An alarming UN report should prompt a rethink about global fertility

The global population may begin to shrink by the end of the century. PA

A report released on Tuesday by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) warns of “tectonic population changes [that] will shape the future of humanity for generations to come”. The cause is a decline in global fertility rates “at a breathtaking scale and pace”.

The UN has, up until now, been loath to give a view on fertility, perhaps because it is such an explosive subject. The issue of whether our species should have fewer children or more is often tangled up in debates about climate change, feminism, resource scarcity and even racism.

In his influential “Essay on the Principle of Population”, published in 1798, the demographer Thomas Malthus argued the human population would eventually outgrow the planet’s resources. Although our numbers have increased eight-fold since then, Malthusian fears have proved largely unfounded. As countries became richer, their fertility levels fell. While birth rates remained high in much of the developing world over the past century, it was generally accepted that these, too, would fall as these societies became more prosperous.

The theory behind this is that because wealthier societies enjoy greater life expectancy, lower child mortality, improved female literacy and independence, and more urbanised lifestyles, their adults are less likely to “need” many children.

Today, birth rates in much of the developing world are indeed falling – but, as the UN report explains, the reasons are complex, and not altogether positive. In many cases, financial difficulty – not prosperity – is the culprit. Moreover, this is the case in some wealthier countries, too.

Across the 14 developed and developing countries the UNFPA surveyed, 39 per cent of people cited “financial limitations” as a reason for not having a child despite wanting one.

Today, birth rates in much of the developing world are indeed falling – but the reasons are complex, and not altogether positive

Time is another issue. Modern life often demands several hours a day in commute time or employment in a second job. That leaves less time for child-rearing.

The result is a kind of dark mirror of the refutation to Malthus. Development and modernity appear to have overcorrected in freeing us from the burden of unsustainably large families – they are now beginning to box us into unsustainably small ones.

“One in four people currently live in a country where the population size is estimated to have already peaked,” the UNFPA points out. “The result will be societies as we have never seen them before: communities with larger proportions of elderly, smaller shares of young people, and, possibly, smaller workforces.” By the end of the century, the global population could shrink for the first time since the 1300s, when the Black Death ravaged Europe and Asia.

In some wealthier countries where birth rates have already plummeted, the debate has become polarised. Some pro-natalists – advocates of more births – warn of native populations being “replaced” by foreign immigrants, while others predict a collapse in pension systems as the workforce diminishes. Some of Malthus’s intellectual descendants, meanwhile, point to climate change as a reason to welcome population decline.

According to the UNFPA, however, these concerns are beside the point. The real crisis in this picture, it says, is the growing lack of reproductive agency. Millions of families around the world are unable to have as many children as they’d like, but millions of others are also having more than they intended. The former is fast overtaking the latter as the dominant trend, but in both cases the problem is that a huge number of couples feel they do not have control over the size of their families.

This is a reminder that while it is, of course, important to have policy discussions that promote sustainable population growth, ultimately the guiding principle of fertility ought to be freedom – ensuring that couples are fully empowered to build the kind of family that works best for them.

That is a very different – and much more fruitful – way of framing the matter.