Empty infant beds sit gathered in a corner in a quiet maternity ward at rural Madera Community Hospital which closed in January 2023 in Madera, California.  

The time has apparently come to panic about global declining birthrates, again.

“America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population,” worried the Economist, in one of many representative headlines I’ve spotted over recent months. “The EU faces a major demographic decline,” warned Euronews.“Japan’s latest plan to reverse declining birth- rate,” teased a recent News- week headline. The Wall Street Journal put the finest point on it: “Suddenly there aren’t enough babies.”

In the United States, this discussion could be linked to some April news from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: The fertility rate in the United States decreased by 3% between 2022 and 2023. Aside from a 1% increase in 2021 — a pandemic blip, maybe — that’s the 10th consecutive year that fertility rates have fallen in America.

And so, the headlines. And so, the worrying.

Perhaps you are wondering, as I did, why we should care about this population decline. Have studies that shown women and couples are happier if they have more children? Not to my knowledge — in fact, many show the opposite: that while children may bring tremendous joy, they also bring tremendous stress to marriages. Do women want to have more children, but they somehow feel they are unable to? Maybe — though it appears that the birthrate is declining even in countries that have implemented family-friendly policies such as extended parental leave. Are more humans on Earth better for the planet? LOL.

So what exactly are we talking about when we say that suddenly there aren’t enough babies? Enough babies for whom?

“Where will a nation’s economic growth come from if companies cannot recruit enough workers?” asked a recent BBC article. “How can a smaller workforce afford to pay for the pensions of a much larger retired population?”

Ah. Aha. It turns out that when news articles and the economists quoted in them worry about the declining birthrate, what they’re saying, almost without exception, is that there aren’t enough babies for the economy.

Which means that … this is not my problem. Or rather, it is my problem, because one day I too would like to receive the Social Security benefits I’ve been paying into since I was 15. But this seems like a matter for policies, not pregnancies. And I am curious to know why an economic dilemma, the kind you might expect to be tackled by corporations or governments or NGOs, is instead presented as a dilemma to be solved by uteruses.

The only parts of the world where the birthrate seems to be steady or increasing right now are in places in which birth control is hard to come by and where women’s roles are relegated to domestic labor.

Instead of asking, How do we get more people to have babies? maybe it’s asking, How do we best care for the people already on this planet?

We need a backup plan. One that does not involve women on their backs.