The example I will give you is even more difficult for most people to accept. Humans have largely stopped reproducing, and unless women want to tell men that it was the responsibility of the male population to force them to stay home and have babies, then women need to accept responsibility.
It could be observed that it is only societies that have been influenced by Western Christianity that are choosing to become infertile, but the truth is that as the rest of the world is exposed to western culture, the more likely they are to aspire to that lifestyle. Even Muslim families who emigrate to western societies soon adopt that society’s behaviors and it is common for parents to lament the way that their daughters stop acting traditionally, including declines in birth rates.
Family structures went from 4+ children per household in the 1970s and earlier, to the current projection of about 1.3 and falling. Nearly 20% of women currently state that they do not intend on having any children and of those who do, nearly all of them are delaying childbirth until their mid to late 30s.
Even having two children per household is a path to extinction. Math and biology, as I so often say, are tyrants.
If all women had two children, only 47.5% of them would be female. Of those in developed countries, one in four women, approximately 25%, struggle with biological fecundity, difficulty conceiving. The implication in the United States is that at the rate of decline in our fertility rate (1.7 and falling rapidly), for every 1,000 women today, there will be approximately 50 in four generations.
South Korea is an excellent example, if you call it that. Of every 100 Koreans alive today, there will be 4 by 2100. That is a 96% depopulation, and they have reached the point where it can not be reversed. In biology this is called the evolutionary trajectory point of no return, where the math and biology collide to indicate that even if every woman alive started doing nothing except having babies, our gestation period and the length of time it takes to reach reproductive puberty cannot overcome the curve of the population decline.
Similar to South Korea, every developed nation on earth is at or nearing that event horizon.
A recent article I read on the website Cofertility, indicates that in the year 2024 the increase in women freezing their eggs in the hope of delaying fertility is growing at a rate of 30% year over year. At the same time, sperm viability is falling to the point where only 4% of prospective donors qualify. The implication of this, combined with other trends, is that in the near future humans will essentially be inbred father-daughter breeding.
One of the most rapidly growing trends is that women with college degrees are as much as 54% more likely to have their first child after the age of 30 and family size will be one child. In 1960, half of all babies were born to women under the age of 22 and family size was four children.
It is clear that we are approaching a point in history that has never been experienced. Perhaps we should turn our attention to discussions of how we got to this point in our society and what can be done about it.
As I often say, Math and Biology are rational tyrants. To understand the fertility crisis, let’s explore further what happens over a 100 year example when we take two populations of 1,000 women with one of them having children at twenty years old, birthing four babies by the time they are thirty; then take the other population and have them start at age 35, having only one child.
This is just an example, and there are many variables, including that about 20% of women are either infertile or struggle with fecundity. Looking at this simple exercise though, will give us the general idea of the issue.
Consider that the global ratio of girls born to boys is only .95. That means out of 200 births, 95 will be girls. The implication of this is that in the first generation, the second population of 1,000 women only produced 475 girls with a 35-year spread in pregnancies, but the first population produced 1900 girls spread 25 years apart. The second generation produces 3600 females in the first group, but only 226 in the second group. That is the last birth generation in our model for the 35-year group, but the 25-year group has two more generations to go.
When you extend these theoretical populations and their birth demographics over a one-hundred-year time frame, you will find that at the end of that period the first population of 1,000 women has grown to more than 27,000 people, but the second population has shrunk to under 500 people, less than half of which are female. At that rate, the group that only has one child becomes extinct in four generations.
All content is either original and owned by V S Campbell, Author, or licensed for use from DepositPhotos.com. user ID 74584362.
Author Website: www.vscampbell.com
