A filmmaker and data analyst warned that the falling birth rate crisis across the globe couldn’t be “any worse.”
Stephen Shaw, who interviewed people around the world to investigate plummeting birthrates for his documentary Birthgap, recently told podcaster Brendan O’Neill that population collapse is a uniquely dangerous problem. This is because unlike the dangers of, say, nuclear proliferation and environmental issues, there are no known solutions to declining birth rates, according to Shaw.
“This is in a category of one in terms of how bad it is,” he told O’Neill. The majority of countries now have a fertility rate below replacement level, and as of 2024, the world fertility rate was 2.2, only very slightly above replacement, according to the Population Reference Bureau.
Unlike commentators who pin the crisis on intentional choices to remain childless, Shaw says the reality is more complicated. In his analysis, he has found that unplanned childlessness is the main driver of falling birth rates. In fact, mothers who do have children have the same average family size as mothers decades ago.
It was in the 1970s that fertility rates in Western nations began to converge in a rapid decline. Shaw pointed out in Birthgap that from about 1973 to 1978, childlessness rates skyrocketed in many countries, including Italy and Japan, driving the declining birth rates.
Shaw points out that the current cultural norm is for young people to not take relationships seriously, let alone think about children, until they are in their mid- to late 20s.
“What do you do if you’re 18 in high school and you’re like your other classmates. You’re probably not thinking they’re the person you’re going to settle down and have a family with … probably college age too.”
By mid- to late 20s, “even if you wanted to take it seriously, you might get a different reaction from your love interest, who (thinks) you’re mad even to talk about children at those ages,” Shaw said in an effort to explain why the average age of starting a family today is 30.
“I think a lot of the issues we’re seeing in societies and particularly in younger people are actually consequences of the reengineering of our societies to deprioritize parenthood,” he said.
Shaw noted that most people aren’t aware of how short a woman’s fertility window is, and this means they can’t make a truly informed choice about whether to delay children, if they are in a position to have children in the first place.