It’s a situation unprecedented in human history: most of the world’s people live in a country that has dipped below replacement rate, its population now spiraling downward.
No place on earth is exempt from declining birth rates, including Africa, which is just a few steps behind the rest of the world.
The scenario is – perhaps without exaggeration – quietly apocalyptic.
“No society in history has been known to come out of that spiral,” filmmaker Stephen Shaw explained in his documentary “Birthgap,” which explores the thoughts on childbearing of young women all around the world, and attempts to find the cause behind today’s record-low fertility.
The dip into the trend of population collapse seems to have crept up on us, with much of academia seemingly unaware of the phenomenon. And for most, the trend doesn’t have a readily apparent reason. In Shaw’s interviews, which take place across the span of several continents, he is hard pressed to find someone who can explain, or even guess, how the world has arrived to this uncharted territory.
Shaw, a data analyst, crunches numbers in search of an explanation, and uncovers a surprising finding: from about 1973 to 1978, a worldwide population decline has been driven not by changes in family size, but by an explosion of childlessness.
By comparing statistics on first-time mothers and the number of children they go on to have with national fertility rates, Shaw found that childlessness rates skyrocketed within only a few years in many countries.
For example, in Japan in 1974, one in 20 women were childless. By 1977, this ratio was one in four, and by 1990, it had reached one in three, a statistic which held in 2020.
While Shaw doesn’t give specific numbers for most countries, he shares that most have become, like Italy and Japan, “childless nations,” where one-third or more people will become “childless for life.”
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