Concern about the world’s declining birth rates is growing; last year, the Office for National Statistics announced that ‘Fewer children are being born in England and Wales and the fertility rate is at its lowest level on record.’ [1] Ireland’s fertility rate has also dropped well below replacement.
Echoing the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) recent ‘State of World Population’ report, the Guardian blamed money worries and sexist attitudes: [2] ‘“Millions of people are prevented from having the number of children they want by a toxic mix of economic barriers and sexism”’. According to UNFPA executive director Dr Natalia Kanem, quoted therein: ‘“The answer [to increasing the number of births] lies in responding to what people say they need: paid family leave, affordable fertility care and supportive partners.”’
However, the Spectator’s Matthew Parris (Parris is one of Britain’s leading columnists) calls this ‘nonsense’; in ‘Falling birth rates are not a crisis’, he asks whether ‘Africa (‘4.1 births per woman)’ has ‘better family leave and fertility care and more supportive partners than Sweden (1.4)?’
He says [3] the UNFPA has ‘not “found” … the reasons people don’t have babies’, but rather ‘the reasons people say they’re not having babies.’ When questioned, ‘most people are unlikely to reply: “babies are hard work, and restrict my freedom to live the life of my choice’”, because saying ‘“I don’t want children” sounds selfish’, so they ‘instead say that they’d like to have more children, but for one reason or another beyond their control are prevented from having a bigger family’. He adds that according to the survey, ‘only one in five said they expected to have fewer children than they’d like’ (Spectator, June 21, 2025).
Parris fails to mention the UNFPA’s role in engineering the population decline about which they now complain: funded by national governments as well as institutions and individuals, the organisation has actively helped for years to lower birth rates to their present very low levels.
Equally disturbing is the UNFPA’s solution to collapsing global fertility: ‘“reproductive freedom”’, which includes abortion.
However, Mr Parris insists: ‘Face it. Modern couples are making a lifestyle choice in curbing procreation. Babies are thoroughly inconvenient. Pets (say reports) are substituting for children as they’re less trouble. Dog ownership is increasing.’
Mr Parris recognises that government ‘bribes’ designed to increase birth rates have failed, but argues: ‘The reason for falling birth rates is the emancipation of women’, moreover: ‘The doubling of available talent for the modern economy must be vastly beneficial both to productivity and the sum of human happiness’, although ‘it doesn’t encourage procreation.’
Paid work is indeed a factor in declining birth rates – something Britain’s Labour Government ignores in announcing more childcare for working mothers as an incentive to have more children.
Mr Parris says ‘professionally successful modern women now choose motherhood towards the end of the female reproductive lifespan’. But Mother Nature is not interested in ‘professional success’, only in biological reality, and older women desperately seek IVF from the (hugely profitable) ‘infertility’ industry, which holds out the hope that postponing childbearing need not mean childlessness. They then charge to keep millions of ‘surplus’ embryos in frozen limbo for years on end.
Sadly, there is nothing so much in demand as that which cannot be had – especially when the thing we want is the thing we did not have in our youth. Even major abortion provider BPAS (the British Pregnancy Advisory Service) acknowledges the female desire for children, launching their own fertility assistance service which, however, closed [4] within a year, apparently owing to financial difficulties. Perhaps those seeking fertility assistance prefer not to seek it from an abortion provider.
Despite all this, in conclusion, Mr Parris disputes the idea of ‘underpopulation’: ‘It’s only about ten minutes since world overpopulation, not underpopulation, was the popular cause for anxiety.’ He admits that with fewer young people, we have to ‘import’ workers, and that these immigrants also get older and need care; however, he argues from the ‘lifeboat economics’ position that ‘the fewer of us there are, the greater for each will be our share; and the more easily we could halt the despoilation of the planet’, adding illogically that the ‘world might become a nicer place to bring children into.’ In reality, resources are not in short supply but unevenly distributed.
If we wish to secure humanity’s future, we must address the shortage of children. But in all the ‘why, oh why’ reports about declining population, there is never a mention of those who have engineered this decline, even though, ever since the 19th century, generously funded ‘birth controllers’ have seen birth prevention, including ‘getting women out to work’, as a way of controlling human numbers.
Mr Parris admits: ‘Of course, if world birth rates stayed below 2.1, humankind would eventually become extinct. But that’s for generations hence to ponder. For our own, there is no shortage of people – quite the reverse.’ One can only imagine the resulting furore if he had suggested that future generations might ‘ponder’ the state of the environment (which he values so highly) after our own generation had trashed it. But if those future generations are never born, there will be no one to ponder anything.
During the UK’s 1978-79 ‘Winter of discontent’ – strikes, go-slows and general economic mayhem – Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan famously remarked ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ Now, even countries with coercive population control (like China) are slamming into reverse, desperately trying to raise birth rates.
Some remain trapped in the ‘overpopulation’ mindset, unable to see that declining birth rates represent the slow suicide of humanity. They still believe there are ‘too many people’; but until we recognise that we are facing not a population explosion but a birth dearth, we cannot address the problem. That is the real crisis.
By Ann Farmer. (Ann Farmer is the author of several books including ‘By Their Fruits: Eugenics, Population Control, and the Abortion Campaign’)