By Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute
The world’s population is not only not exploding, it’s on the cusp of collapsing.
The collapse in birth rates that began in post-war Europe has, in the decades since, spread to every single corner of the globe.
Many nations are already feeling this death spiral, filling more coffins than cradles each year.
Just this past year, Japan lost nearly a million people. Poland lost 130,000.
However, the big story comes from China, home to one-sixth of the world’s population.
The decades-long devastation wrought by the one-child policy has sent that country, for centuries the pacesetter in population, into absolute decline.
China finally admitted that its population was shrinking, but demographers — including myself — believe that the numbers have been falling for almost a decade.
The Chinese government’s official population figure of 1.44 billion also greatly exaggerates its overall numbers, some analysts say by as much as 130 million people.
India, the country that has now overtaken China in population, is still growing, but not for long.
The average Indian woman was having only two children over her reproductive lifetime, the Indian government reported in 2021, well below the 2.25 or so needed to sustain the current population.
The same story is being repeated all over the world, as birthrates in Latin America, the Middle East, and even Africa are not just falling — they are collapsing.
The current total fertility of Tunisian women, for example, is estimated at 1.93.
The result of all these empty wombs is that humanity just passed a major milestone, although not one we should celebrate.
For the first time in the 60,000 or so years that human beings first arrived on the planet, we are not having enough babies to replace ourselves. No wonder Donald Trump has suggested providing free IVF to all Americans “because we want more babies,” he says.
Because of ever-lengthening life spans, the population will continue to grow until mid-century. But when this demographic momentum ends—and it will end—we will reach a second grim milestone on humanity’s downward trajectory:
For the first time since the Black Death in the Middle Ages, human numbers will decline.
The 14th century bubonic plague was the worst pandemic in human history. It killed off half the population of Europe and perhaps a third of the population of the Middle East.
But even as the plague was filling mass graves, the survivors kept filling cradles. And because the birth rate remained high the global population recovered although it took a century or so.
This time around, we may not be so fortunate. All the factors that influence fertility, from marriage rates to urbanization to education levels, are pushing births downward.
Now you may be excused for not knowing about the current birth dearth.
After all, powerful international agencies like the UN Population Fund and the World Bank have done their best to keep it out of the public eye.
Moreover, these agencies, set up during the height of the hysteria over “overpopulation” in the 1960s, like to overestimate births in one country and pad population numbers in another.
For example, the UN, in its annual World Population Prospects, claims that 705,000 babies were born in Colombia last year, when the country’s own government pegs the number at just 510,000.
This is not a rounding error.
Neither is the UN’s claim that Indian women are still averaging 2.25 children, defying the country’s own published statistics, which show that it is now below 2.0.
All this number fudging allows the UN to claim that the global total fertility rate last year was at 2.25, still above replacement
It’s even wrong about replacement rate fertility, which it says is 2.1 children per women.
It’s wrong because in many countries sex-selection abortion skews the sex ratio strongly in favor of boys.
To make up for the tens of millions of unborn baby girls missing in China, India and other Asian countries, those countries need more need 2.2 or even 2.3 children on average.
The UN exaggerates human numbers for the same reason that the Biden-Harris administration exaggerated employment numbers: for financial gain and political survival.
There are billions of dollars at stake, funding that is fueled by a dark fear of mushrooming human numbers.
The population control movement does not intend to go quietly to its grave, even as it continues to dig humanity’s own, so it feeds this fear.
But the world’s population is not only not exploding, it’s on the cusp of collapsing. Which is why it’s time to end the war on population.
This article was originally published on www.pop.org on September 3rd, 2024, before being reprinted in the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family’s Academy Review in November 2024. Edited and republished here with permission.
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