Discourse on the topic seems initially well founded at first, but is largely a disingenuous front for racism, misogyny, and good ol' capitalism.
Increasingly common in contemporary political discourse are discussions of declining birthrates across much of "the West." Over the past decades, this has been an observable trend; across Europe, the US, and the Anglosphere as well as nations attached to the West, such as Japan and South Korea, birthrates for these nations have declined below the natural rates of replacement, signifying an increasingly aged population as well as a declining youth population over time. Some nations, such as the US and Canada, have adapted to this by welcoming and seeking large numbers of immigrants to fill roles citizens alone do not have the numbers to fill. As a result of this decline, a common topic among the center and right is the idea that this low rate is a problem and thereby seek to develop ways to boost the amount of domestic births. While, at first glance, it seems to be a reasonable concern, complaints of "declining birthrates" tend to be disingenuous fronts for racism and misogyny, which in turn are the product of the working class rationalizing a sentiment of infinite growth only understandable from the position of the capitalist.
To be able to properly understand the faults in "pro-birthrate" arguments, one first must understand why birthrates are declining in the first place and why people may see it as a concern. There are two primary drives leading to birthrates going down: 1) Improved living conditions for women, and 2) macroeconomic struggles. In the first case, as is common in much of Western Europe and the Anglosphere, improved living standards for women contributes to a strong decline in number of children born per woman. The most notable causes that improve those conditions are general advancements in healthcare improved contraception, widely available abortion, birth control medication; all of which is affordable under models of universal healthcare – as well as improvements in gender equality, as women are no longer confined to the domestic sphere, as well as stigmatization of rape and underaged relationships. These two factors contribute much to the decline by allowing women to avoid unwanted pregnancies as well as reduce the situations where a pregnancy can become most common, such as at home.
The second instance, that of cyclic economic struggles, is more common in places like the US and East Asia. Suffocating work cultures stifle the free time and effort that child-raising necessitates, and low wages make the financial investment necessary in even one child prohibitively difficult. It is worth noting that these struggles are not the inherent struggles of poverty, but rather the product of developed industrial economies producing the pressing conditions; this is in contrast to many "third world" nations who, while in objectively more poverty, have much higher birthrates as a byproduct of societies not fully industrialized and reliant on agriculture (something labor-intensive and commonly done as a family unit; see the exceptions to the Chinese one-child policy given to farmers) differing from the economic model of the first world. In short, the biggest sources of decline come from improved healthcare, gender equality, poor work-life balances, and low wages.
A low birthrate seems very pressing and existential in the scope of its threat. The rational understanding of the issue in a vacuum would be that a low birthrate could indicate a demographic collapse in the future, rippling into economics and causing massive disruptions. As low birthrates lead to smaller families and smaller workforces, elderly people become a larger burden on the healthcare system, as many have pensions paid to them and thereby raise government expenses, all while lacking younger workforces erode the basis of taxation to fund those payments. To address that, governments would raise taxes on younger workers, leading to the youth increasingly taking care of the old and worsening the crisis of births by making childrearing less appealing with lower incomes and increasingly austere social services for non-seniors. As people have less children in an ever-vicious cycle, cities get smaller and towns fall off of the map. With less and less workers, the economy slows to a halt and becomes increasingly reliant on the consumption spending of a burgeoning population of seniors endlessly stimulated by a government sapping every penny it can from the working populace. In its most “glaring” threat, collapsed birthrates could mean the death of humanity itself in the long run as a product of this cycle.
However, the natural decline of births is not driving the human race to extinction – it is a decline to sustainable levels with consideration to the changes we have made to the carrying capacity for humanity – this is something that naturally occurs in all ecosystems. A given population is given increased access to basic goods needed for survival, they have their basic needs met and then go on to reproduce, which produces a large surplus beyond what the environment can hold, and then afterwards the population declines back to a sustainable equilibrium. The only difference between those populations and humanity is that in the former case it is often much more bloody, as more prey becomes available to hunters with the growth, or the decline in available food leading to starvation in a Malthusian example of population regulation. Humans are willingly, as a product of better welfare and social standards, having less children and naturally regulating themselves.
Naturally, the "pro-natalist" would have a laughably easy solution to the economic issues of childrearing; make raising a family cheaper by subsidizing children’s goods, raise wages to living amounts, and ensure people have time to themselves rather than just their work. Why don't they ever advocate for that? To put it rather simply, it is because the concern for birthrates is not founded in a genuine concern for the future but instead exists as a front for reactionary politics, which in turn is another layer of legitimization for the underlying goal of birthrate discourse; maintaining labor's position as an expendable commodity by the profit-maximizing bourgeoisie.
The first layer of motives, and often the more blatantly obvious, consists of racism and misogyny. Concerns with birthrates are often parroted by figures also pushing for mass deportations and remigration; low birthrates become an existential issue to such people as, often, governments will make up the difference by hiring more immigrants or foreign workers. It would be more accurate to label such views less as "concern for low birthrates endangering humanity" and instead as "concern for low white birthrates." Often intertwined with such concerns are also antisemitic conspiracy theories positing that a shadowy cabal of global elites – Jewish "globalists" – deliberately keep white birthrates down so they can replace their "homelands" with non-white peoples. Variations of this sentiment also, paradoxically, often seek to blame the developing world for issues pertaining to overpopulation. An instance of such would be former British PM Winston Churchill, who remarked that Bengals brought the famine of the 30s on themselves by "breeding like rabbits."
In a much more unambiguously sinister form, birthrate concerns are often also supported by outright regressives seeking to, unconsciously or consciously, erode the position of women in society as equal to and/or independent of men. Some, such as the FOX News dialogue that motivated the authoring of this article, will freak out about birthrates that have declined as a result of falling teenage pregnancy. Another instance would be the drive by Republican-governed states to restrict abortion and contraceptive access as widely as possible, who see forced births as a preferable alternative to letting those finnicky women decide whether or not they are able to actually care for a child at that stage in their life. Because religion is generally a poor manner of justifying political policy, centrists of this inclination often use birthrates as a basis to support abortion restrictions on the grounds of "bipartisan, policy-over-ideology pragmatism."
These two tendencies of thought are the most common among those considered “common people” and are often featured as front-page editorials written by intellectuals. This is an abnormality even in the current reactionary media environment, as, historically the wealthy magnates that own the newspapers pushing this narrative are skittish around outright populist nativism and what is in no uncertain terms pro-rape politics and, while willing to court these potential customers at a distance, sought to keep them separate from any serious position of influence. But birthrates are different – everyone from open racists like Elon Musk to those who obscure their cultural politics like Jeff Bezos are willing to platform sugar-coated versions of Great Replacement rhetoric. The reasoning behind this abnormal choice brings me to my next point.
Labor functions under the same fundamental economic framework as the costs of goods and services, specifically in that it is subject to the demand and supply of a market; there is a price of equilibrium between supply (which is lowered by low prices) and demand (which is lowered by high prices) that firms will generally seek to obtain if price floors and ceilings (such as minimum wages or rent controls) are not set. Labor and its costs are subject to the same basic concepts, and thereby the costs rise and fall with the amount of labor available. This thereby explains many historical developments that may seem foreign to us now – in the Gilded Age of the US, wealthy industrialists supported lax immigration policy – something seen as heterodox to a group widely regarded as conservative today – as it would allow them to devalue labor costs due to the massive supply, while labor groups, who wished to preserve their benefits and bargaining power, were often at the forefront of nativism against Mexican and Chinese immigrants.
Building on the established historical precedent, this also naturally occurred in the 14-15th centuries in Europe during the spread of the bubonic plague. With peasants and general workers being most susceptible to the spread of disease, the number of deaths proportional to each group’s size was disproportionately skewed towards menial laborers. In the ensuing decades, labor shortages would become one of the contributing factors in the development of modernity and abolition of serfdom, as workers naturally obtained considerably stronger power at the negotiation table due to the scarcity of labor, they could set more generous terms and make demands for better conditions – something that the nobility obliged out of necessity.
Looping back to the initial premise of this work, lowered birthrates, too, are a form of population decrease which leads to a reduced supply of workers in the long run. Such a decline would contribute to a scarcer labor market[1] and thereby put upward pressure on wages and benefits much like in the aforementioned example with the Black Death; furthermore, a lowered population would cause profits to dwindle as a lower population means less consumers. Population decline, which is largely occurring because the factors causing the explosive growth in human populations (cheap industrial labor, women being valued near-exclusively on childbearing) have started to erode, utterly flies in the face of the capitalist mantra of infinite growth. For the capitalist, the idea that something cannot grow exponentially and infinitely is inexcusable – as it would inevitably extend to their pursuit of profit – and thereby must be prevented at all costs.
With this direct and existential material incentive to not let populations decline, the capitalist, still reliant on laborers and complicit governments to exist, must legitimize their view with rhetoric on a basis different from just blatant self-interest and personal gain. Thus, they platform anybody willing to complain about it; rightists brazenly utilize racism and antifeminism to court other rightists and build a base of political support, while centrists use the “reasonable bipartisan concern” of an aging population while conveniently ignoring immigration’s role in population equalization, to push the topic into discourse outside of right wing spaces and into liberal and left wing spaces to build support outside of the rightist base.
None of this is meant to be anti-natalist or misanthropic, and I do not wish to convince anyone that having children or supporting the continuing existence of the human race is a bad thing. If anything, I believe the opposite, as those strains of thought are often deeply rooted in ecofascist beliefs. However, the decline of birthrates is by no means a threat to humanity’s existence, and if anything, it is the opposite. The only threats that a naturally regulated population poses are threats posed to the wealth and position of the upper class’s drive for infinite growth in all respects, the same modus operandi of the cancer cell.
[1]Not to be confused with a job shortage, which is currently occurring. The difficult employment market of today is owed to cyclical issues with business ownership, rather than a surplus of labor as those who lament “immigrants are taking our jobs” would like you to believe.
Hello all! I apologize for the very lengthy delay between this post and my last one. I vastly overestimated the time I would have in the spring semester, and so this site became pretty neglected for a bit! Luckily it is now summer, and I have plenty of time to work on it. Thank you for your patience!