SEOUL - Around the world, declining fertility rates have panicked governments and sparked a flurry of pro-natalist legislation and initiatives. These state-run campaigns include matchmaking in China, a proposal for fertility testing in France and South Korea’s efforts to create a new ministry devoted to dealing with what the country’s former president declared a “national emergency.”
This urgent language is echoed globally each year when birth rates are published. If births increase - as they did slightly last year in South Korea, though it still has the world’s lowest birth rate - it’s celebrated, and if they decrease, as in Japan, it’s often framed as a disaster in the making. Pronatalist rhetoric is on the rise in the United States. Vice President JD Vance recently told an antiabortion rally that he wants “more babies” in the country, while President Donald Trump’s influential adviser Elon Musk has repeatedly called low birth rates “the biggest danger civilization faces.”
But with significant anxiety and resources devoted to what is widely referred to as a crisis, it’s worth asking: Are low fertility rates really as bad as everyone seems to say? And do state-led efforts to boost births have a downside?
Reversing the trend
Some experts argue that low birth rates are not implicitly disastrous. They are looking for optimism in a trend that is proving difficult to reverse, and raising concerns about the ethics of pushing for more births and how this affects reproductive freedoms.
“The framing of low birth rates as a ‘crisis’ is a political and ideological choice rather than an objective description,” said Sunhye Kim, a professor at Ewha Womans University in Seoul who studies the politics of reproduction.
“The real issue,” she said, “lies in how societies respond to demographic changes - whether through policies that enhance social welfare, gender equality and labor rights or through coercive pronatalist measures that restrict reproductive autonomy.”
The concerns posed by low birth rates and an aging society have been covered extensively. For instance, there are worries about the burden on the pension or health-care systems as the population ages. Fewer working- or military-age people could threaten the economy and national security. Innovation could stagnate in societies depleted of young minds.
But some experts warn governments against fearmongering or treating demographic solutions as a cure-all.
“We’ve got to be really careful to make sure that we’re not making the mistakes of the past and mobilizing wombs for economic development,” said Stuart Gietel-Basten, a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who studies low fertility in Asia, pointing to governments that have restricted access to services for family planning, as well as sexual and reproductive health “in the name of demographic survival.”
He urged the media and political leaders to “stop with these metaphors that involve destruction” to describe the birth rate, such as “‘tsunamis’ and ‘ticking time bombs.’” Instead, he encourages focusing on the reality at hand: “If the pension system is broke, don’t have more babies - fix the pension system.”
‘Baby bonus’
Many governments have adopted the opposite approach, reaching for short-term solutions such as giving couples financial incentives for childbirth, sometimes called a “baby bonus.”
These campaigns in places such as South Korea and Japan have not had a significant impact, said Kim of Ewha Womans University, because they “often fail to address the deeper societal issues discouraging childbirth such as gendered caregiving burdens, long working hours, housing insecurity, and rigid family structures.”
She said countries such as France and Sweden, while also experiencing demographic decline, maintain relatively higher fertility rates compared with many other European countries “through comprehensive social welfare policies.” Kim added that a sustainable approach would “move beyond numbers and focus on creating an environment where individuals - regardless of gender - can make reproductive choices freely without economic or societal coercion.”
The idea that more births is implicitly good is deeply rooted. Religious texts have long called on humanity to multiply and a country’s strength is often seen as synonymous with the size of its population or military. Efforts to boost population have, accordingly, used militaristic language, such as France’s recent “demographic rearmament” plan or right-wing Hungarian leader Viktor Orban’s assertion that women in the country need to have more babies because allowing immigration “is surrender.”
Indeed, reproductive freedom is often treated as an obstacle to government ambitions.
Changing policies
South Korea, which encouraged smaller families for decades, transitioned to pronatalist policies in the mid-2000s. China, meanwhile, maintained its one-child policy from 1979 to 2015 - and is now emphasizing the opposite approach.
“Both approaches have instrumentalized reproduction for national goals rather than centering women’s rights and autonomy,” Kim said.
In 1994, at a time of concern about high birth rates in sub-Saharan Africa, a landmark U.N. conference on population and development addressed the issue of government involvement in reproductive choices by shifting member states’ focus from “merely meeting demographic goals” to meeting individuals’ needs. In other words, it sought to empower people to make the decisions that were best for them by increasing reproductive freedoms.
Now that demographic decline is a concern, the same principles are at stake, said Rintaro Mori, a specially appointed professor at Osaka University and a former regional adviser at the U.N. Population Fund. “It’s not legitimate, actually, to talk about population size because it comes down to the individual choices. That was the agreement we made in 1994,” he said.
Mori pointed as an example to Iran, which doubled down on abortion and contraception restrictions in 2021 amid concern about low birth rates. Decades ago, he noted, in a similar effort to increase births, Romania enacted an abortion ban that ultimately led to a spike in maternal mortality.
When it comes to declining fertility rates, “I think it’s just shortsighted views to look at restricting reproductive choices as a solution,” Mori said.
The abortion link
Some experts also pointed as an example to the U.S., where abortion access nationwide was upended when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, and where some figures on the right, such as Musk and Vance, have publicly linked overturning abortion access to increasing births.
Speaking at an antiabortion rally in January, Vance - who has said parents with children should have more voting power - criticized what he called “a culture of abortion on demand” and said, “I want more babies in the United States of America.”
Suggesting that fewer births is neutral - or even positive - can be taboo. Still, if birth rates are trending down on their own, some experts are looking for positives.
Jane O’Sullivan, who studies the impact of population growth at the University of Queensland in Australia, noted that a tightening labor market brought on by population decline can be “really good for people on low incomes.” This, she said, is because employers have to compete to court fewer jobseekers, meaning salaries could rise - making it easier to buy a home and support a family.
In very crowded places, even a generation or two of very low fertility means “less constraints on resources,” such as imported food and energy, and “a lot of benefits for the whole population,” she said.
Data on the fertility gap suggests that in many places, people are having fewer children than they want to have. If a smaller population can help ease the cost of living and other concerns, the fertility rate would probably reverse on its own, experts said - undermining the common framing of the situation as a crisis.
“If you took seriously this nonsensical idea that the population dwindles to nothing, what do you think house prices and rents in Seoul would be?” said David Miles, a professor of financial economics at Imperial College Business School in London. “They’re going to be pretty cheap,” he said, adding that this alone could increase willingness to have children.
Gietel-Basten, the Hong Kong professor, is similarly unconvinced of an impending apocalypse for low-birth-rate countries such as South Korea.
“I’m pretty sure that killer robots or a nuclear holocaust are going to come,” he said, “before Korea goes extinct purely from demography.”