Are Infertility Deniers the New Climate Change Deniers?

Scientists have been warning the public about dropping birth rates for decades. So why isn’t anyone listening?

In a maternity ward in Nicosia, Italy, tiny beds with starched white sheets are arranged in a single file. The beep-beep of heart rate monitors echoes down the hall. A nurse sits in the corner reading a book, occasionally glancing at her watch. She has nothing to do.

She has nothing to do because the beds are empty. There are no babies.

If you are an exhausted American parent, you probably are not too worried about well-rested childless people in other parts of the world. But demographers are worried. They have sounded the alarm for over a decade, and their warning is dire.

The US has entered an infertility crisis that may be too late to reverse.

It’s a different narrative from the one that many of us have been fed. Since the 1960s, we have been taught that population growth, not decline, is the real problem. There are far too many people on the planet. Babies not being born? One less human to waste valuable resources. Or so the Malthusian story goes.

But it’s not overall population growth or decline that should alarm people. It’s where we are experiencing population growth — only in older generations.

In the last decades, fewer babies have been born, but more people are living longer. In 1960, 9 percent of the US population was sixty-five and older. In 2018, 16 percent of the population was sixty-five and older. Demographers call this inverted population growth. And you will be hearing that term a lot in the coming years.

Inverted population growth comes with obvious economic consequences. As the US population ages, society does not have enough working class to support the retired class. This means your retirement will look a tad less posh without anyone to fund social security and rising health care costs.

Some demographers believe we have already reached the tipping point. In 2017, the US birth rate was 16 percent lower than necessary to sustain population growth. Researcher and clinician Niels Skakkerback, MD, does not mince words — “the species is under threat,” he warns. “If this doesn’t change in a generation, it is going to be an enormously different society for our grandchildren.”

To maintain the current population size, every American woman must have 2.1 children each. But that’s not happening. In 2017, the birth rate was 1.8. In 2020, the US birth rate was 1.64 — the lowest in thirty-two years.

At first blush, it may seem declining birthrates are due to women having children later in life or choosing not to have them. That is true to some degree, but the picture is not that black and white. Fertility rates are dropping in all ages, not just older couples. In fact, fertility rates have dropped the most dramatically in younger women.

Many millennials can not afford to have children (and those that did are not too keen to have more, given their financial struggles). Gone are the days when you could pop out a few kids and put them to work plowing fields, feeding livestock, or toiling away in a factory. Children are now a financial burden that only the wealthy can afford.

The pandemic has accelerated this trend. When the pandemic first hit, clickbait articles predicted a baby boom. Every economist scoffed at those predictions. In times of economic uncertainties, people have fewer children, not more. In 2020, the US birthrate dropped to the lowest since the Boom era.

And then some parents cannot have children. In Western countries, the average twentysomething woman is less fertile than her grandmother was at thirty-five. Miscarriage rates have increased by 1 percent per year.

Miscarriages are commonly blamed on the woman, but 50 percent of infertility problems lie with the male. Endocrine disrupters found in plastics, pesticides, and solvents have caused a drop in testosterone in men. And lower testosterone moves in lockstep with lower sperm counts. The result — sperm counts have dropped by 50 percent in the last forty years.

And it’s not just our species who are suffering. Polar bears are struggling with reduced testosterone levels, shorter penises, and smaller testicles. Female sea snails are developing male sex organs. Alligators now have such short penises that they can’t get the job done. (And as testosterone rates drop further…expect to see shorter penises in Homo sapiens too.)

What lessons can we learn from history?

Many deny the infertility crisis because we don’t have a comparable example of birthrates being disrupted. The closest example was the fourteenth-century bubonic plague when a third of the population died in some areas. This resulted in a drop and then a sudden rise in population. But that baby boom helped seed the middle class and grow the economy.

The infertility rates we are experiencing now are not due to mother nature. They are due to mothers. Or, more specifically, women choosing not to become mothers. Our planet has never experienced a slow death in the desire to have children. And that is a thorny problem.

We do have some lessons from history, and they are ones we should not repeat. Before birth control and female reproductive rights, women were treated like broodmares. And to some degree, they still are. I recently watched an all-male discussion panel of scientists debating how they can incentivize more women to have children and delay their careers.

Let that sink in…If a panel of all-male scientists debating how to make more women pregnant doesn’t scare the hell out of you, then you need to brush up on your Atwood.

“Demography is Destination” — Auguste Comte

Economists have come up with two solutions.

The first solution is to give couples more incentives to have children. Some countries are already doing this. Japan and France have offered cash incentives, larger tax breaks, and more affordable childcare to new parents. It has resulted in more babies filling maternity wards (although the pandemic slowed gains).

But not every part of the world is experiencing a baby bust. In the Congo and Mali, the birthrate is 6.0, and that pattern is repeated in many parts of Africa. This brings us to our second solution — allow more migrants into the country to replace the lost younger workforce.

Oh, I can hear the collective gasps from Conservatives now…

The Trump administration bred a fallacy that immigration hurts the economy and increases crime. But every economist will tell you that is not true. But good luck disabusing Conservatives that immigrants are not the monsters under the bed.

In Nicosia, Italy, the town bells ring every time a baby is born. The bells are now silent. Only five babies were born in the last year. In the span of twenty years, the birthrate has halved.

Unfortunately, the infertility crisis is not going to resolve overnight. But here’s the worst thing we can do — not talk about the problem. Ignore it and let it get to a point where women’s reproductive rights are compromised.

So if you know an infertility denier…spread the word. Talk about it at the dinner table. Educate yourself on endocrine disruptors. Demand more affordable childcare from our government.

Because what I won’t tell you to do is make babies. That’s a decision no one should be forced to make. Let’s hope we never get to that point.

About the author:

Carlyn Beccia is an author, illustrator, columnist, and speaker. Beccia's books, including The Raucous Royals, I Feel Better with a Frog in My Throat, They Lost Their Heads, and Monstrous have won numerous awards, including the Golden Kite Honor, The International Reading Association's Young Adult Book Award, and the Cybil Award. For more information: www.CarlynBeccia.com