Three more EU member states — including the most populous, Germany — have joined the list of countries with “ultra-low” fertility rates, highlighting the extent of the region’s demographic challenges.
Official statistics show Germany’s birth rate fell to 1.35 children per woman in 2023, below the UN’s “ultra-low” threshold of 1.4 — characterising a scenario where falling birth rates become tough to reverse.
Estonia and Austria also passed under the 1.4 threshold, joining the nine EU countries — including Spain, Greece and Italy — that in 2022 had fertility rates below 1.4 children per woman.
The fall in birth rates partially reflects the “postponement of parenthood until the 30s”, which involves a “higher likelihood that you will not have as many children as you would like because of the biological clock”, said Willem Adema, senior economist at the OECD.
Without immigration, low fertility rates mean a shrinking working-age population, adding pressures on public finances and limiting economic growth.
With young people reaching milestones, such as buying a house, later in life, the average age of EU women at childbirth rose to 31.1 years in 2023, a year later than a decade ago. The figure rises is 31.4 in Germany, and over 32 years in Spain, Italy and Ireland.
Austria reported a fall to 1.32 children per woman in 2023, down from 1.41 in the previous year. In Estonia, the rate hit 1.31 in 2023, down from 1.41 in the previous year.
Birth rates have fallen across Europe — even in countries such as Finland, Sweden and France, where family-friendly policies and greater gender equality had previously helped boost the number of babies.
In Finland, the birth rate was above the EU average until 2010, but it dropped to 1.26 in 2023, the lowest since the record began in 1776, according to official data.
France had the highest birth rate at 1.79 children per woman in 2022, but the national figures showed it dropped to 1.67 last year, the lowest on record.
Rates fell lower also in countries where they were already ultra-low, reaching 1.12 in Spain and 1.2 in Italy in 2023.
Guangyu Zhang, population affairs officer at the UN, called for governments “to put more family-friendly and gender-responsive policy measures in place”, saying this would enable women and men to have the multiple children that surveys claim they want.
Experts believe economic and political upheaval partly explain the trend of people having fewer children.
“You might have a job, but if you’re worried about losing it, or worried about inflation or worried about conflict in Ukraine, then you still might hesitate to have children,” said Ann Berrington, professor of demography at the University of Southampton.
Changes in social attitudes might also be at play.
Adema said: “The norms of what it means to be a good parent and how intensive you should participate in that are such that quite a few young people say: ‘Well, in addition to the fact that I don’t need children to be happy, it would also be a very difficult job for me to do, and I’m not sure that I can take that responsibility’.”
But why would we revert falling birth rates? We're still way too many people on earth.
fear of decline
"the economy" aka we need slaving people doing the work and "we are afraid of immigrants"
Because while low birth rates are a real thing that is happening (because of war, hunger, poverty, disease, climate change, and whatever other inequality), "overpopulation" is and always has been a (classist, ableist, racist) myth, to shift responsability away from capitalism, which is what causes war, hunger, poverty, disease, climate change, and whatever other inequality, for profit.
I disagree wholeheartedly. The fact that they are in some instances used by those with evil motivations does not negate their truth. And mostly the elite want more people rather than less people, as shown by nearly all dictators making abortion illegal and "inspiring" women to be broodmares.
Oh, hey everyone, this random on the internet disagrees with masses of research that I guarantee they didn't even glance at, as well as observable reality (once and only if you're willing to set your bias aside, that is), problem solved!
I don't exactly see why you are so hostile, but I will not steep down to that level. I will instead explain my reasoning a bit more, maybe we can reach an interesting discussion yet.
I didn't read all your articles, but I read two of those before, so you are kinda right in that regard.
My reasoning is not that it's wrong in itself, mostly just unrealistic to achieve. I think it is easier for people to see that more people equal more destruction and stop having children than to change our system. Call me pessimistic, but I don't think I will see a different system in my lifetime.
Second, reduced fertility is a normal process with increased living standards, due to the wish to enjoy life more by yourself instead of "limiting" yourself by having kids, especially multiple ones. Also, it's not like people in the past had kids because they wanted to. It was mostly tradition, an economic investment and also maybe biggest thing: retirement planning. All of those are bad reasons for me. In my opinion, people should have children if they want to have them (and can care for them).
Third, as I wrote before, it's not exactly a secret that people at the top need people below them to be at the top. You can extract more wealth from millions than from hundreds. With an oppressive system, the more persons there are, the better they oppress each other and you can extract wealth from them. That's visible at nearly each point on our current worlds societies.
Fourth, and this is my biggest point: Earth is limited. There is a point where Earth can't sustain more people. And while we are still away from that point, at one point it would be reached if the number of people grows continually. So at a certain point, the growth needs to stop either way. So why not stop slowly now and solve the systemic problems, instead of continuing on and running into the metaphoric problemwall headfirst and then wondering why it hurts so much?
And fifth: I'm not advocating for anything to "stop overpopulation", because I think the problem solves itself if we don't force people to have children (by making abortion illegal or the whole tradwife nonsense etc.). I'm just deciding not to have children myself and I don't see a problem with falling birth rates that needs to be countered (yet).
Or to try and condense my political view in one question: why not try to limit suffering now by first solving our systemic problems instead of bringing even more children into our fucked up world.
Higher human development index and lower birth rates are correlated. So the opposite of war, hunger poverty and so forth.
Oh, so the people in your country aren't avoiding having kids because it's too expensive to either give up a salary, pay for childcare and bigger housing, or both? Or because they fear bringing a child in to a world being devastated by climate change and other inequality (which you oh so conveniently ignore)?🤔
But hey, don't let reality get in the way of your bootlicking..
(E: also, thank you for demonstrating one of the classist ableist and racist aspects of the myth - the idea and implication that people who are having more kids are "less developed", or that those who you do consider "developed" got that way by magic or "hard work", and not by exploiting those who you consider "less so" and their countries resources, is the epitome of that. Get off your fucking high horse)
The "less developed" part is about child mortality which seems to have a direct, instinctive, link to fertility. Pretty much every single country on earth has reached a tipping point in that regard, though some are only at the beginning of their demographic transition. It's not a sudden drop-off but takes a while.
For a datapoint, have a highly developed country -- Cuba. Their birth rates have been falling since 1964, half a century post-revolution when the healthcare system really started to kick in, now they're lower than in the US, which also has higher infant mortality.
"classist, ableist, racist" my ass, according to demography Cuba is more highly developed than the US. Maybe look at more data and fewer narratives.
On top of that there's also cultural factors -- Israel bucks the trend under perceived extinction pressure, South Korea is a country of incels and femcels and impossible expectations, compounding the effect. France is at about 1.8, way above Germany or Italy, I'd say it's mostly policy. Cultural differences exist but at least in my estimation nothing drastic enough to explain the difference.
Fair enough. Your country is better, as unlike in mine children are not lazy but work for a living and support their parents.
EDIT: Sorry for the dark joke, but most countries in the world have below replacement fertility rates. The strongest correlation seem to be between women's rights and health care. So basically as soon as women, who tend to do the care work, can say no to babys many choose to do so. Health care allows for people to have access tot he pill or condoms. That is why HDI has a close correlation then GDP, as HDI includes education, which allows women to have an independent income, and life expectancy, which is a decent indicator for health care. The third factor is income, which according to ShareMySims@sh.itjust.works would mean that rich countries would have more children, as they can afford them. Also clearly wrong.
In other words improving peoples quality of life, lowers birth rates, which solves overpopulation. I honestly can not think of a less classist, ableist and racist thing to be proven with data.
Because a) we're not actually near much less over the sustainable population limit and b) our current gerontocracy is already bad enough. Both societies that grow or shrink too quickly have lots of inherent issues. If, for the sake of argument, we did have to shrink the population we should still only go for a birth rate as low as 1.8 thereabouts to avoid fallout.
Kids are too expensive nowadays, way too much of a poverty risk, and people don't have enough time. Both are due to capitalist short-term interest. The ole story of mere aggregate microeconomics vs. macroeconomics and we're not even at sociology and ecology yet which also disagree with the microeconomics.
Someone is going to have to take care for our elderly, and someone else has to pay for that. Immigration doesn't really solve that long-term and comes with its own issues on top of that. We'd have to change our countries pretty radically to tackle this issue and I very much doubt that's going to happen anytime soon.
Though I guess we would also need to change radically to get a birthrate at replacemen level.
Then, who pays for the generation that looks after the elderly? Does the next-next generation need to be even bigger?
Yeah, you don't need a rising population to care for the elderly, just not a rapidly shrinking one. If we got our collective heads out of our collective asses we probably wouldn't even need that, there's still tons of bullshit jobs that could be automated away or just outlawed because they provide no value to society, but good luck sorting that out.
You don't need replacement or growing rates to care for the elderly, 1.8 would be perfectly fine. South Korea has half that and yeah it's gonna be a problem.