We live in a century that worships efficiency. Robots weld, algorithms predict, capital compounds in silence. Yet the arithmetic of humanity is going the other way: fewer cradles, more canes. Across continents, the question is no longer “how many jobs will machines take?” but “who will still be here to care for children, for elders, for us?” The answer is not in coercion or nostalgia. It is in the price we put on care and the rights we guarantee to those who provide it.
The world’s pivot point (facts that matter)
- The UN’s 2024 revision estimates 8.2 billion people in 2024, with a peak just under 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s, then a slow decline driven not by catastrophe, but by falling fertility as countries become richer and older. Two-thirds of humanity already lives where fertility is below the 2.1 “replacement” level (Ined.fr).
- In France, 2023 saw 678,000 births and a total fertility rate (TFR) of 1.68, the lowest since the early 1990s; France remains relatively high by EU standards but is trending down (Insee.fr).
- South Korea is the emblem of ultra-low fertility: TFR 0.72 in 2023, the lowest recorded in the OECD amid long work hours, high housing/education costs, and steep gender gaps that make combining career and motherhood costly (OECD).
- Japan recorded 758,631 births in 2023, an eighth straight annual decline or a demographic winter now shaping policy across the archipelago (Reuters).
- China’s population has shrunk again, with 9.54 million births in 2024 after 9.02 million in 2023, a structural reversal following decades of rapid urbanization and rising costs. (Reuters).
- In Europe, the EU TFR slipped to 1.46 in 2022 and preliminary Eurostat analysis points even lower in 2023. Italy hit ~1.20 in 2023 (and 1.18 in 2024, provisional), while Spain was about 1.19 in 2023, both at or near record lows. (Reuters, European Comission).
What’s really being “refused” is not children, but the deal
Read the interviews behind the numbers and a pattern repeats: women (and couples) are not rejecting children; they are rejecting a contract that penalizes care. When childcare is scarce or expensive, housing unattainable, work inflexible, and careers fragile, fertility falls even where pronatalist subsidies exist. Korea’s experience shows that cash alone cannot offset long hours, rigid jobs, and gender-unequal risk.
Should we “control” births at 8 billion?
No. Coercion is both unethical and ineffective. The UN’s own storyline is that the global slowdown is already here, and the peak is in sight without controls. Where fertility is still high (notably parts of sub-Saharan Africa), voluntary levers (girls’ education, reproductive health access, and economic opportunity) lower fertility while raising well-being. That’s the development playbook, not population policing.
Mothers’ rights in a machine world
The hidden variable in all the charts is time, specifically, women’s time. We have automated production, but not care. A society that values machines more than caregivers will always be short of babies and short of hands to hold the old.
A rights-and-care compact that actually moves the needle:
- Guarantee the right to affordable, universal early-childhood care (from birth to school entry). Countries that built dense childcare networks slowed their fertility decline more than those that paid lump-sum bonuses. (Korea’s OECD review is explicit on childcare alignment with working hours.)
- Make work fit families: enforce predictable schedules, cap extreme hours, and normalize flexible/remote options without career penalties (core frictions flagged in low-fertility labor markets).
- Close gender pay and promotion gaps and protect against motherhood penalties (pregnancy discrimination, stalled careers). Where gaps are large, births are delayed or forgone.
- Treat housing as fertility policy: high urban housing costs correlate with later, fewer births (Korea, Spain, Italy). Target supply where jobs are.
- Use migration as the honest stabilizer: Europe’s slight population growth now leans more on net migration than natural increase, including in France. Managed, skills-aware migration eases aging pressures.
- Aim AI at the care deficit: if machines raise productivity, recycle the gains into paid parental leave with high replacement rates, eldercare systems, and portable social rights for non-linear careers. (Korea’s low replacement rates and weak protection reduce leave take-up.)
Countries to watch (and why)
- Korea, Japan: testbeds for whether deep labor-market reform plus childcare and gender-equity policy can lift TFR off the floor (OECD).
- Italy, Spain: Southern Europe’s lesson that bonuses without structural fixes (housing, jobs, childcare) don’t change trajectories (ft.com).
- France: still among the EU’s “less-low” group but drifting downward; policy will decide whether it remains an outlier (INSEE).
- China: from one-child to many-incentives, yet births keep falling; the long tail of urban cost and gender inequality is hard to reverse (Reuters).
So why bring children into this world?
Because the value of human life is not a spreadsheet cell. The machine age can either compress care into unpaid heroism or fund it, insure it, and honor it. Demography isn’t destiny; policy is. If we price care fairly and protect mothers’ (and fathers’) time, fertility will settle where people’s real aspirations, not their constraints, lead them. The future, then, is neither a baby boom nor a birth-control decree. It’s a care economy that lets families choose without punishment.
Sources
- UN, World Population Prospects 2024 (global totals, peak timing, share living below replacement).
- INSEE (France) : Demographic report 2023 (births 678k; TFR 1.68).
- OECD (2024), Korea’s unborn future (TFR 0.72; childcare/work-time/gender-gap drivers; leave design).
- Reuters (2024) : Japan births 2023 (758,631; marriages fall).
- Reuters (2025) & China NBS (2024) : China population decline; births 2024 (9.54 m) and 2023 (9.02 m).
- Eurostat (2024) : EU TFR 1.46 (2022); 2023 moving lower.
- ISTAT (2025 release) : Italy TFR 1.20 (2023), 1.18 (2024) provisional.
- Reuters (2024) : Spain births 2023, TFR ~1.19.