Dear Friend,
“Human Fertility Levels Need to Be Higher to Avoid Extinction.”
That recent U.S. News & World Report headline implies we may soon join the dodo bird, woolly mammoth, and Tyrannosaurus rex on the vanished species list.
It’s absurd, of course. There are more of us today than ever before. In fact, global population has more than tripled just since 1950.
That doesn’t prevent birth dearthers from hyperventilating over relatively recent reductions in average family size — while glossing over the fact that world population will increase by more than 70 million people this year.
Pronatalists constantly claim that small families will bankrupt the United States due to increased costs relating to an aging population. Goldman Sachs recently reported that this is much ado about not much since additional care costs are more than offset by revenue generated due to Americans extending their working years. Their report concludes: “Transitions are often difficult to manage, but this is one transition that we are currently managing well.” Certainly, there are funding challenges facing Social Security and Medicare, but they can be met as in the past.
Meanwhile, let’s not overreact to recent reports of sharp reductions in US family size. A 2023 study published in Population Research and Policy Review reported that “the lifetime fertility is (or can be projected to be) at or near replacement levels for the oldest cohorts of US women.” Regarding those now in their teens and early 20s, the researchers concluded, “Similar clues for these cohorts can be obtained by monitoring their future fertility intentions and desires, which to date continue to follow a two-child norm and thus closely resemble those in older cohorts.”
While we simply don’t know what we can’t yet know, it can be hard for some to avoid “jumping to confusions” when we are constantly bombarded with narratives that elide inconvenient facts such as continued rapid population growth. Every day, we deplete nonrenewable resources and destroy the fabric of nature. And now we must deal with the Trump administration’s wholesale assault on reproductive health here at home and its callous cancellation of US investments in international family planning—a program that has been in place since Lyndon Johnson was president. Those are the extinction events we should be worrying about this very minute.
We face an uphill battle fulfilling the right to all forms of reproductive health care as well as ensuring that children everywhere are planned, wanted, and have a great future. If, in the meantime, we see reductions in population numbers in the US and around the world due to people choosing smaller families, that could alleviate all sorts of social and environmental pressures. Just imagine if we could proclaim the extinction of climate change, hunger, water shortages, extreme poverty, and biodiversity loss. What a world that would be.
