The Panic over Lower Birthrates Has Just One Target -- the Wrong One.
Even if birthrates continue to fall, the population will reach an unsustainable 11.2 billion people by 2100--literal hell on earth. We need to change economies now.
Since we sent this a few months ago, we have had a huge surge in subscribers, and we want to make sure newbies see this one. And if you’re a beloved Old Timer and missed this one, this is an issue that is being distorted more than just about any I can think of. It’s being used by corporate bigshots who want women to breed for low-wage labor, by countries and religions waging demographic warfare, and by the Manosphere, which desperately wants all birth control ended and rights of women rolled back to keep them out of the public sphere and in the home. The simple fact of the matter is that just two things gave women the independence they have now: (1) choice about childbearing and (2) a surge personal rights—the to work, to own financial instruments and property, a right to education, to vote, to inherit, to divorce at will, and to choose her own mate, not to have her mate chosen for her.
All of those rights are under assault now.
AND if these crazy people get their way and women are virtually FORCED into 25 years of childbearing, the world will be in a terrible, terrible state by 2100. As Neal deGrasse Tyson says, a human population of 11.2 billion — which is where we’ll land in 2100 EVEN IF THE BIRTHRATE KEEPS FALLING!!! — doesn’t mean the extermination of homo sapiens: it means everyone alive then will be living in HELL ON EARTH.
Please thoroughly read this article. Then pass it along to everybody you know. It’s fine to link it and to cross-post it. Just don’t edit it down. There’s a logic structure that develops the subject rationally and eases the data out in the order it’s easiest to understand.
Thanks, everyone. What a great group we have here.
It’s all too convenient, of course. Amidst the worldwide backlash from conservative, right-wing males in power and in the culture generally, the target is the freedom, financial independence, and self-determination of women.
True, in the last 300,000 years of human development—a time that incorporated a devastating ice age that ravaged the Northern Hemisphere—relations between men and women were egalitarian except for a few specializations (childbearing and the whole “heavy lifting” thing). Religion had pantheons equally dispersed between the masculine and feminine. In ancient Crete, there was a brilliant division of labor: men ran the government and women ran the religion. Otherwise, there were females in equal numbers to men in all the professions, from farming to the command of the ships that managed a vast portion of Mediterranean trade. In Old Europe, there was goddess worship and matrilineal inheritance, with women responsible both for the young and the old.
Then, about 900 BCE, the situation began to flip when the Garden of Eden story, written as a pro-patriarchy polemic against the sacred feminine and women in general, started to gain traction in a surge of male dominance that took almost 1,500 YEARS to fully manifest. See:
Since the disaster of the conscious creation of this myth to rip off women’s freedom, the last 5,000 years have seen women reduced to breeding animals, home servants, and chattel to be traded to pay men’s debts or to seal pacts to build empires or to prevent wars. The resulting social structures put all power and all wealth under the control of men, but for a few queens whose ascension to thrones were tolerated because it was the only way a ruling line could stay in power.
After the falls of Greece and Rome and the rise of Islamic caliphates that challenged Christendom to the Gates of Vienna, other revolutions took shape that transformed the world: the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the Modern Age, the Information Age.
Meanwhile, given some stable cultures, the lack of any appreciable birth control, and a slow improvement in health conditions, birth rates slowly rose—with a dip of 200,000,000 deaths from The Black Death in the 14th century.
The chart above ends at 2019, when world population was 7.7 billion. As of this morning, it’s 8.12 billion. For constant updates on US and world population, go to https://www.census.gov/popclock/world.
To clarify that hockey stick you’re seeing on the right side of that graph is an explosive and dangerous rise in population in since we reached 2 billion people worldwide in 1928.
But, you think, we’re hearing panic from China, Japan, the USA, Mexico, most of South America, North Africa, Spain, Portugal and Ireland that their birthrates are falling precipitously. Only Central Africa and Central Asia have fertility rates that are maintaining their previous levels.
And the problem for countries with crashing birthrates is that most of the world’s economies are growth economies, where an ever-increasing supply of young workers is needed to fuel the industrial might, military strength, and wealth of the upper classes through stock market transactions—with allocations for elder security, medical care, and research. The latter are allocations often resented by the ultra-wealthy despite the fact that they are paid for by workers’ taxes, not their own.
But given that growth economies depend on maintaining or increasing the population—and many want those increases to come from children of their own kind, not immigrants—a falling birthrate spells disaster. They’re just not rigged for it.
But even if the economy takes something of a hit, wouldn’t declining population be a good thing? After all, aren’t we facing multiple crises having to do with population, mismanagement of resources, loss of habitat and wildlife, melting ice caps, and warming seas? Don’t we need to have fewer people so the aquifers stop getting drained so fast, so fewer people (or NO people) are dying of starvation?
Yes. So isn’t a declining population rate a good thing?
Yes. And if these declining rates continue, won’t that mean we’re out of trouble.
No. People are living longer. And Central Africa, the fertility rate of which is stable despite massive losses to endemic infections, will continue to have a huge and burgeoning population.
And even if fertility rates continue to decline, world population will rise until at least 2100. And that’s spectacularly dangerous.
The problem with population is that it’s like a container cargo ship traveling at flank speed. Once you realize you’re going to ram something, it’s going to take up to 4.6 statute miles to get the ship stopped. And even if you go for a “crash stop” by reversing the engines to 4 knots, getting her stopped is still going to cost you 1.75 statute miles. By this time you’ve bisected New York City.
The chart above shows population growth through 1999. Let’s look at what’s happened since 1750 and what’s going to continue until 2100—DESPITE the falling global annual birth rate. Even with the precipitously falling rates we see now, heavily attributable to and starting with the availability of birth control in 1960, now exacerbated by falling male fertility rates worldwide, the trajectory keeps going up. In fact, if Reagan hadn’t tied foreign aid to denying birth control to Africa and other high fertility areas in the1980s to appease the religious right, we’d be in a far better position than we are now.
But note this: Even with fertility rates plummeting, the population will continue to rise at least until 2100, when it will start to slow at 11.2 billion people — 3 billion more people than we have now.
That is a 100% total disaster. The projection is that nations will be going to war over dwindling supplies of potable water and that hundreds of millions will be dying of starvation.
Wondering why billionaires are building bunkers and rockets? Look no further. The planet is rapidly becoming uninhabitable, and if we lose the ice caps, if the seas rise, as projected, by as much as 4.5 vertical feet by 2100, if hurricanes go to Saffir-Simpson 6 and tornado speeds rise to Fujita 6 at 550 mph—if deserts expand by 50% and we lose every ice pack on earth, including the Western Antarctic Ice Shelf and the Greenland Glacier—and if we suffer a crushing loss of albedo at the poles and most of the wildlife in the seas as a result—Global Thermohaline Circulation will shut down, and in as little as 10 years, the earth will begin to freeze and the resulting ice age could last 90,000 years (the average).
And they know this. They’re just going to fiddle while Earth burns and then turns into an ice cube. They don’t care. They’ll just go hide and hope the hoards who’ll want to (finally) hold them responsible can’t get through the 4-foot solid steel doors to their luxury bunkers.
Breed, Baby, Breed: Survival Realities Slam into Toxic Male Privilege and Virulent Racial and Religious Supremacy
It’s everywhere now. The Japanese offered their women $3,500 for each baby they have—when it costs roughly $200,000 to raise one. China, with flat wages and a skyrocketing cost-of-living, are practically begging women to have more kids, having abandoned the one-child policy as numbers declined, and women are not responding, seeing more children as a recipe for poverty in coming years.
And the uber-rich are joined by hoards of people wanting to hang on to wealth concentrated in industrial nations and perpetuate privilege concentrated in the hands of heterosexual men and whites worldwide.
And to this end, these vested interests have enrolled radically conservative forms of religion that support the male control of women, the vilification of all gender expressions not solidly heterosexual, the denial of climate change, the execration of science, and a host of conspiracy theories ranging from claims that the United States had a Christian nationalist origin—NOT!!!—to the embrace of the completely disgraced notion of the racial superiority of white people. From Viktor Mihály Orbán of Hungary to Jair Bolsonaro (who tried to stage a fascist coup in Brazil) to the viciously anti-gay Vladimir Putin and the intransigently pro-white and pro-male Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Russell Vought, Elon Musk and virtually the entire Manosphere, the Radical Right is trying to turn back the clock in denial of every sensible measure of the kind of trouble we’re in.
The Only Ace There Is
To win any of the games dear to the hearts of these people—and to radical Evangelical Christianity—you must, must, must get control of women’s reproductive capacities. The level of power here is unimaginable. And intricately tied to this power, which so many want to harness, is contraception in all its forms.
In places where contraception is readily available—as well as in all places where there is a general escape of widespread poverty—birth rates fall. Women who have choice always opt not to have more children than they can support. The society, already rich, gets richer. But the society then starts to lose its low-paid servant class. Then, like the Dutch did, the society imports servants from poorer nations. But then they realize these people aren’t the same color and don’t have the same religion and aren’t assimilating—and they’re breeding faster—and now the culture becomes afraid its original inhabitants will be at risk of losing money, political power, and majority. Then you get Geert Wilders. Or, as is the case in the United States, there are privileged industries—the meat-packing industry, the hotel industry, seasonal agriculture, and the fast-food industry—who import or hire migrants, some legal and some illegal. When this issue is used to inflame racist views, it’s migrants, mostly employed and paying taxes, who are called criminals and subjected to arrest and deportation. The industries that rely on them for profits aren’t mentioned. In result of both these issues, the desire to have women citizens reproduce more comes into play. The only way to keep America solidly white-majority—and therefore control of the government that will set the rules of who gets rich and who pays taxes (and doesn’t)—is to stop white women from electing to have fewer or no children. To do this you must take away abortion—and, as Clarence Thomas wants to do, contraception for all women, including married ones.
One reason for this push to make white women breed is that white and Asian women have the best access to birth control and use it, and it shows in the statistics. So taking away abortion and birth control directly increases the percentage of American-born children in favor of retaining a white majority. So those who claim ripping contraception away from all women proves it’s not a racist policy are lying. Yes, it is. In childbirths per 1,000 women, the rates are:
White (Non-Hispanic): Approximately 1.7 children
Black (Non-Hispanic): Approximately 2.0 children
Hispanic: Approximately 2.1 children
Asian: Approximately 1.6 children
Native American: Approximately 2.0 children
So, in fact, white women, with their easier access to both contraception and (earlier on) abortion, started having significantly fewer children than blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans—brown peoples. Only Asian women have a lower birth rate than white women. So, the group most likely to breed faster with all forms of contraception removed are white women. This is a racism issue.
Now we get to the “holy will” of the Manosphere, which wants women completely out of the public sphere. If Clarence Thomas gets his way and the government gets to ban birth control, then you have women almost entirely out of the public sphere for the 20 most productive years of their lives. Inadequate, meritless men then get back all the money and high-paying jobs without having to compete with women (they're losing a lot), and the entire public arena is full of inadequate, meritless men during work hours with virtually no women except those in janitorial and food services, or who are secretaries and factory workers, to bear witness. Men also get the $130,000 a year in free domestic services they used to get: Their laundry is done, their house is cleaned, and there's dinner on the table. Cushy. Some of it is straight chauvinism, as when Russell Vought said that all responsible positions should be held by men. Some of it may be that more children means more poorly-paid workers for Elon to use in the future. Mostly, it’s that men get all the power back, all the money back, and do not have to adjust to a world in which they don’t run everything and have to relate to a women as equals. The epidemic of so-called “male loneliness” is also related to heavy levels of gaming additions—men who have digital dementia (now a bona fide psychological term)—that further isolate men who rely upon the Internet rather than physical social contact for dating. A system that incarcerates women in the home with childbearing and child-rearing returns higher paying jobs to men, elevates their stature in the society, provides a sexual partner at easy access, and solves his need to clean up after himself.
What is also clear is that the same group of toxic males also look forward to stripping away women’s access to bank accounts, credit cards, property ownership, business ownership and the vote. Some want to illegalize a woman’s right to serve in government—J.D. Vance, Russell Vought, Clarence Thomas, Pete Hegseth and Mike Johnson (who has a Covenant marriage with his wife), to name a few.
Finally, there is widespread religious mania around control of a woman’s body, and those suffering from it absolutely mean to subject women to their beliefs, and virtually all the major religions have a longstanding and jealously guarded top-down, full-throttle patriarchal orientation in which men have all the power of the priesthood and all the cultural and legal power to enforce masculine will. These religions include Hinduism—which, though it is the only religion that never lost its goddesses, tolerates what is, in some cases, the worst kinds of abuses of women—the more conservative elements of Islam (Deobandi Talibanism, Wahhabi Sunni, Twelver Shi’ism)—Catholicism with its proscription of female involvement with the priesthood—conservative Protestantism, particularly Evangelicism—conservative Judaism, and ultraconservative forms of Shinto. Liberal Christian and Jewish denominations and Buddhism have made immense strides in the treatment and inclusion of women, but the conservative forces inside the major world religions, especially when allied with government, are operating in retrograde motion on women’s rights and portend a loss of the most basic rights gained in the last 100 years. Secretary-General of the United Nations is António Guterres believes it will be at least 150 years before women have equal rights, and it will be longer than that unless religions, which are the enforcing agencies of the patriarchy worldwide, stop saying that the subjugation of women is God’s will. It’s not: it’s the will of men who tampered with many scriptures to insert it. [See Dan McClellan’s latest.] Presently, Evangelical Christian Nationalists, who constitute 30-40% of the American electorate are buttressed by a U.S. Supreme Court that includes six practicing Catholics—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor (the only liberal), Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. Together they have effectively created a conservative Christian shadow state challenging the rights of women and all non-whites. The court has rolled back abortion rights, allows the tracking of women across state borders, challenges the right to abortion pills, denies medical abortions, resulting in the deaths of women. Russell Vought would deny abortion even in the event of rape, incest, or threat to the mother’s life.
The religious demographic wars. Part of the calculus of forcing women to breed prolifically is that the pecking order of religions worldwide has to do with numbers. With 2.5 children per woman, Muslims are out-breeding Christians. Hindu women have 2.2-3 children, depending on the area. Catholics are out-breeding Protestants except in developed countries, but they’re still in trouble. In fact, in the last years of his papacy, Pope Francis was alarmed at the falling Catholic birth rate. Evangelicals have higher birth rates than most other Protestants, and non-religious people have the lowest birth rates of all.
Heeding the Tragic Lesson of India
So, the synergy is in place: panic from crashing birthrates almost globally, racism, rampant misogyny, toxic religious ideology, and the demographic war between religions combine to paint a target on women’s freedoms and rights and threaten to return women to the status of home-bound servant and child bearer with no suffrage and no financial rights.
One tragic example of how this all goes sideways comes from India. In the 1970s and ‘80s, abortion became widespread there. But because of the dowry system, in which fathers of girls PAY some man to marry her (!), parents want boy babies, not girls. With knowledge of the sex of the foetus available to parents before abortion, it turned out that 2,999 aborted unborn out of every 3,000 abortions performed was female—selective female infanticide.
Some commentators, noting this, raved that it would mean that women would be valued, well-treated, revered. But doctors warned that an entitled male population deprived of a ready supply of wives would become viciously aggressive and that rape, woman-burning, and murder would skyrocket.
And that’s what happened. Note that the operative term above was entitled male. When a society already devalues women, men frustrated at a new class of liberated women saying “no” to marriage, while the gender is already underpopulated, and with a legal system that, until recently, rarely held them accountable, will just take what they want no matter what it does to the woman. And this is how India became the rape, gang-rape, and rape-murder capital of the world.
Dumping the Problem on Woman
All the problems in this article—from male loneliness, to white angst, to the passion for religious supremacy, to demographic religious wars, to economic collapse by population decline—are being dumped on women to solve. And the solution to all these problems is projected to be controlling women to reproduce more, which means taking her rights so males can incarcerate her in the home and to force her into the mother/maid role. Women’s rights and freedoms—right down to the right to control her body—have a target painted on them.
And just as a reminder, a person whose body is not his/her own to control is a slave.
Towards an Economics of Humanitarianism
But enslaving women to have more children is not going to solve the most basic problem facing us:
According to some people with lots of brains, the maximum sustainable number of people on this planet is 2 billion. The population on March 28, 2025 was 8,213,269,530. That's unsustainable. We've lost 60 percent of our plant and animal species. Starvation is rampant. We're running out of potable water, the air and water are polluted, we're drowning in plastics that are now showing up in the umbilical cords of newborns, and the climate is collapsing.
Attempting to solve economic problems by breeding more is insane. We need to breed less not more—and come up with a sustainable economic model not based on constantly making more, consuming more and eating up more molybdenum.
Elon and Bezos and Zuck don't care, of course. For them, it's just a bigger yacht, a deeper bunker, or a faster rocket to whisk you off to Mars. For everyone else, it's a world that's unbearable -- and for women, it's right back to the breeding animal chattel slavery that's been our fate for 5,000 years.
And the ultimate question is:
Can we envision an economy that is not based on insane levels of consumption—not based on such immense income inequality—that's based on providing for everyone at a comfortable level for food, water, housing, and medicine.
Sounds like socialism to me, but no socialist state has managed it, and consumer capitalism has had everybody by the throat for a couple of centuries. Now they're going for broke, and my fear is that they are going to effect the male-only world for the Manosphere that gave Trump the election after the call by Vance—and force-breed women to for the multiple competitive reasons listed above.
What needs to happen fast:
Abortion rights need to be immediately restored.
Contraception and abortion rights need to be written into a Constitutional amendment—and contraception medicines should be exported as foreign aid to every overpopulated country that requests them.
A Women’s Rights Amendment needs to be written into the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing women suffrage, the right to stand for election, the right to financial independence, the right to own property, the right to own businesses, and the right to education. Otherwise, we’re going to lose all that as easily as we lost Roe v. Wade.
And we need to Vote Blue across the boards. If the United States loses to Radical Right Theocratic Fascism, the rest of the world won’t be able to hold back the Orbans and Bolsonaros and Wilders of this world.
And then the world will not address the climate crises that can render the world uninhabitable for every single person. For what we’re facing is a mathematical certainty if we do not allow the population level to continue to decline—and if we do not proactively address the generative causes of climate change.
And women do not deserve to be forced into providing an imaginary solution that makes a real problem worse.
Insightful.
"One reason for this push to make white women breed is that white and Asian women have the best access to birth control and use it, and it shows in the statistics. So taking away abortion and birth control directly increases the percentage of American-born children in favor of retaining a white majority." And ya better hurry up!! The treatment of girls and women in India by patriarchal males who are also brutal, is so much like the reported feelings/actions of the Incels here in the U.S.