Mesmerizing charts show the world’s most and least populated countries over time – and how the UK has slipped down the rankings and out of the top 20
Women worldwide are having fewer children on average now than in previous generations.
The trend, down to increased access to education and birth control, more women taking jobs and changing attitudes about having children, is expected to see dozens of countries’ populations shrink by 2100.
Dr. Jennifer Sciubba, author of 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World, told MailOnline that people are choosing to have smaller families and that the change ‘is permanent’.
“So it’s wise to focus on working in this new reality rather than trying to change it,” she said.
Sex education and contraception
An increase in education and access to contraception is one of the reasons for the decline in the global fertility rate.
Pregnancy and contraception education has increased, and sex education began in the US in the 1970s and became compulsory in the UK in the 1990s.
“There’s an old saying that ‘education is the best birth control’ and I think it’s relevant” to explain the fall in birth rates, said Professor Allan Pacey, andrologist at the University of Sheffield and former chairman of British Fertility Society.
Elina Pradhan, a senior health specialist at the World Bank, suggests that more educated women are choosing to have fewer children because of concerns about earning less when they take time off before and after giving birth.
In the UK, three in 10 mothers and one in 20 fathers report having to cut back on their working hours due to childcare, according to ONS data.
They may also have more exposure to different ideas about family sizes through school and connections they make during their education, encouraging them to think more critically about the number of children they want, she said.
And more educated women may know more about prenatal care and child health and may have more access to health care, Ms. Pradhan added.
Professor Jonathan Portes, an economist at King’s College London, said women’s greater control over their own fertility means ‘households, and women in particular, both want and are able to have fewer children’.
More women are entering the workplace
More women are in the workplace now than they were 50 years ago – 72 versus 52 percent – which has contributed to the global fertility rate being halved over the same period.
Professor Portes also noted that the decline in the birth rate may also be due to the structure of the labor and housing markets, expensive childcare and gender roles that make it difficult for many women to combine career aspirations with having a family.
The UK government has “implemented the most anti-family policies of any government in living memory” by slashing services that support families, along with benefit cuts that “deliberately penalize low-income families with children”, he added.
As more women have entered the workplace, the age at which they start a family has been pushed back. Data from the ONS shows that the most common age for a woman born in 1949 was 22. But women born in 1975 were most likely to have children when they were 31 years old.
In another sign that late motherhood is on the rise, half of women born in 1990, the latest cohort to reach age 30, remained childless at 30 – the highest rate on record.
Women repeatedly point to work-related reasons for delaying having children, and studies show that most women want to advance further up the career ladder before becoming pregnant.
But the move can lead to women having fewer children than they had planned. In the 1990s, just 6,700 cycles of IVF – a technique to help people with fertility problems have a baby – took place in the UK annually. But this rose to more than 69,000 in 2019, suggesting more women are struggling to conceive naturally.
Falling sperm count
Reproductive experts have also raised the alarm that biological factors, such as declining sperm counts and changes in sexual development, could “threaten human survival”.
Dr. Shanna Swan, an epidemiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, authored a groundbreaking 2017 study that revealed that global sperm counts have fallen by more than half over the past four decades.
She warned that ‘chemicals everywhere’, such as phthalates found in toiletries, food packaging and children’s toys, are to blame. The chemicals cause hormonal imbalances that can wreak “reproductive havoc,” she said.
Factors including tobacco and marijuana smoking and rising obesity rates may also play a role, Dr. Swan.
Studies have also pointed to air pollution for decreasing fertility rates, suggesting that it triggers inflammation that can harm egg and sperm production.
However, Professor Pacey, a sperm quality and fertility expert, said: ‘I really don’t think any changes in sperm quality are responsible for the fall in birth rates.
“Actually, I don’t believe the current evidence that sperm quality has decreased.”
He said: ‘I think a much bigger problem for declining birth rates is the fact that: (a) people are choosing to have fewer children; and (b) they wait to get them until they are older.’
Fear of bringing children into the world
Choosing not to have children is cited by some scientists as the best thing a person can do for the planet, compared to reducing energy consumption, traveling and making food choices based on their carbon footprint.
Researchers at Oregon State University have calculated that each child adds about 9,441 tonnes of carbon dioxide to a woman’s ‘carbon legacy’. Each ton is equivalent to driving around the circumference of the earth.
Experts say the data is discouraging the climate-conscious from having babies, while others are opting out of children because of fears around the world they will grow up in.
Dr. Britt Wray, a human and planetary health fellow at Stanford University, said the decline in fertility rates was due to a “fear of a degraded future due to climate change”.
She was one of the authors behind a Lancet study of 10,000 volunteers, which revealed four out of ten young people fear bringing children into the world because of climate problems.
Professor David Coleman, emeritus professor of demography at Oxford University, told MailOnline that people’s decision not to have children is ‘understandable’ due to adverse conditions such as climate change.