Europe’s fertility crisis: Which European country is having the fewest babies?
https://www.euronews.com/health/2024/05/14/europes-fertility-crisis-which-european-country-is-having-the-fewest-babies
by euronews-english
Europe’s fertility crisis: Which European country is having the fewest babies?
https://www.euronews.com/health/2024/05/14/europes-fertility-crisis-which-european-country-is-having-the-fewest-babies
by euronews-english
47 comments
Not surprising.
The more developed the country the less babymaking, it seems.
Russia will be lowest at the end of their war if the latest UN estimates are true. They’ll be missing out on an entire generation.
Yeah keep doing jack shit about the housing crisis, let’s see how bad it can get.
Wow, even Türkiye is at 1.63, that is surprising after decades of population growth.
Deploy the artificial wombs
We won’t have babies until we have houses to raise them in. It’s as simple as that
Hey I have an easy 4- step solution:
1. Increase wages¹
2. Penalize large properties owners who speculate on housing²
3. Subsidise infant care facilities (Kindergartens etc)
4. TAX THE RICH (preferably the same from point 2) to have money for all of the above
Notes:
1. in the case of my country just pay people a decent wage to begin with for f sake
2. C’è un girone dell’inferno per voialtri
Me 29 and gf 31 can’t even find a apartment larger than 50m2 to move in together. How are we supposed to have kids? Both masters degree in engineering and high income. It’s a joke.
Meanwhile my parents could buy a house in the city in the early 90s. Today that house goes for 7-8 times what they paid for it.
I wonder what’s happening in France for them to have slightly different numbers than the rest
Who gives a fuck? The elites will just import more people from 3rd world just so they can work at factories. They wont give a shit about anything else lmao
Europe is already over.
It will be Europeistan or Europadabad soo
“Fertility crisis” my a$$.
This has nothing to do with fertility and everything to do with that doom and gloom atmosphere that permeates the whole of Europe right now. Climate crisis, war crisis, housing crisis, financial crisis, the crisis of split societies and the migration crisis.
Who wants to foster children in a world that right now burns to the ground all the while politicians seem either disinterested or plain helpless?
We are going to (hopefully) have a cild in the next few years. But that’s it, only one child. We would like to have 2 or maybe even 3 but it’s not possible with today’s economy. Even though we own an apartment we just can’t comfortably sustain more than one child. The rates are high, cost of living skyrocketed and kindergarten is barely available. The current system is skewed heavily against having children so that’s what they get.
Think I’m gonna hold on to my shotgun as a plan B since it doesn’t look like there’ll be people to wipe my ass when I get old and crippled
Can we stop this talk “crisis”? Unempolyement is too high, there aren’t enough jobs for everyone, only corps not wanting to pay enough and wanting imigrants for lower pay, while having unemployed youth right here. what jobs? Still looking for one
Nice doomsday article. Pretty much anyone I know that wants a kid isn’t getting one because they live in their parents house and want to move out but thats not possible. So yes I guess we add these people to the statistic as well?
Fertility rate issue is really in the media nowadays. Sounds like an important issue for the top capitalists, otherwise it would not be everywhere..
It’s the economy.
That’s it.
Who would feel comfortable (other than the senseless breeders) having children when you can’t properly finance yourself, your apartment, your car, food, taxes, plan and pay for decent child care, their education, not to mention insurance for everyone and everything and still have something left over to enjoy your existence outside of the grind?
People talk about housing and money, which is a problem, but is not the main reason for the fertility crisis. The main reason is cultural, people now value careers, trips and just generally spending more time on themselves than making babies.
The big irony is that the high quality of life that people have in europe (in general) is not sustainable with decreasing populations, so something has got to give, retirements being one of them. But if more people are older, more people will vote against pro-young policies, which will lead to social unrest and self destruction. Things are going to get much worse before they get better.
Double the salary then we’ll talk!
From one side, we have a housing crisis and cost of living that is skyrocketing, making it difficult to raise kids, on the other side we have real fertility issues related to the amount of microplastic we ingest on a daily basis that is altering our biological systems.
But instead of contemplating the idea that our current socio-economic system is at fault, for both creating savage consumerism and over-production of useless things and a financial/economic landscape that is altering the housing market, newspapers and politicians are only able at pointing fingers at the “young people not making babies” and “let’s make the hit parade of the lowest fertility countries”. Not even ostriches can hid their heads so much in the sand like human beings.
It’s crazy that no one seems to want to raise kids on a continent that is completely organized to make life for boomers as laid back as possible.
Imagine being a 30 yo boomer in 1980:
– housing prices now vs then
– child care now vs then
– real income (vs inflation) since then
– student debt now vs then
– corporate taxes now vs then
– car prices now vs then
– pensions now vs then
– income tax now vs then (vs wealth tax)
– climate change now vs then
– pollution now vs then
… the list goes on and on and on.
They have created a world that is unfair at times, in which every policy against the interests of the 60+ year-olds is political suicide, to then wonder why people don’t want to have kids any more.
Same goes for entrepreneurship and economic growth btw, there is a reason there is no Magnificent 7 company that is European. We have built societies that are there to protect the interests of the elderly and wealthy (often the same group), not to create newness and ambition.
Ursula vd Leyen can give all the bombastic and hollow speeches she wants, but she is the embodiment of this, a society created by the Christian Democrats and Conservatives over the past decades in multiple European countries. Including mine (NL). And now we’re left with a populist-voting younger generation. Thanks a lot for that too btw.
(Sorry, this topic always infuriates me)
1. People aren’t earning enough to be able to own a house or pay rent in a decent place.
2. Kindergartens and nurseries prices aren’t in tune with what people earn either.
3. Global warming, constant threats of wars and violence.
4. Generally speaking, people are more educated and think about the real implications of having children – to them and to their future child.
Given the scenario above, what do you want?
What really blew my mind was Jamaican ferility rate at 1.35. Europe isn’t unique, its a worldwide trend
Seems like it has constantly lowered in every country but can someone explain the plunge in 2010 in Finland, Sweden and the UK? What happened there compared to the rest of the Europe?
There is no alternative to sinking birth rates.
A crisis for who?
On top of what everyone else has said here, I also want to point out that we culturally treat people like they are children until they are in their mid-late 30s.
* School systems teach extremely slow and condescendingly.
* Most employers treat you like incompetent replaceable employees, which is reflected in laughable wages and maternity leaves.
* Governments offer no help in ensuring things like maternity leaves, min wages, or housing affordability for young parents are met
* Older generations encourage constant travelling/playing games/childish pop cultures instead of giving solid advice and guidance.
* You get laughed at for discussing homeownership / affordable rents. Like it’s something we just don’t understand and therefore cannot discuss/debate.
It is very hard to prepare mentally and financially to enter parenthood when you have no support backing you.
It may seem like what Im saying is passing blame… but there are so many 20-30 year olds I know that haven’t even come close to hitting the maturity their parents were at at the same age. How can you expect them to embrace parenthood when they haven’t been raised to embrace it and society is working to harshly against them to thrive as parents.
There aren’t suddenly too few babies🙄
My brother graduated in demographics. Part of his study was how population progressed. It’s been known for what, many decades that the whole bell curve would become very top heavy right about… Now. The bulge moves up and up, and for the Netherlands at least between 2030 and 2040 the bulge will pass the 100 year mark. Guess what happens? People grow old and pass away.
It’s been known a loooong time that these are going to be rough years with a disproportionally large number of elderly pensionated care needing people who do consume, but aren’t part of the workforce. Pension age has gone up already, but how much more can be done?
On the one end they receive better and better medical care and thus can stay out of assisted housing, and thereby keep living in their family homes, grinding the housing market to a halt, on the other end bulding space for new housing is more and more limited, and where housing could be developed, is delayed and blocked by nitrogen pollution.
Living cost for younger generations goes up both by housing scarcity and because they need to cough up the money for society to upkeep the elderly. Doule working households were encouraged, and by now a bare necessity.
I might understand the sentiment of increasing the number of younger generations to even out the bell curve but 1) you’d be about 30 years too late to do that, and 2) how the heck are we supposed to house, clothe, feed care for, and educate all these babies AND be a double working house hold?
“MoAr BaBiEz!1” is not solving anything at all!
At this point it would create another bulge in the population, putting even more stress on already strained sustainability as it is, and create the SAME problem 80-100 years from now.
The solution? Imo, tough it out. In ten years, old peoples homes, hospitals and housing will grow less strained.
When I was in school, Yugoslavia still existed, and they were saying that fertility rate was much higher in Kosovo than in the rest of Serbia. If I understood this article, now it is the other way around.
Let’s speak in the language they understand: “Fix housing crisis – Get fixing fertility crisis extra!”
Houses are one thing but I saw also an interesting article that the more people make the less kids they have but instead focus more on quality of the 1 or 2 they have.
So it is possible even if there were more houses available if people get richer it would not change that much
We are fertile, just conditions ain’t right.
“Birth rate” crisis …not “fertility”
I can BARELY buy a house in 2-3 years (after saving for almost a decade) near my friends and family … how the fuck can I do that and have children? Fuck off with the “bUt wHy cAnT wE PrOcReAtE?!”
I didn’t realize it was a competition 😭
Yeah well, it’s I don’t know how many times harder to have a house for someone around 30 now than it was 50 years ago.
We can’t raise a child in a 15m² studio
women also learned that they don’t have to have children, it was never acceptable in the past. in fact there are still women who think they have to get a proposal, get married, have kids – tick the boxes. Now people are more aware of childhood trauma, more people go to therapy, climate change, raising prices. It’s just the responsible selfless thing to do.
1.29 for Poland? That would be euphoric news. We’re 1.10 and ramming through the 1.0 soon. Western prices, eastern salaries.
Let people keep their money and maybe things will turn around. Oh and stop handing out free shit to people who stab children in playgrounds. Maybe that also helps.
Even if we beat housing crisis I can’t imagine having a baby. Ever.
Le getting pregnant – I’m going to face poor treatment in hospitals, being belittled by biased and ignorant obgyns, in case of fetal pathology everyone looks away instead of helping (thanks Poland)
Le giving birth – horrific per se, hard to get proper anaesthesia here without cesarean and basically I wouldn’t be treated as a human being in this most vulnerable moment in my whole life
Le postpartum- ughhhhh don’t even get me started
Le how society sees me- Im being ridiculed for stretch marks, saggy breast and gaining weight, society sees me as a parasite on state/my employers butt that only pushed out the kid to live off social benefits, I’m being judged for literally everything, I’m being blamed for bad years for our economy, I’m being blamed if kids father would abaddon us and most likely wouldn’t even get child support, because such man is smart while I was a wh*re that opened legs and should suffer.
And you guys are talking about housing crisis?!
I could get the largest house in Warsaw and still would choose to remain child free because I’m not going to deal with all this crap. Especially if my alternative is enjoying my hobbies and making money- because money is all that matters for society and people wouldn’t give a shit about fertility rates if it didn’t had any influence on their fucking pensions. You get rich you get respect. You get kids (as a woman) you lose respect.
So to me the biggest problem lays within our mentality and priorities. And am playing along.
If people can still fuck and get babies, the problem is that no one WANTS to because there’s no baseline support to do so.
Housing? Awful for anyone who isn’t really well off or already owns/inherits a home.
Wages? Average salary in my country keeps slipping closer to minimum wage, despite raises in minimum wage.
Buying power? Plummeting across the board.
Working hours? Steadily rising.
But no, you’re right. Young adults are infertile, selfish or some other boomer-pandering shit of an excuse.
Why does the world need more people?
The less people there are the more their work is worth.
More people means corporations can get away with offering you a lower salary because it’s a “competitive” market.
Remember that the perfect employee has kids and at least one mortgage.
And then you have to pope who begs the one between 18-25 to have more children.
I am sorry… But this shit in 2024 is outlandish to think about. Not when rent in a major city is more than 500-700 euros a month. Maybe even more. And at 18-20 you shouldn’t even have a kid. Sure, there are those who want to etc.
I don‘t understand. People keep saying it‘s because of the housing crisis but third world countries have a lot of babies and I would think that they have worse housing situations. Can someone explain?
But at the same time the environment cannot house anymore people. Quality of life is declining. Being less sounds better than being more and anyway dying of devastating climate events and wars and famines.
Why would people have babies when they don’t know if there will be a place for them to live and if they would have the finances to be able to afford to raise that kid.
Oh yeah also climate worries and a multitude of other issues too.
– Slave wages
– Inflation record high
– Housing shortage
And no, don’t tell me people are selfish and don’t want kid, there are always people like that but they’re the minority
What else did I miss? And what’s our government doing about it? Absolutely nothing, they and their friends still get richer though