When Storks Don't Oblige

Some people get very upset.

There would be no population explosion if people who are trying to keep the wolf from the door wouldn't let the stork fly in through the window.—Evon Esar, a 20th Century American humorist, suggesting a way to simultaneously address overpopulation and poverty.

The world has begun an unprecedented decline in fertility rates…Most people surveyed want two or more children. Fertility rates are falling in large part because many feel unable to create the families they want. And that is the real crisis. — Natalia Kanem, head of United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), 2025.

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Governments and high-profile influencers want people to have more kids. They insist society will all but crumble unless global fertility rebounds from its present fortuitous slide.

The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has pushed back against the up-the-fertility crowd with release of its 2025 report entitled “The Real Fertility Crisis.” But wait, not in ways you might think!

According UNFPA, a lot of people want more kids. It wants countries to help them do that, but without coercive means. The agency doesn’t care whether human fertility and population go up or down. It wants “full realization of reproductive rights,” apparently absent any concern for natural environments, the climate, and the general well-being of life on Earth.

UNFPA insists that “conversations, policies and solutions must shift away from alarmism over ‘population explosion’ and ‘population collapse’ and towards the real-world concerns of individuals.”

In its view, there’s a demographic crisis because “very high proportions of men and women – in every country surveyed, in every region of the world – are unable to realize their fertility aspirations.” UNFPA’s executive director, Dr Natalia Kanem, believes that “the answer lies in responding to what people say they need: paid family leave, affordable fertility care and supportive partners.”

Based on its survey of 14,000 adult men and women across 14 countries, UNFPA found that:

• Over 50% of respondents indicated that economic barriers were limiting their ability to have the number of children they desire. These include financial limitations, unemployment, job insecurity, and housing concerns, such as lack of space or high cost.

• About 24% of respondents cited health issues, including difficulty conceiving, barriers to fertility or pregnancy care, and general poor health.

• Nearly 19% said fears about the future (climate change, environmental degradation, wars, pandemics, etc.) cause them to have fewer children.

• About 14% said partnership issues (the lack of a partner, or a suitable partner) limit parenthood.

UNFPA wants “policies that expressly – in letter and spirit – affirm the rights of individual women and men to make their own choices” as to when, how and whether to have children. Its focus is on “both preventing unintended pregnancies and enabling intended pregnancies…[as] both require supportive environments, policies and norms.”

This may sound great from a human rights and welfare perspective. Who could possibly be against “the rights of individual women and men to make their own choices”? It is certainly better than governments crassly pushing for more people since those efforts reportedly have little or no effect.

Unfortunately, UNFPA fails to consider that population growth may run counter to improving human health, reducing poverty, and fostering healthy relationships between partners. Moreover, it is clueless or doesn’t care about the impacts that vast human numbers have on other-than-human life.

It’s shocking that the UN agency on population matters appears unconcerned about growth trends, even in terms of how they affect human wellbeing. It is hard to imagine that sub-Saharan Africa in particular, with extremely high fertility and poverty today, will benefit from having billions of more people before 2100.

Be it as it may, how might UNFPA goals, if widely adopted, affect human population trends? I see three possible outcomes:

1. People continue having fewer kids anyway. Fertility rates around the world continue to decline, but not fast enough to forestall a projected world population of over 10 billion by the mid-2080s (up from today’s 8 billion).

2. The global fertility decline largely evaporates and the world’s population reaches 13-14 billion by the end of the century.

   However, given the current state of the world, it seems unlikely that societies will substantially reduce economic barriers to having children, lower people’s fears about the future, better deal with health issues, or even significantly help partners have better relationships. Improvements in accessible and affordable treatments for infertility might have some effect, but, as UNFPA reports, these have until now not kept pace with the expansion of contraceptive technologies.

3. Today’s declining fertility accelerates to a point where human numbers drop to 6-7 billion people by 2100. Combined with reduced economic growth, that would be huge blessing for most life on the planet.

   Under this scenario, UNFPA’s programs would sharply cut unintended pregnancies and greatly help empower women in less affluent countries where fertility rates are highest. At the same time, they would fail to incentivize people to have more children. It’s possible that people in the UNFPA survey may want fewer children than reported because openly expressing that might sound selfish or “anti-family.” They may, in fact, have other priorities, and prefer the freedom that goes along with having a small family or being child-free.

Despite posturing to the contrary, UNFPA isn’t neutral on the matter of population growth. As Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, points out "This is the first time that [the UN] have really gone all-out on low fertility issues…Until recently the agency focused heavily on women who have more children than they wanted and the ‘unmet need’ for contraception.”

To be fair, UNFPA warns against coercive responses to declining birth rates – such as baby bonuses or fertility targets – noting that these policies are largely ineffective and can violate human rights. Instead, it wants governments “to empower people to make reproductive decisions freely,” for example, “by investing in affordable housing, decent work, parental leave, and the full range of reproductive health services and reliable information.”

However, it’s one thing to push for affordable housing and decent work, and quite another to promote fertility enhancement and “more generous childcare provisions, such as tax breaks, and extended, fully-paid maternity leave.” UNFPA also urges that “companies could be compelled to offer new mums and dads more flexible working hours, and provide workplace creches.”

As I see it, there are two primary objections to what UNFPA is promoting, one social and one environmental.

1. People who decide not to have children, or few, should not be required to share the costs of people having children.

2. Insofar as UNFPA policies increase global fertility, they further drive ecological overshoot tied to overconsumption and overpopulation.

As you can imagine, I don’t buy the counter argument that everyone benefits from, and therefore should support, people who make more people.

If the goal is to promote the “general welfare,” society shouldn’t bias its actions against people who choose to be child-free or limit family size. Instead, it can promote public wellbeing through programs such as universal health care and “sabbatical leave,” rather than “parental leave.”

UNFPA might also want to educate people on the pros and cons of having children, on better family financial planning and sufficiency life styles, and on choosing quality over quantify for just about everything.

According to UNFPA, the following situation is becoming a global norm:

It was different when Namrata was growing up. "We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do. She spends at least three hours a day commuting to her office and back. When she gets home she is exhausted but wants to spend time with her daughter. Her family doesn't get much sleep. "After a working day, obviously you have that guilt, being a mom, that you're not spending enough time with your kid," she says."So, we're just going to focus on one.”

I strongly suspect that hectic, rushed, and demanding lives, driven by consumerism, pronatalism, crowding, economic inequity, and misguided messaging about what’s important, lie at the heart of the problem.

Let the stork rest! Wood storks, like countless other members of the world’s living community, suffer from habitat loss and degradation linked to human overpopulation. (Photo: Tony Povilitis)

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Faithfully for the Living World,

Dr. Tony Povilitis