Written by Olivia Nater | Published: September 24, 2026
In high- and middle-income countries, “baby bust” panic has seemingly replaced overpopulation concern, with many governments attempting to increase fertility rates (the number of births per woman). While global fertility decline reflects women’s empowerment, fertility rates in many countries are now well below the replacement rate and still falling. A new study attempts to summarize this trend and its drivers.
The global fertility rate has declined significantly over the last six decades, from around 5 births per woman in 1966 to just 2.2 today. This is largely due to the development of and expanding availability of modern contraceptives, girls’ improved access to education, women’s increasing autonomy, and decreasing rates of child marriage and teen pregnancy.
Between 1994 and 2024, for example, the adolescent birthrate dropped from 74 to 38 births per 1,000 girls aged 15–19, and from 4 births to 1 birth per 1,000 girls aged 10–14 years. These are tremendous human rights victories, a fact that is generally overlooked by those lamenting the falling fertility trend.
According to the United Nations, fertility rates have fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman in 55 percent of all countries and areas, accounting for more than two-thirds of the global population. This means that in the absence of net immigration, these populations would eventually begin to decline. Some countries are already shrinking, including China, Japan, Italy, Russia, and most of Eastern Europe.
Today, more than a quarter of the global population — over 2 billion people — live in countries with a very low total fertility rate below 1.3 births per woman. China alone, which has a fertility rate of just 1, accounts for 1.4 billion of these people. South Korea is the country with the world’s lowest fertility rate, at just 0.8 births per woman.
Not only are people having fewer children — the proportion of people completely forgoing parenthood is also increasing.
A new paper by demographer Tomáš Sobotka, The global fertility freefall: trends, drivers and uncertainties, published in Reproductive BioMedicine Online, notes that in some countries, including Italy, Spain, and Japan, up to 25–30% of women born between the 1960s and the early 1980s don’t have children.
While media outlets often make it sound like the declining birthrate is a tragedy, surveys (including Population Connection’s own 2024 survey on Americans’ fertility intentions and outcomes) indicate that in many countries, the majority of people now have a preference for a small family size.
Smaller families bring multiple benefits, such as enabling greater investment per child, more disposable income, and more freedom for couples to pursue careers and hobbies.
Sobotka points at research showing that among French women aged 18–24 years, the cited number of desired children decreased from 2.5 in 2005 to just 1.9 in 2024.
Once smaller families become common, they start to become the social norm. This is particularly noticeable in China, which still has a very low fertility rate of just one birth per woman despite the removal of its strict one- and then two-child policy in 2016 and 2021, respectively.
While a growing proportion of young people are childfree by choice, surveys indicate that the majority still want children, and that two kids has become the most popular desired family size across most parts of the world.
So why are fertility rates significantly lower than this in so many countries?
The reasons behind sustained fertility decline are multifaceted and complex. Sobotka explains that historically, fertility rates would usually fall during economic shocks but then bounce back during periods of increasing prosperity. Nowadays, we are no longer seeing these recovery periods — low fertility has become entrenched.
Sobotka describes the Great Recession of 2008–2010 as “a watershed moment heralding a new era of low and less stable fertility and a shift to lower and more ambiguous fertility preferences.”
Financial constraints are the most frequently cited factor behind fertility decline. The paper points out that rental and housing prices have increased faster than inflation across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries since 2013, while young people in many parts of Europe experienced stagnating or declining wages despite economic growth during the 2010s.
In a 2026 UNFPA survey of more than 100,000 young people across 73 countries and territories, 88% of respondents rated financial security as an important precondition for having children, followed by stable employment at 87%.
Sobotka highlights that even wealthy nations with family-friendly policies, such as the Nordic countries and France, saw continued fertility declines during the post-2010 period.
While finances appear to be a significant contributor, Sobotka suggests that the low fertility trend has been further amplified by recent and emerging crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and new armed conflicts, as well as deepening worries about the future that make prospective parents believe their offspring would be significantly worse off than them.
Indeed, concern over the state of the world was tied with economic constraints as the leading limiting factor on people’s family size intentions and outcomes in Population Connection’s US-based survey. Author Anna Louie Sussman describes it as “young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood.”
In many countries, expectations that women should perform the vast majority of household and childcare duties are also driving fertility rates down. Sobotka cites research by economist Claudia Goldin which found fertility rates to be lower in OECD nations where women do significantly more unpaid household and care work than men.
He adds,
“Research on East Asia suggests that, in the face of persistent gender discrimination in employment as well as highly unequal gender norms and behaviours relating to parenthood, childcare, elder care and household work, some women are giving up on marriage and childbearing.”
Linked to this is the fact that an increasing share of young people are no longer getting married or living with a partner, while many are also not dating or engaging in intimate relationships. These changing relationship dynamics are likely also partially driven by gender inequality, or rather, growing female resistance to patriarchal injustices (a link not explored in the paper). Ultra-low-fertility South Korea, for example, is home to the feminist 4B movement, which calls on women to say no to heterosexual marriage, motherhood, dating, and sex with men.
Men are now more likely to be involuntarily single than women, and generally want a higher number of children than women do.
Because of persistent and rampant gender-based violence (most often perpetrated by men toward their partners), sexist attitudes and expectations, “motherhood penalties,” and increasing female emancipation, women are now opting out of traditional gender roles in droves, while many men are digging in their heels. Young women are increasingly moving left on the political spectrum, whereas young men are shifting rightward — a polarization that is being amplified by social media algorithms.
The fact that young people are spending more time on their phones and less time socializing may further reduce the likelihood of finding a partner and getting pregnant.
Some authors have linked the declining birthrate to dropping sperm counts, but Sobotka argues that “the evidence is mixed and contested.” He notes that delayed parenthood likely plays a more important role:
“Women in parts of Europe and East Asia (including Japan, Italy, Germany and Spain) become mothers at ages 30–32 years, about 8 years later than was seen in the 1970s. The mean age at first birth in South Korea is higher still, at 33 years on average.”
Delaying pregnancy affects the total number of kids a woman can have in her lifetime due to a limited fertile window and increased difficulty conceiving at older ages.
The observed fertility decline is partly attributable to postponement of childbearing, which can mask the actual number of children women eventually have.
Delayed childbearing depresses the commonly used (period) total fertility rate (TFR), which is calculated as the average number of children born to a woman if she lived to the end of her childbearing years and experienced the same age-specific fertility rates throughout her reproductive life as the age-specific fertility rates seen in that particular year. In other words, it provides a snapshot of fertility rates in one particular year and may thus underestimate the total number of children a woman will actually have at the end of her fertile period. Completed cohort fertility rate, the average number of children born to women in a specific birth cohort by the end of their childbearing years, is a more accurate measure, but can only be determined retrospectively. We don’t yet know the CCFR for the women who are of childbearing age today, thus we need to use TFR to estimate contemporary fertility rates. However, we do know that in recent decades, compared to the rapidly dropping TFR, CCFR has remained relatively steady.
[Here is a detailed explanation of the difference between TFR and CCFR for those interested in learning more.]
Concern over low fertility is mostly driven by fears of the impacts of population aging and decline on economies, and in some countries, by nationalist desires to maintain the dominance of traditional ethnic groups, cultures, and religions, as well as a strong military.
Even if fertility rates in some areas remain very low for a while, there is no reason to panic. At the global level, the total fertility rate is not projected to reach the replacement level until 2050, while our global population is projected to keep growing to more than 10 billion people this century. In other words, we are nowhere close to running out of people.
As we’ve repeatedly argued at Population Connection, the low fertility trend is in large part a positive development reflecting women gaining more choices over their bodies and lives, as well as people practicing more thoughtful and considerate family planning (i.e. wanting to achieve certain preconditions to better meet kids’ needs).
Two low-fertility-related developments are unfortunate, however. One is the fact that young people feel hindered by unaffordability and the dire state of the world, and the other (not explored in the paper) is the growing gender divide, with many women opting out of relationships and parenthood because of men’s unwillingness to build a more gender-equal world.
As Sobotka writes,
“The complex nature of contemporary low fertility means that policies aimed to increase fertility are unlikely to bring a sustained fertility upturn. Many governments have expanded family policies and implemented new schemes for supporting parents, often in the form of financial benefits to families. But these benefits pale in the face of the high and rising monetary costs of children to families and they are often unable to address the barriers many people face when planning to have a child, such as labour market uncertainty, unaffordable housing, worries about the future or lack of a suitable partner.”
Sobotka states that we need bolder policies that provide “time, resources, support and flexibility to parents from different backgrounds and social groups to help them realize their fertility plans.”
This is true, but we also need to go beyond that and pursue a cultural paradigm (r)evolution to bring about greater equality and well-being, peace and security, and a safe and healthy environment.
