April 2009 – Imagine a world in which there are no children and no one who looks young enough to have young children. 

Everyone is 80 years old or older, and the doctors, nurses and administrative staff who provide care for their hospital or nursing home patients are also on oxygen and shuffle along in the growing feebleness of old age.

There are no younger ones coming to take their place, either as patient or care-giver. It is the absolute end of a society.

Of course, this scenario can’t literally happen. Long before it would ever reach this stage, an economy would collapse or an invader would take the land and all it contained.

But what happens when an entire civilization stops having enough children to replace the adults who die?

According to some experts, over the next century many Western nations – probably beginning with those in Europe or Japan – will find out.

Demographic suicide
The demographic equation is not hard to figure out. For any population to remain stable, it must maintain a birthrate of 2.1 births per woman – a rate that provides a replacement for both mother and father. (The .1 covers infant and child mortality.) 

Barring large-scale immigration, when the birthrate falls below that number, a population goes into decline – which is precisely what is happening in numerous Western nations. Germany (1.37), Canada (1.5), Italy (1.23), Greece (1.3), and Spain (1.15), for example, all have shrinking birthrates. 

The U.S. is relatively healthy in this regard – with a fertility rate of 2.11 per woman – but that is often attributed to the large numbers of Hispanic immigrants who in general have larger families.

A declining fertility rate – or “birth dearth,” as it is sometimes called – is problematic, according to demographers. For example, a graying population with fewer and fewer younger workers may face the collapse of the retirement and health benefits on which they counted.

According to Lianne George, author and senior editor for Macleans magazine in Canada, “[A]nalysts are estimating a shortage [in Canada] of 1.2 million workers by 2020.” Which means that for every two Canadians planning on retiring over the next 20 years, there will be less than one replacing them in the workforce.

Even in the U.S. the economic problems could become acute. According to David Ellwood, professor of political economy and dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, “In the next 20 years there will be no net native-born workers in the so-called prime age of 24 to 55 in the United States. The only new workers will come from two places: older workers and immigrants. And most immigrants in nations like the U.S. have been low-skill.”

It’s more than just an economic question, however. It is a cultural one. Catholic scholar George Weigel, a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, focuses especially on the breathtaking drop in fertility across much of Europe in his book The Cube and The Cathedral.

“What is happening when an entire continent, wealthier and healthier than ever before, declines to create the human future in the most elemental sense by creating the next generation?” he asked. 

Just not having kids
So what’s driving the dropping birthrate? Historically there have been a variety of reasons for a birth dearth. Poverty, malnutrition or disease can affect the ability of women to have children, for example. In some instances an absence of men – such as during a war when men are away or afterwards, when many fail to return home safely – can lead to a drop in the birthrate.

But the current circumstances seem rather unique. Catherine Hakim, professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, told Newsweek, “Never before has childlessness been a legitimate option for women and men in so many societies.”

That is to say, women are simply choosing not to have kids. Married with children, said the Washington Post’s Blaine Harden, is becoming “an exception rather than the norm.”

With much of the U.S. focus on marriage being concerned with the tragedy of divorce, it sometimes slips past the notice of many pro-family groups that a smaller percentage of couples are actually choosing to get married.

According to the National Marriage Project, directed by Rutgers University professor David Popenoe and social critic Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, statistical trends clearly indicate that Americans are less likely to marry than previous generations.

“This is reflected in a decline of nearly 50%, from 1970 to 2004, in the annual number of marriages per 1,000 unmarried women, …” they said in their annual report, “State of Our Unions.”

Popenoe and Whitehead said, “[W]e have looked at changes in the percentage of persons age 35 through 44 who were married. … Since 1960, there has been a drop of 22 percentage points for married men and 20 points for married women. …” 

They are also waiting longer to get married when they do wed. “Much of this decline [in the percentage of people who are getting married] results from the delaying of first marriages until older ages: the median age at first marriage went from 20 for females and 23 for males in 1960 to about 26 and 27, respectively, in 2005,” the pair said.

But waiting until later years to get married means a shortened amount of time available in a woman’s life for the bearing of children.

In “Beyond Babies,” Newsweek European economics editor Stefan Theil stated, “Among women who do have children, the average age of first conception has risen from 24 in 1971 to 30 today. A new study from the Vienna Institute for Demography suggests a rush of women having children in their late 30s and beyond. …”

Theil said that demographic experts have demonstrated that “late can easily become never. Most childless couples simply wait too long to conceive; only about one third make a deliberate decision to remain that way.”

The consequences are clear. “Punctuating a fundamental change in American family life, married couples with children now occupy fewer than one in every four households – a share that has been slashed in half since 1960 and is the lowest ever recorded by the census,” Harden said.

Economic pressures
So why are so many women waiting until later in life to get married and then have children? The short answer seems to be that the establishment of a career following college almost necessitates it.

Young women, Ms. George said, are “focusing in their 20s on career and deferring even the thought of family and kids until well into their 30s. At this point, the thinking goes, they’ll have enough cash and job-related goodwill socked away to ‘opt out’ of work for a few years to raise the child.”

Career demands can thus create a cascade effect that pushes a nation’s fertility rate downward. Building a career leads women to get married later and then put off having kids once they do wed. A push to get back to work may cause a couple to decide to have only one child. Furthermore, many demographers believe that the children who grow up in such small families are socialized to believe that small families are the ideal – leading to even fewer children in the next generation.

“Even as we bemoan our plummeting birth rate, and the grim economic future it may bring, everything about the way we’ve organized our culture is designed to force women to choose between work and kids – and to penalize them if they choose kids,” Ms. George said. “And so, these days, it’s not just a matter of a woman wanting children; it’s a matter of wanting them at the expense of everything else she’s worked for.”

She concluded: “Is it so surprising, then, that given such a pinched range of options, so many millions of women would choose to sidestep the entire ordeal?”

Devaluing children
So why are so many young people – both men and women, of course – choosing to organize their lives around their careers, rather than around marriage followed by children?

The words their lives seem to be the linchpin of the entire problem. For many young people, life revolves around their own personal dreams for happiness, and anything that gets in the way is, well, an obstacle to that happiness.

“As the active child-rearing years shrink as a proportion of the life course, life with children is experienced as a disruption in the life course rather than as one of its defining purposes,” according to Popenoe and Whitehead. “More broadly, it is life before and after children that American culture now portrays as the most satisfying years of adulthood.”

Whitehead calls this increasingly prevalent attitude “the cultural devaluation of child rearing.”

The individual now reigns supreme in American life, and all decisions are based on what the decision means for the individual’s personal life.

“In a hyper-individualistic, ultra-commodified culture like ours, motherhood, for better and worse, is less a fact of life than just another lifestyle choice,” Ms. George said.

Of course, young people might have an effective rejoinder at hand: We learned the self-centered lifestyle from you, Mom and Dad. And now you want to complain about the fact that, all of a sudden, individual lifestyle choices matter to the community at large?

But these choices do matter, and it may be better to understand that fact now rather than never – or when it’s too late to do anything to avoid catastrophe.

As Canadian columnist, author and poet George Jonas said, “Style is important to us. We’re all set to march to our extinction in style. We’ve become the only species that diminishes with success: the first in natural history to experience population decline whenever we do well.”

Yes, kids can cramp our style. They hedge us in and make us lie awake at night when they’re out. They make us live by a budget and force us to save for college.

As Patrick Meagher, contributing editor to the online ethics and policy site MercatorNet, said, “Children make the world a better place because they force their parents to grow up by thinking about the needs of others.”

But that happens only if couples actually have children.