West panic over baby bust isn’t for economists to fix. Leave it to the feminists

Wealthy countries in the West and Asia aren’t producing enough new people but are retaining existing ones longer. The question is, will this become a woman’s burden?

Representational image | Women protesting for reproductive rights | Photo: X (formerly Twitter)/@promuzi

Move over climate change, nuclear threat, new cold war. There are dire warnings that it is all going to end, not from one of these but apparently from The Great Baby Bust.

Data shows many countries in the West and some developed economies in Asia are just not producing enough new people but are retaining existing ones longer—the fear is that some parts of the world will soon be filled with aged and unproductive people with not enough young hands to produce, feed, and pay for their care. That this will lead to a shortage of labour and a slashing of tax collection and government spending.

The question is, will this panic become a woman’s burden? There is even a risk that child-free women will be labelled ‘anti-national’. Republican vice president nominee JD Vance had earlier condemned Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “childless cat ladies” who don’t have a stake in national welfare. This week, he doubled down on his remarks again.

State funds are being offered to married women to have children. But no bribe has been able to reverse a phenomenon that is largely seen by women as a story of success: the freedom to have fewer or no babies.

This is why more women must enter this conversation.

For much of the 21st century, economists and planners panicked about overpopulation. Women were paid to have fewer babies in many countries. Today, they want the opposite.

Women are not baby-breeding machines that you can turn on and off. Freedom is linear—you can’t take it back or put it back in the bottle. It knows to go only in one way. Definitions of freedoms usually, and must, continue to expand in civilised societies. To expect women to give up the sovereignty they finally gained over their bodies is irrational and dangerous. It pushes them back into history.

So far, I don’t see any prominent feminist alliance in the West speaking on the measures to tackle baby bust in the wealthier nations.

Falling fertility rate

A Pew Research Center survey released this week revealed that 47 per cent of Americans below the age of 50 (and without children) said they were unlikely to ever have children. This is a big increase of 10 percentage points since 2018. What was surprising is that a staggering 57 per cent of these didn’t even report any reason for not desiring children. Among those who gave reasons mentioned the 3 Cs: cost, career, and the climate. The US fertility rate was at about 1.6 births per woman in 2023.

The Lancet published a study saying fertility is falling in “more than half of all countries and territories in 2021 below replacement level.”

South Korea will be reduced to half its population by the end of the century. Its fertility rate of 0.72 is among the lowest in the world. China’s population has declined for two consecutive years. Richer nations in the continents of Europe, Asia, and Australia will have to confront dwindling populations by the middle of the next century with fertility rates of less than 1.5.

It’s a no-brainer that as societies advance economically, they tend to get demographically older. Sociologists say that women’s increasing education and participation in the paid labour force delay childbirth. A woman’s education is the most effective birth control pill. Daycare centres and extended maternity benefits were expected to encourage and ease women’s baby-bearing decisions. Now, countries are resorting to directly incentivising child-bearing.

Korea, Japan, and Scandinavian nations are offering huge sums of money and tax breaks to women who bear children. Taiwan has spent more than $3 billion to incentivise women to have more babies. Japan’s government is now playing matchmaker to encourage youth to marry and have children. Iran is offering zero-interest loans and making abortions more difficult. Greece and Italy give baby bonuses. As part of the ‘family-friendly Hungary’ campaign, the Viktor Orban government gives a loan to married couples and the loan is even waived if they have three children.

There’s no evidence these top-down, last-century solutions are working.

Unfinished feminist project

Young women’s “first aspiration” should be to have children, Lavinia Mennuni, the right-wing Italian senator from the ruling party said recently.

It sounds almost medieval to the ear. It’s just been half a century of the pill-induced sexual revolution, women’s work, and mobility. The feminist project is still vastly unfinished. There is still no pay parity, women are still unsafe at work, the glass ceiling continues to be intact for the top positions, and women continue to be disincentivised at work when they become mothers. India continues to report an abysmal deficit of women in workforce—and most of this comes from disruptions arising out of marriage and motherhood. The women workforce project is nowhere near the finishing line.

All this population alarm is rising even as one state after another in the US is rolling back abortion rights and reproductive freedom of women. Louisiana went as far as deeming abortion pills a harmful substance. The overall slide in hard-fought reproductive rights of women is unmissable.

West’s anxiety politics

Two kinds of anxieties are gripping the West’s politics these days: families having fewer babies and immigrants flooding their countries. And far-right politics is surging as these anxieties coalesce—perhaps because of it.

Viktor Orban rails against viewing immigration as a solution. “We want Hungarian children,” he said. “Migration for us is surrender.”

The world’s poorest countries in Africa and the Middle East will continue to experience growing populations with a fertility rate of 2.7, well above the global replacement rate of 2.3. This fuels fears in the West about immigrants.

This anxiety-ridden politics will seek to foreground family values, nationalism, and religion as its tools. And in all three projects, women’s needs and autonomies have historically been pushed down.

Feminists over economists

It is facile to blame independent, careerist women and climate-wary millennials for the birth-strike.

You can’t push young women to have children in order to rescue the economy of the future.

Governments should flip the message and instead say “the economy is there for you to have a baby,” Anna Rotkirch, research director at the Family Federation of Finland’s Population Research Institute, told the Financial Times.

Consult feminist groups instead of knee-jerk responses of turning the clock back. Do feminists even think the baby bust is a woman’s burden?

Philosophers call such a situation ‘the tragedy of the commons’. Each individual may not be impacted by an issue (such as pollution), but society as a whole is deeply and collectively affected. ‘Tragedy of the commons’ problem can’t be fixed with economic policy solutions. It requires a moral philosopher. Feminists are the moral philosophers who can help wealthy nations figure a way out without compromising freedoms.

Rama Lakshmi is Editor, Opinion and Ground Reports at ThePrint. She tweets @RamaNewDelhi. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)