Surface answers mask two widespread changes: toward digitial living, and away from faith
Remember the cause-du-jour, “Zero Population Growth,” of decades past? It’s been too long for many to remember the certitude of ZPG that society will collapse unless people stop having so many children. How things have changed!
China has reversed its decades-long, totalitarian one-child policy. Russia’s future, based on its very low birth rate, has long been bleak, even before it sent some 300,000 young men to the slaughter in Ukraine. No European country’s birth rate meets the replacement standard. The birthrate in the US is not as low as in Europe, but it too is below replacement level.
Who is going to sustain a society as it ages?
Posed in this fashion, the question of falling birthrates obscures the two primary reasons, which are hard to hear amidst the farrago of other reasons that make little if any sense.
One of the reasons given for falling birthrates is simply a restatement of the question. This reason is: “I don’t want children.” This is but another way of asking the question: Why don’t you want children?
A different reason offered for falling birthrates is a denial of the question. Long-range social trends are cited to render falling fertility irreversible. For example, a letter writer to The New York Times sees an inverse relationship between wealth and fertility as an “ironclad” demographic finding. Nations prosper, birthrates fall. The fall in birthrates is put forth as an inevitability (offered, incidentally, by a former COO of Planned Parenthood). However, if a falling birthrate is inevitable as nations prosper, why is Israel prospering and yet its birthrate is not falling? Israel is one of the few countries with a birthrate above replacement level, even as its wealth grows.
To say that a falling birthrate is inevitable, when it is not, is to deny the question: Why are birthrates falling?
It is also pertinent and ironic to note that some cite rising wealth as a cause of dropping birthrates, while others cite the rising cost of child-rearing. Children are too expensive. For individuals, either wealth or poverty may determine their choice not to have children. But as a society-wide phenomenon, we must look elsewhere for why birth rates fall.
Another inevitability is offered by another letter writer:Today’s world is shaky. Prospects for peace, for jobs, for social cohesion, for bipartisanship, for civility, for a better world tomorrow, are gloomy, and add up to uncertainty. Why bring up children in an uncertain world? Again, in what country are the prospects for peace, for social cohesion, for bipartisanship least likely? Israel. Yet, again, its birthrate rises.
External circumstances cannot explain, or at least fully explain, dropping birthrates. Nor can the availability of contraception.
It is two other factors that mainly cause falling birthrates: a shift in values, and the substitute universe of digital living.
The digital universe of endless screen images, messages, ripostes, diversions, entertainments, discoveries and allegedly supremely important, impossible-to-ignore data supplant social relations. So marriage rates fall. Marriage is felt to be less compelling. For many, loneliness is not as lonely as it used to be.
The other primary cause of falling birthrates is a shift in values — not only away from marriage, but away from faith and away from self-sacrifice. One statistic is not disputed: Families who practice their faith — be it Judaism, Christianity or Islam — have more children. Every supposed deterrent to having children confronts the religion-oriented and the religion-nonoriented alike. Yet, birthrates are higher in religious groups.
The other value shift is a drop in self-sacrifice. Nothing demands more of a person than a child, emotionally, economically, physically and in just about every other way. The idea that the joy that comes from children outweighs the self-sacrifice has been overtaken.
Fundamentally, a shift in government incentives on everything from the cost of education to the cost of food may help some to decide to have children, but will not put a dent in the larger trends of digital living and of a fundamental shift in values. Those factors require a deep, hard readjustment to restore birth-rates.
© IJN 2026
