The world is rapidly heading toward a childless dystopia. Consider these shocking statistics:
- The average number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime, the global total fertility rate (TFR), has dropped from 5.3 in the 1960s to 2.3 by 2023.
- The widely accepted replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman, but research suggests a more realistic number for long-term survival is 2.7
- Two-thirds of the world’s people now reside in countries with fertility rates below the 2.1 mark
- In Japan, the TFR is 1.36. Japan’s population is projected to shrink by 31% every generation if current trends continue.
- In South Korea, the TFR has dropped as low as 0.87. South Korea’s population will halve in twenty-two years without immigration.
- In the United States, the TFR is only 1.66. The U.S. TFR was above the 2.1 replacement level as recently as 2007, but is now just 1.62 children per woman over a lifetime
- Fertility has been on a ten-to-fifteen-year slide in nearly all rich democracies. The decline has ranged from dramatic to catastrophic:
- Down 20 percent in France and the US.
- Down 30 percent in Sweden and Finland.
- Down 40 percent in Argentina and Chile.
- Down 50 percent in South Korea.
- Italy’s TFR has fallen so low that without immigration, the country’s population will halve in forty years.
Marriage, Coupling, and Childlessness
- The U.S. marriage rate has been stagnant since 2010. Over this period, the share of never-married forty-year-olds has risen from 20 to 25 percent.
- The mean age at first marriage has increased about 2.5 years for both men and women since 2010.
- The most common number of children born to an American woman aged twenty-five to forty-four is now zero.
- Lifetime female childlessness, currently around 15 percent, is on track to set a national record by surpassing 25 percent.
- In Norway in 2023, only 37 percent of children were born to married parents, one of the lowest levels in the world.
- In the U.S., nearly 50 percent of the overall fertility fall is due to childless women remaining childless. In the Nordic countries, the figure is closer to 90 percent.
Attitudes and Behavior
- A 2023 Pew poll found that only 26 percent of Americans regarded having children as extremely or very important to a fulfilling life. A mere 19 percent of Democrats expressed that belief.
- Another 2023 Pew poll recorded an increase of ten percentage points over only five years among currently childless Americans aged eighteen to forty-nine who say that they are “unlikely” ever to have children.
- Pew found that American women were 7 percent less likely than men to agree that children are important for a fulfilling life, and 10 percent less likely to say the same about marriage.
- Childless women aged eighteen to thirty-four were 12 percent less likely than childless men of the same age to say that they want to be parents someday, and 6 percent more likely to say that they definitely don’t.
- Among eighteen- to thirty-nine-year-olds, single women are 6 percent more likely than single men to say that they are not looking to date
Sources
Paul, Darel E. “Feminism Against Fertility.” First Things, 2025. First Things, https://firstthings.com/feminism-against-fertility/. Accessed 8 May 2025.
Ralls, Eric. “Our current fertility rate isn’t high enough for humanity to survive.” Earth.com, https://www.earth.com/news/our-current-fertility-rate-isnt-enough-for-human-survival/. Accessed 8 May 2025.
