Falling birth rates are usually treated as an economic problem. But the deeper crisis may be cultural: societies losing faith that the future will contain something worth creating.
The worldwide collapse in birth rates is not chiefly economic but anthropological. It reveals societies that no longer expect anything genuinely new, with loneliness its statistical twin.
Let me start with a figure from my own country. This week, Italy’s national statistics institute released new population projections. The median scenario projects the country’s population would fall from 58.9 million in 2025 to 55 million in 2050 and to 45.8 million in 2080; the share of people over 65 would climb from 24.7 per cent today to 34.5 per cent by mid-century.
The number that matters more than any of the totals, though, concerns the shape of households: in 2047, couples without children will outnumber those with children.
It looks like a local story but Italy is better read as an early indicator of something that left Europe behind some time ago, and that can be seen in its most advanced form in East Asia.
In 2025, East Asian fertility fell below one child per woman. Japan stood at 1.14; China at roughly 0.9, which is below the target of its one-child policy; South Korea at 0.8 and Taiwan at 0.695. Seoul recorded 0.63, and Macau 0.47. Singapore is at 0.87, and Thailand at 0.93. In the same year, the region counted three deaths for every two births, and Japan registered 671,000 births, fewer than in 1873, when it started keeping the count.
The rest of the world is on the same curve, at varying distances from the front.
In 2024, fertility in the European Union fell to 1.34 children per woman, the lowest figure since Eurostat began calculating the aggregate. None of its 27 member states reached the replacement threshold. Projections place Europe’s population peak in 2029 with a decline to 398.8 million by 2100.
Mexico City is at 0.96, Bogotá at 0.8, Chile at 1.03. Delhi is at 1.2, Ankara at 1.15. The Philippines, the most populous Catholic country in Asia, is at 1.7, and Manila at 1.4.
In a report published on 20 August by the American Enterprise Institute, Nicholas Eberstadt and Patrick Norrick calculate that in 2023, more than 70 per cent of humanity was already living in sub-replacement societies, and that every continent except Africa had crossed the sub-replacement threshold.
More than 50 countries and territories now record more deaths than births, and more than a quarter of the world’s population already lives in such conditions. This is where the economic explanation gives way. The low-fertility regime now includes an Islamic theocracy like Iran, poor rural countries like Nepal and Myanmar, and Brazil, which never had a national family-planning program.
Eberstadt notes that the best statistical predictor, with about 90 per cent accuracy, of a society’s fertility remains the number of children women say they want. What has shifted is desire, ahead of circumstance.
Technical answers also exist, and they deserve to be taken seriously.
Immigration offsets negative natural balances, but the countries people leave are themselves falling below the threshold, and the offset has an expiry date.
Welfare systems can be redesigned, retirement ages pushed back, and women’s participation in the labour force supported by services that are missing almost everywhere.
Yet when childbearing is defended because it keeps the pension system solvent, one has already conceded the premise that makes having children difficult: that a person is worth whatever function they perform. A child, by that definition, is of no use to anyone.
The anthropological heart of the matter lies here. To bring a child into the world is to bind oneself to a stretch of time one does not control. A society stops having children when it begins to picture tomorrow as an administered extension of today, populated by the same people, only slightly older. Read this way, the decline in births is a forecast: nothing genuinely new is expected to happen.
The statistical obverse is loneliness. To stay with the Italian case, by 2050 nearly 45 per cent of households will contain no family nucleus, and more than half of those living alone will be over 65.
The decline in births and the rise of solitary life are two sides of the same phenomenon.
Pope Leo XIV addressed the question of demographic decline on 25 May, when he met with the European Parliament’s Demography Intergroup. He spoke of a “pandemic of loneliness” as a structural factor in the decline in birth rates and reminded his listeners that demographic data concern fatherhood, motherhood and children.
At the same address, the pope traced the continent’s “drastic sterility” in part to the rejection of the Christian inspiration of Europe’s institutional founders. This has been contested, and it is worth revisiting for what it claims about causation: that fertility rests on shared sources of meaning before it rests on policy.
If the hypothesis holds, East Asia is the severest test available because the collapse in births there has persisted across wildly different religious traditions without slowing.
Christianity has never equated fecundity with biological generation. For centuries, monasticism and consecrated virginity were forms of generativity directed toward a future that did not belong to those who embraced them. Those without children copied manuscripts, cleared land and founded hospitals and schools for people not yet born.
It is in that direction, before family policy, that the Church’s own contribution is to be looked for.
Magnifica Humanitas, presented on the same morning as that address and left standing apart from it in the discussion that followed, offers the frame within which the demographic question ought to be reconsidered.
In 1862, 355,000 children were born in Italy; in 2025, the figure was 833,000. Eberstadt and Norrick suggest that one would probably have to go back to the first decades of the 16th century to find a figure that low.
A country can live well with fewer inhabitants. The scarcity these projections raise is of another kind: whether the future still has a face or has become a scenario to be managed.
Republished from Global Catholic
Antonio Spadaro
Antonio Spadaro, SJ, is undersecretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See. He is a member of the board of directors of Georgetown University and an Ordinary academic of the Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts and Letters of the Virtuosi al Pantheon. He was editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica for 12 years.