Why women are having fewer babies, in Ireland and worldwide

International Women’s Day was not just about celebrating women. It was also a nudge to look at the big picture. And that picture is confusing.

Global fertility rates are plunging, singledom rates are rising, and violent pornography is a life-threatening plague. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has discovered the “sweet spot” for staff productivity: it’s a 60-hour week. Some companies are offering to pay for woman staff’s egg-freezing plans while also demanding they spend more time in the office.

There are many obvious conundrums for women contained in those sentences but for anyone who is listening carefully, the problem is not just women’s but the whole of humanity’s.

With any luck while in the Oval Office today Taoiseach Micheál Martin will encounter the effective co-president Elon Musk wearing a small fractious child on his head. This would be X Æ A-Xii (the four-year-old who achieved world fame by rubbing the contents of his nose on the Resolute desk), one of 14 children reportedly fathered by Musk – with four mothers that we know of.

Why women are having fewer babies, in Ireland and worldwide

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Musk believes a collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger facing civilisation and that “people are going to have to revive the idea of having children as a kind of social duty, otherwise civilisation will just die”. It’s called pronatalism. But it’s not just any children of course. He really wants smart people to have kids, said Shivon Zilis, mother to three of Musk’s.

Musk is not wrong about birth rates. Worldwide fertility fell from an average of five births per woman in 1950 to 2.3 births per woman in 2021. In Ireland the picture is grim; in the first half of 2024, the birth rate fell to 1.5 per woman, according to the Central Statistics Office, well below the replacement rate. It’s even lower than the US rate of 1.6.

Population ageing and decline are powerful domestic and global forces shaping everything from economics to politics and the environment, yet they hardly feature in serious public debate.

One problem is that the issue is being framed by right-wing pronatalists such as Musk and JD Vance, that scourge of “childless cat ladies”. “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness,” said Musk in November.

So how does that work for women in Musk’s and Mark Zuckerberg’s world of “masculine energy”? Musk makes no mention of responsible parenthood, never mind fatherhood. Ex-partners of his have publicly tried to reach him through his social media site about a child’s “medical crisis” or just begging him to visit a newborn.

Family values carry a different meaning now. The fact that women can exercise reproductive choice according to their wishes, health and means is all good news. But falling birth rates are not just the result of couples or singles electing to have smaller families or none. It’s not just the slick often questionable marketing language around a woman’s (costly) choice to freeze her eggs, equating the chances of a successful pregnancy to money in the bank, to be withdrawn when that elusive decent life partner turns up.

A big problem is that there are fewer such partnerships in the first place. Relationships are not just becoming less common, but increasingly fragile. The issue is the rising rates of singledom according to Financial Times analyst John Burn-Murdoch.

In egalitarian Finland, it is now more common for couples who move in together to split up than to have a child, a sharp reversal of the historical norm. In the US, Finland and South Korea, in Turkey, Tunisia and Thailand, and in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, falling birth rates are increasingly downstream of a relationship recession among young adults.

The global spread points to the proliferation of smartphones as one cause, suggests Burn-Murdoch. Geographical differences in the rise of singledom broadly track mobile internet usage, particularly among women because social media facilitates the spread of liberal values especially among women and boosts woman empowerment.

Singledom remains rare in south Asia, for example, where women’s web access is more limited. Other factors might include caste and honour systems which encourage high rates of marriage. But whether his theory is plausible or not, the point is that baby bonuses only go so far. Housing shortage is an obvious barrier but it does not explain Finland or all the rich countries with low birth rates.

Hungary’s right-wing pronatalist government poured 5 per cent of gross domestic product into tax cuts and bribes for parents, yet birth rates are falling again after a temporary surge.

Russia, where the birth rate is predicted to fall to 1.32 per woman, has looked at opening a “ministry of sex” to combat the declining birth rate and has come up with a programme in which 18- to 23-year-old woman students could be paid for having a child, according to Newsweek. Russian health minister Yevgeny Shestopalov has even encouraged the population to “engage in procreation on breaks” while at work.

And yet it’s hard to get away from that image of Elon Musk wearing his child around the office or of JD Vance disembarking from a flight with his children in pyjamas to yelps of public delight at what “great dads” they are and how “incredibly relatable to Americans with families”.

To see just how relatable, note that Vance was getting off Air Force 2, not a Ryanair flight from Malaga. And try imagining Kamala Harris or one of our few woman Cabinet Ministers appearing at an Oireachtas committee with a four-year-old on her head and being praised as “great mammies” or aunts. Then have a closer look at the reasons behind women’s reluctance to have more babies.