks' homes.

16:48Well, that's telling. Yeah. And Jisoo said that she has noticed this out in the world. Walking around, you see so much more older people, relatively, than children. Is it like you're birdwatching and you're like, look, it's a one-year-old? Right, right. It's much more difficult to see a baby just walking around in the streets than seeing older people, right? Very old people. It's much easier to see very old people than to see babies. Yeah, and the other thing about this is it can build on itself. So if you're thinking, oh, like maybe I do want to have a kid and you look around and you're like, oh, there's no school.

17:29Right. There's no pediatrician. There's no other kids on the playground. There's no infrastructure in place. Right. So that's a thing, too. Like, maybe you hesitate. And then the next thing that happens that freaks people out about all this, it relates to the older people, right? Like, we just heard that we have way fewer kids. And proportionally, we have way more older people in the population, right? And they need someone to take care of them. Yes. Not only do they need someone to take care of them, they also need, like, money to take care of them. because there's two pieces of this, right? Like there's the idea that you can run into like caregiver shortages, which we do hear about.

18:08But the thing that actually economists seem to be a little more freaked out about is that like, okay, when you get old, what happens? You're too old to work, you retire. You maybe have a pension, but you also generally have health care. And the way we pay for those things is through taxes. I know taxes. Woo, I can see you. I can see your eyes glazing over. But it really matters. This tax thing actually is really important because what happens is if you don't have people, younger people in your population, you end up with fewer people in the workforce, you end up with fewer people paying taxes, and then you end up not being able to pay for these programs for your older people.

18:48Plus, we use taxes to pay for other stuff, right? Like roads, parks, fire departments. So all this could get messy. And obviously, like, South Korea is trying to figure this out. They are very aware of this problem, of course. But it could get bad. Here's what Jisoo told me. You know, in the extreme scenario where we don't do anything, then those kind of systems will collapse, right? We won't have a public pension, for example, if we don't do anything, at least the way it is now. Well, it makes sense though because it's like the whole society is structured in such a way that young people support old people.

19:26So without the young people, the old people are screwed. Yeah. And that's bad for us future old people. Yeah, so South Korea, actually scientists call it a super-aged society because more than 20 % of the people are older than 65 and a lot of them are actually living in poverty. And this isn't just because of the population stuff. Like, there's other reasons, too. But South Korea actually has, like, one of the highest rates of elderly poverty among rich countries. And they have, like, really high suicide rates also. Hmm. Jesus. At least in some cases, according to the research, that's because people are like, you know, can't afford to live.

20:04Oy vey. So this is the fear, basically. That if trends for fertility keep going the way they're going, other countries worldwide, we're all going to end up in this boat. Mm-hmm. Where, like, things kind of start to crumble. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense because society is people. So without people, you don't have society. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I mean, it's true. You know, it's very—it's so simple when you put it that way, Rose. Society is people. And so this argument—and also, I mean, frankly, like, the way we've had society now is, like, society is all different ages of people doing all kinds of stuff.

20:38You know, not just because we're like, you know, we love the sound of children's laughter, but also because we've built a society that requires all these different parts of it to sort of function and to like also like feel good, you know? So it's, yeah, so like the concerns are very real, which means the obvious question is, what can we do about it? Yeah. And that's what we're going to talk about after the break.

21:15Welcome back. It's Blythe. I'm here with Rose Rimler. Hey, Rose. Hey, Blythe. Today we are talking about the idea that we are in a fertility crisis in the U.S. globally because birth rates are going down all over the world. And the question is, what can you do? Well, I am not volunteering to get impregnated by Elon Musk. So don't even suggest that. You're not signing up for the, like... The Musk Express. The Tesla sperm delivery service. No. It's just a Cybertruck shows up in front of your apartment with a refrigerated sample. No, that's not what you want. Please offer other solutions that could potentially work.

21:55Okay. So where I want to start here, Rose, actually, is with this study that I got extremely obsessed with. because it involves like a kind of surprising tactic to get people on the baby-making train. Free tequila? What is it? What is it? No, Rose, I'm taking you to church. Oh, excuse me. And one of the researchers who was involved in this study, her name is Dr. Neha Diopa. I'm an assistant professor at the University of Exeter in the economics department. So what she studied, it all goes down in Georgia, in Eastern Europe, back in the mid-2000s, mid to late 2000s. And where we start is that Georgia has this fertility rate that maybe doesn't sound that bad by today's standards, but it is below replacement.

22:42It's about 1.76. Okay. Yeah, which is, you know, kind of similar to where the US is right now, right? A little higher. Here's Neha. So Georgia is, let's say, post-Soviet, one of the post-Soviet countries, and it has a very typical trait of the other post-Soviet countries, which is extremely low fertility rates. There was a concern both by the government and the church that the demographic landscape of Georgia looks like is going through a fertility crisis. And another thing going on in Georgia is that it has this very powerful national church, this church I'm talking about called the Georgian Orthodox Church.

23:24And as like a cultural institution, it's really strong. More than 80 % of Georgians belong to it. And it also just like has—it's very strongly tied to the national identity. So people are like into this church. And this church is led by a very powerful dude called Patriarch Ilya II. He's not quite Pope level, but he's like a big deal in this church. So he is a very popular guy. And his opinion, like he was rated the most trusted man in the country. The most trusted man in the country. With a rating of 94%. Would you compare him to like, is he like Elvis? I can't think of anyone who at some point had such high approval ratings.