washingtonexaminer.com
2025-09-14
The world's birth rate is just about equal to, or possibly even below, the level at which the human population will hold steady -- right about 2.1 babies per woman.
The United States's birth rate has been falling for 18 years, is at a record low, and is still falling. Fewer children exist in the U.S. than did a decade ago. Every wealthy country, except Israel, has a birth rate below the replacement level, and most are well below. Nobody seems to have found a way to reverse this trend.
The baby bust will be the dominant story of the next 30 years, at least.
All this makes it really dizzying to go back 60 years and look at the panic about overpopulation.
The overpopulation panic of the 1960s had two distinct elements: believing the world couldn't feed, house, or keep warm 6 billion people, and the U.S. couldn't handle 300 million, and believing that something drastic was needed to curb the birth rate.
When reviewing the '60s concerns about population, a good place to start is this dispatch in the New York Times from the 1964 World's Fair by science fiction author Isaac Asimov.
Scotland's birth rate at its lowest since 1855, the year it started keeping records by Jonathon Van Maren