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Yvana van den Hork  •  26-01-2025

Why are fertility rates declining around the world?

Why are fertility rates declining around the world?

Why are fertility rates declining around the world?

Anyone who has been following the news even a little bit, will have noticed the following contradiction: on one hand, our country is bursting at the seams due to the influx of migrant workers, foreign students and asylum seekers, while on the other hand, we have been reading about the doomsday scenario of a rapidly ageing population for a few decades already.
 
While we thought for the longest time this would mainly occur in countries where a true population explosion took place after the Second World War upon which this generation is rightly referred to as 'baby boomers', it now appears that this birth rate crash also applies to other parts of the world, with the exception of developing countries, where birth control measures are difficult to access, such as in Africa and parts of Asia.
 
Pieter Omtzigt recently pointed this out once more in a lecture, warning that we really need to start implementing policies to encourage couples to have more children.
 
 
The real shocker was hearing this past week in a podcast how the birth rate in China had dropped to just 0.5, although it was not clear to me whether this was per individual or per woman! China, the country where a very strict one-child policy was implemented for decades and people were punished if more children were born, is on its way to a full-blown population implosion.
 
There are even rumours how authorities in China are now trying in vain to increase the birth rate by ensuring that couples have more children by explicitly prohibiting birth control, you wonder how they are going to tackle this in Europe. On the other hand, the birth rate there is not even that low, it is mostly just below the replacement rate of 2.2 per woman.
 
Then I started wondering out loud how it could have come to this that one of the most natural instincts of a human being to reproduce could be so curtailed.
To be honest, we don't have children either! This was partly due to the fact that I was a happy single until the age of 40 while being the child of parents who married late as well and then did have children after all. Personally I always thought it was quite unfortunate and swore that it would not happen to me.
 
At the moment I have mixed feelings about it, but that's water under the bridge and cannot be undone. I am happy for my brother though, who has now become not only a bonus father but also a bonus grandfather thanks to his girlfriend.
 
Anyway, it does seem that birth rates have been declining faster in the last few years than before. I wondered if there were physical causes for this, besides social causes (due to the housing shortage, young people are living with their parents longer and longer) and social causes (climate doomsayers).
In the past, I sometimes heard my sweetheart say that fertility in men has declined, among other things, purely due to the fact that the optimal temperature for the scrotum is slightly lower than body temperature and that this became too high, especially due to wearing jeans and underwear that were too tight.
And then of course there is also the fact that one of the most reported side effects of the mRNA vaccine appears to have been a severely disrupted menstrual cycle.
 
So let's investigate both the declining fertility in men and in women.
 

Author

Yvana van den Hork
Rank: Senior Editor
Position: Director
She holds an MSc in Toxicology and Biology of the Wageningen University
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