#birthrate-policies

#birthrate-policies

Since the first IVF baby was born in 1978, technological advancement of reproductive medicine has enabled millions to have children, marking a significant milestone in medical history.

"Asia has more diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular patients than anywhere else in the world," Abrar Mir states, emphasizing the severity of the health crisis in the region.

From a young age, I was a very sexual person. I knew I wanted to have a lot of sex, and I also figured that to do that, I would need to meet women who felt the same. I never considered making sex my career. Or at least not until one day in Tokyo, when I was with a friend who got a call about a job.

This was no accidental clash of shoulders in a crowded place, but one of the most visible examples of a spate of butsukari otoko bumping man shoving incidents in Japan that experts attribute to a combination of gender dynamics and the stresses of modern life.

Life expectancy in the EU continues to increase, reaching 81.5 years in 2024, 0.1 years more than the previous year and higher than in 2019, the year before the pandemic (81.3). As a reference, at the height of COVID-19, in 2021, the expectation of life had declined to 80.1 years across EU countries.

People still want children, and the question is why are they not having them? A sense of security is essential for realizing the desire to have children. The succession of crises has prevented many people from turning that wish into reality.

Much of the rebound reflects what demographers describe as the echo boomer effect. Roughly 3.6 million children were born between 1991 and 1995, when births briefly rose after the government in effect ended its family planning policy. That cohort is now in its early thirties, the age at which birth rates are highest. Women in their early thirties numbered an estimated 1.7 million in 2025, up 9% from 2020.

The Trump administration really wants Americans to have more kids. President Trump, the self-proclaimed " fertilization president," has called for a new " baby boom." Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says communities with big families should get more government funds. The on-again-off-again Trump ally Elon Musk, father of at least 14, has warned that "civilization will disappear" if we don't get busy.

At the current rate, China's population could drop as low as 800 million by the year 2100, according to the United Nations. China's population fell for the fourth year in a row in 2025 after the country's birth rate dropped to its lowest point since records began almost 80 years ago, according to figures released by the national statistics office in Beijing on Monday.

We didn't think too much about the economics of having four children, but this aspect of parenting is very, very important

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China's birth rate fell last year to its lowest level since 1949, highlighting a deepening demographic struggle for Beijing even as officials roll out new subsidies to encourage couples to have more children. The number of births per 1,000 people dropped to 5.6, the lowest since at least the founding of the People's Republic, according to data released by the National Statistics Bureau on Monday (Jan. 19). The number of newborns decreased 1.6 million, the most since 2020, to 7.9 million.

The U.S.'s population growth is slowing as immigration has declined amid President Donald Trump's deportation push and stricter border policies. According to new Census Bureau data, the drop-off is the biggest since the COVID-19 pandemic. From July 2024 to July 2025, the population of the United States grew by 1.8 million people (about 0.5%). This was mostly driven by immigration: During that period, the U.S. added 1.3 million immigrants.

For the first time since the end of the second world war, France has recorded more deaths than births, suggesting that the country's long-held demographic advantage over other EU countries is slipping away. Across the country in 2025, there were 651,000 deaths and 645,000 births, according to newly released figures from the national statistics institute Insee. France had long been an exception across Europe, with birthrates that topped many of its neighbours'.

U.S. births fell a little in 2025, according to newly posted provisional data. Slightly over 3.6 million births have been reported through birth certificates, or about 24,000 fewer than in 2024. The decline seems to confirm predictions by some experts, who doubted a 22,250-birth increase in 2024 marked the start of an upward trend. The posted numbers account for nearly all of the babies born in 2025, according to the CDC.

Half a world away, specialists in Japan say they have some hard-won wisdom to offer. They watched flu and pneumonia deaths spike after the Japanese government stopped pushing parents to have their children vaccinated against influenza. They witnessed rubella outbreaks driven by shifting vaccine guidance that left a segment of the population vulnerable. And they saw an unfounded media scare turn the public away from immunizations against human papillomavirus (HPV), which is responsible for nearly all cases of cervical cancer.