As populations collapse, the far right’s baby fever puts hard-won freedoms at risk

John Ibbitson is writer at large at The Globe and Mail. Darrell Bricker is chief executive of Ipsos Public Affairs. They are the authors of Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline.

Demography is destiny, the saying goes. But demography is also politics.

As fertility rates collapse across the developed world, fewer and fewer young people are available to fill labour shortages, purchase goods and pay taxes. In countries that don’t accept large numbers of immigrants, economies and populations are stagnant or in decline. In countries such as Canada with robust immigration, hundreds of thousands of newcomers can stoke resentment among those who resist change.

Though our country appears thus far to be mostly immune, many young people around the developed world, especially males, are starting to push back against the status quo by embracing populist parties on the far right.

This 21st-century form of right-wing populism “taps into some young people’s sense of vulnerability,” says Daniel Rubenson of Toronto Metropolitan University. Some may feel resentful of those with greater economic security than they have, he explains. Some may resent the increasing equality and autonomy of women. Some may resent newcomers who are not of their race or religion. Some may resent the claims of gender and sexual minorities to equal treatment. “It’s all of those things,” says Dr. Rubenson. “It’s a feeling of being left behind.”

Populist parties of the far right often seek to roll back the social progress of recent decades: They aim to restrict immigration, to stigmatize sexual and gender minorities. And increasingly, they advance a new form of natalism – we call it “neonatalism” – that emphasizes support, not for mothers who work, but for mothers who stay at home and have babies. The demography of low fertility is silently influencing our economies, our societies and politics, jeopardizing hard-won gains.

Kate Moorhead, a 37-year-old consultant who lives with her husband, John Hanley, in Calgary, always expected she would remain childless. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to do the things I wanted to do with children,” she says, explaining that the couple valued their independence. Plus, she anticipates that, at some point, she might need to move back to her childhood home of Trail, B.C., to help care for aging parents. Finances are also part of the equation. Some of her cousins coming out of university plan to have families, and they’ll need enough income to afford homes amid skyrocketing real estate prices. “I don’t know how they are going to be able to do it,” she says.

Ms. Moorhead is one of millions of young Canadians who have decided not to have children. Canada’s total fertility rate has fallen – plummeted, really – to 1.3 children per woman, down from 1.7 in 2009, and far below the rate of 2.1 children per woman, known as the replacement rate, needed to keep a population stable.

Similarly, fertility rates around the world have been declining for decades. When people move from the countryside to the city anywhere in the world, children become more of an economic burden, women are able to access both formal and informal forms of education, the power of traditional religion and of clan relationships weakens, and as a result couples choose to have fewer babies. And every day, we become more urban. The United Nations estimates that in 2007, for the first time in history, more people lived in cities than outside them. Today, the figure is 56 per cent.

Two-thirds of the human population now lives in a society with below-replacement-rate fertility. The UN, which once projected the human population would exceed 11 billion by 2100, now projects the global population will max out at 10.4 billion in 2080. Other analyses see the population peaking at less than nine billion by mid-century. In all scenarios, peak population is followed by population decline.

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That decline would start sooner and be sharper were we not living longer. The global life expectancy has increased from 51 in 1960 to 73 today. In developed societies the number is much higher: 84 in Japan, 83 in Canada, 81 in Germany.

A planet with fewer people living on it every year will be environmentally much happier. But there are consequences. Decades of sub-replacement-rate fertility and ever-increasing life expectancy are contributing to societal aging. In 2019, one person in six in Canada was over 65. In 2035, it will be one in four.

Population graphs used to look like a pyramid, with plenty of young people on the bottom and few old people at the top. Now, we are inverting that pyramid.

In many countries that don’t embrace immigration, population decline is already under way: Italy lost 179,000 people last year; the population of Greece is expected to fall from more than 11 million in 2005 to nine million in 2050; and Poland’s working-age population will shrink by a third by 2060. The European Union as a whole will start losing population by 2026.

China’s population began to decline in 2022; last year it lost more than two million people. The country is expected to lose more than half its population by 2100. Japan, which has been losing population since 2010, is now shedding 800,000 people a year. South Korea began to lose people in 2020.

Even India, now the world’s most populous country, has below-replacement-rate fertility and will start losing people some time around the middle of this century.

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Many countries have programs in place to support parents with children. Sweden, perhaps the best known example, offers 480 days of parental leave, with fathers typically taking 30 per cent of that leave. Nursery school in Sweden is available from the age of 1; shopping centres and libraries have nursing rooms; and in some cities, parents pushing prams travel on the bus for free.

Nonetheless, the fertility rate has been declining in Sweden, though not as rapidly as in some other European societies, reaching 1.5 in 2022.

There’s a reason child-support programs have limited success in raising fertility rates. A 2022 Harris poll in the United States showed that more than half (54 per cent) of adults who said they were not likely to have children cited “personal independence” as the reason.

This buttressed a 2021 study by the Pew Research Center in Washington, in which 56 per cent of respondents who said they were unlikely to have children cited as the reason that they just didn’t want to.

But if the old policies of child and parental support have only limited effect, a new school of thought is promising results by pushing a different approach: Limit the reproductive choices of women, encourage the traditional family, support established religion, promote cultural cohesion and discourage immigration.

We consider this approach anathema. But it is starting to catch on.

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On Oct. 19, after winning a runoff election, Javier Milei became president-designate of Argentina. The troubled economy of Latin America’s fourth-most populous country is in even worse shape than usual, with inflation sitting above 200 per cent. Argentina has been throwing up populist (and often autocratic) leaders for generations, but Mr. Milei is something special. A self-described anarcho-capitalist, he campaigned on a program to eliminate more than half of all government ministries, shut down the central bank and replace the peso with the U.S. dollar.

He also has strong views about the proper role of women in society. The new President hopes to rescind legislation legalizing abortion. He says sex education is a ploy to destroy the family, and maintains affirmative action degrades women.

“I will not be apologizing for having a penis,” he said in 2022. “I don’t have to feel ashamed of being a man, white, blond with light blue eyes.”

Mr. Milei is one of a band of rising populist politicians around the world who emphasize regressive attitudes toward women and toward racial minorities. Such politicians typically draw support from older conservative voters. But now they are attracting the support of younger voters as well. A majority of voters under 35 supported Mr. Milei in the runoff election.

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Economic stress and a general sense of disenfranchisement appear to be pushing younger voters toward populist conservatives who promote so-called traditional social values.

The far-right Alternative For Germany (AfD) has been surging in regional and local elections, and stands at about 20-per-cent support nationwide. AfD opposes immigration, membership in the European Union and a woman’s right to an abortion. It would limit teachings on sexual and gender diversity in the curriculum and would ban same-sex couples from adopting children. In some recent regional elections, the party has been the most popular choice of voters under 30.

Similar values animate Viktor Orban’s anti-immigrant, anti-feminist and homophobic government in Hungary. Austria’s Freedom Party, which has at times been part of a governing coalition, embraces similar values, as does the far-right Slovak Nationalist Party, which became part of a governing coalition last year.

And Netherlands voters shocked Europe on Nov. 22, when the populist Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders – who is stridently anti-Muslim – received the most seats in that country’s House of Representatives. If only the votes of those under 35 had been counted, his victory would have been even greater.

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Elections in the Netherlands and Argentina mostly affect the Dutch and Argentines. But the impact of elections in the United States is felt around the world. And the 2024 presidential election could be one of the most important in the republic’s history, because the Republican nominee will almost certainly be former president Donald Trump, who has remade the GOP in his image.

Among other things, Mr. Trump wants to finish the job of building a wall across the southern border, to keep out Latino immigrants. He hopes to continue filling the courts with reliably conservative judges. Because of his appointments, in 2022 the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, which protected a woman’s right to an abortion.

Republicans at the state level have advanced an agenda to limit the reproductive rights of women and to stigmatize sexual and gender minorities. Fourteen states now prohibit abortions, with a number of others banning abortion after a certain number of weeks.

Access to sex-education in the classroom and to contraceptives are credited with reducing teenage pregnancies by 78 per cent since 1991. But many Republican-led states are moving to restrict sex education in the lower grades, or to emphasize an abstinence-only approach.

So far, there is little evidence that these policies have led to an increase in teenage pregnancies or decrease in abortions. But the goal of limiting a woman’s right to know about and control her body is clear.

Politicians who restrict what can be taught in the sex-ed curriculum also usually restrict discussion of LGBTQ issues in that curriculum. They also tend to oppose open immigration, and to assert that Christianity should have primacy over other religions.

Far-right commentators in the United States speak of “replacement theory,” a conspiracy by elites to import immigrants and submerge white, Christian society.

All these values are increasingly popular with younger voters. Polls show that younger voters prefer Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden.

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Why is this happening? Economic insecurity is the simplest, and most accurate answer. Many young voters feel hemmed in by rising housing costs, inflated prices, steep interest rates and relatively low wages.

Economic insecurity “created this sense of anxiety” among many young people, says Allison Harell, a political scientist at University of Quebec at Montreal. There’s a sense, she adds, that “‘I’m not getting ahead, but others are getting ahead more than me.’ And that creates a very contentious dynamic in politics, because it’s hard to compromise when you think you deserve more than another group.”

While the short-term causes of discontent among the young, such as the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, may evaporate over time, the long-term pressures of fewer young people and more old people brought on by low fertility will only worsen. As they worsen, economic insecurity could reinforce cultural insecurity, and a further shift to the right.

And rising right-wing populism could be having another impact: an effort to reverse declining fertility by encouraging women to give up work and return to the role of mother and caregiver.

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At a recent women’s forum in Beijing, President Xi Jinping, declared: “We should actively foster a new type of marriage and child-bearing culture,” urging delegates to “tell good stories about family traditions.”

In the days when Chinese couples had four or five children, the young looked after the old. When the Communist government imposed a one-child policy in 1980 in order to reduce explosive population growth it promised that the state would look after the elderly. The policy was lifted in 2016, when it became clear that the country faced a concerning population decline.

“The government now wants young people, especially young women, to do two jobs,” says Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “To work and pay taxes, and to look after elderly people at home.”

The Chinese government is also encouraging families to have more children, though there is no reason to believe Chinese women will be any more willing than their Japanese and Korean counterparts to do so.

Increasingly, populists on the right and authoritarian governments of all stripes are pushing for a renewed emphasis on families having more children. Celebrities have joined the chorus. Tech billionaire Elon Musk has warned that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”

Recent neonatalist conferences in Austin, Tex., and Budapest focused on encouraging women to have their first child when they are young, to prevent “unplanned childlessness.”

A “long-term, monogamous, child-centric relationship should be the ideal goal for everyone in society,” the controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson told the Budapest gathering in September.

The question is whether younger voters, who increasingly embrace the other nostrums of conservative populists, will embrace neonatalism as well.

But we would emphasize this: Efforts to support women who are willing to stay home and have children are just as expensive, and the outcome just as uncertain, as efforts to support women who wish to have both children and a career.

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Beyond immigration, there are positive things governments can do to mitigate the impact of societal aging, such as implementing long-term-care insurance, in which younger workers pay into a fund to support their care when they get older, and improving the quality of long-term care in the home.

But continuing low fertility is bound to increase the stress between generations, along with political polarization, as the right seeks to return society to the patriarchal past, and the left fights to preserve hard-won gains.

As fewer children are born every year than the year before, those tensions will only increase.

Fertility and the future: More from The Globe and Mail

As more young Canadians choose not to have children, baby boomers are resigning themselves to life without grandkids. Reporter Zosia Bielski spoke with The Decibel about how that is shaping family dynamics. Subscribe for more episodes.

Maya Wang and Tingting Li: China’s government wants women to return to domesticity, but it’s already too late

Peggy O’Donnell Heffington: Policies that make it easier to be a parent won’t actually help people become parents

Kelly Cryderman: As Alberta’s population zooms toward five million, the province grapples with the challenges of growth