Why People Are Having Fewer Kids, Even If They Want Them

People around the world have had fewer and fewer children, and it is not always because they don’t want them.

The world rate of fertility has, on average, fell less than half of what it was in the 1960s, noted that the United Nations, falling below the “level of replacement” required to maintain the current population in the majority of countries.

In the midst of this historic decline, almost 20% of adults of reproductive age of 14 countries around the world believe that they will not be able to have the number of children they wish, said the report of the United Nations (UNFPA), the Health and Defense Agency for the United Nations, in a report published this week. For most of them, the report found that it was not infertility preventing them from doing so. They highlighted factors, in particular financial limitations, obstacles to fertility or medical care linked to pregnancy and fears of the state of the world which, according to them, prevent them from making their own fertility and their reproductive choices.

“There are many people who are ready to have children – and have more children than they have – if the conditions were good, and the government’s obligation is to provide these well -being, well -being measures, which allow a good balance between professional and privacy, secure employment, reduce legal obstacles, provide better health care and services,” said Shalini Randerria, the Central University of Viennes and senior. But she says that the policies that certain governments implement – such as the reduction of Medicaid in the United States and the application of restrictions on boresic health and autonomy – are both a step back for the rights of people and “counterproductives from a demographic point of view”.

Find out more: Why so many women wait longer to have children

For the report, the UNFPA conducted an investigation, in collaboration with Yougov, of people in 14 countries in Asia, Europe, North America, South America and Africa which, together, represent more than a third of the world’s population.

“There is a gap between the number of children that people would have liked to have and the number they had,” explains Randeria. “For us, it was important to understand then – asking them – which is that causes this gap.”

Financial barriers

Respondents of the most important obstacles in survey identified with the number of children they wanted were economic: 39% cited the financial limitations, 19% of housing limitations, a lack of sufficient or quality child care options and 21% unemployment or employment insecurity.

Prices of all kinds of goods and services have rushed with precipitation in recent years. Global inflation has reached the highest level seen since the mid -1990s in July 2022, according to the World Bank group. Although it has decreased since then, the current levels are still considerably higher than those observed before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Find out more: Why affordable guard services are out of reach for so many people

The cost increase has reached accommodation and child care hard. In the United States, for example, the Treasury Department has found that housing costs have increased more quickly than income in the past two decades, increasing by around 65% since 2000 when adjusted for inflation. And research has revealed that the cost of childcare services in the United States has won in recent years, exceeding what many Americans pay for housing or college.

The current housing crisis has an impact on “each region and countries,” said the United Nations Human Colonies Program in a report last year, saying that between 1.6 billion and 3 billion people worldwide have adequate housing.

Reproduction obstacles

People have cited other factors that also bother as many children as they wish, including obstacles to reproduction and substitution maternity.

Several countries, including France, Spain, Germany and Italy – have prohibited substitution maternity. The UNFPA report also stresses that many countries restrict or prohibit access to assisted reproduction and substitution maternity for same -sex couples. In Europe, for example, only 17 in 49 countries allow medically assisted insemination for people, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity, depending on the report.

The UNFPA notes that, as global fertility rates are decreasing, some governments take “drastic measures to encourage young people to make fertility decisions in accordance with national targets”. But the report argues that the “real crisis” is “a crisis in a reproduction agency – in the ability of individuals to make their own free, informed and unhindered choices on everything, from the dissemination of sexual relations to the use of contraception to the creation of a family”.

According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, 40% of reproductive women from around the world live under the restrictive laws of abortion. Many countries – including Brazil, the Philippines and Poland, among others – have a very limited abortion. In 2022, the United States Supreme Court canceled the historic decision Roe c. Wade, striking constitutional right to abortion. Since then, more than a dozen states have promulgated almost total prohibitions or a limited abortion. There have been many reports of pregnant people who have been denied intensive care due to the laws of states restricting abortions, and many women have declared that they do not feel pregnant in states where abortion is prohibited.

And although an increasing share of women around the world has its family planning needs, around 164 million were not yet in 2021, the UN discovered in a report published in 2022.

In addition to considering access to family planning of a human right, the UN also notes that it is essential to reduce poverty.

Fear for the future

About 14% of the respondents of the UNFPA report said that concerns about political or social situations, such as wars and pandemics, would lead or have already led to fewer children than they wanted. And about 9% of respondents said that concerns about climate change or environmental degradation would lead or have already led them to have fewer children than they wanted.

Find out more: Terrified climate change? You may have eco-anxiety

Violence and conflicts have increased worldwide in recent years. The period between 2021 and 2023 was the most violent since the end of the Cold War, according to the World Bank group, and the number of deaths and violent conflicts has climbed in the last decade.

This violence has contributed to years of growing travel: more than 122 million people around the world have been moved by force, the United Nations refugee agency reported on Thursday, almost double the number recorded a decade ago.

The impact of the global pandemic has been even more widely felt and it is unlikely that the memory of anyone who has the time to spread COVID-19 early to propagate, develop new variants and wreak havoc on people whose recovery of the virus can take months, even years. Even beyond the covid, epidemics of infectious diseases become more and more common – and experts predict that, in the coming years, the risk that these epidemics would deteriorate into epidemics and pandemias will not increase.

In a United Nations Development Program survey in 2024, which statistically represents around 87% of the world’s population, around 56% of respondents said they thought of climate change on a daily or weekly basis. About 53% of respondents also said that they were more concerned with climate change now than they were a year ago. A third of the respondents said that climate change considerably affected their main life decisions.