Hi, I'm Blythe Terrell filling in for Wendy Zuckerman, and you are listening to Science Versus.
This is the show that pits facts against falling fertility.
Today we're talking about the claim that people are having fewer and fewer babies and that it could be bad news for humanity.
We've actually been hearing about this fear for years, but recently it has made its way to the White House.
President Donald Trump is pushing for a baby boom.
We want more babies, to put it very nicely.
I'll be known as the fertilization president.
That's not bad.
I've been called much worse.
Vice President J.D.
Vance has gone in on this, too.
So let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America.
And it's not just the US.
This idea that people need to have more babies has been popping up all over the world, with headlines about low birth rates in parts of Europe.
Italy is suffering through one of the worst demographic crises anywhere in the world.
Spain's population is disappearing.
Plus Japan and South Korea.
The Korean population crisis has reached a new milestone.
The nation's population could free fall by 85% over the next century.
China, which famously had a policy limiting couples to one child only, has done a 180.
For the first time, Beijing has announced a nationwide child care subsidy policy in a bid to boost the country's birth rate.
Meanwhile, in the US there's actually a whole movement building around this of people called pro-natalists.
And they seem to have the ear of President Trump.
Some of the proposals we're hearing about to get more babies include stuff like 5000 cash bonuses for parents, classes to teach women about their menstrual cycles and even a grand prize for the most fertile among us.
A national medal of motherhood for women with six or more children.
So there's a few reasons that people are eager to turn this around.
Like, we hear that a baby bust will totally mess up society and potentially tank the economy.
And we also hear that it's actually an existential problem, that we might even be on our way to extinction as a species.
So today we are asking, is that right?
How worried should we be about this?
And if you want to boost fertility rates, how do you do it?
Because when it comes to fertility, there's a lot of... We want more babies, to put it very nicely.
But then there's science.
Coming up after the break.
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All right.
Welcome back.
This is Blythe Terrell.
I'm the editor at Science Versus.
I'm here with senior producer Rose Rimmler.
Hey, Rose.
Hi, Blythe.
Welcome.
Welcome.
Thanks.
Actually, you told me I had to be here.
No, but it's a very interesting topic.
Although I've noticed, Blythe, that you in particular, you seem like particularly obsessed with it.
So why?
Why does this like grab you so much?
Yeah.
So I think what it is, is that there's like this motley crew of this like band of misfits, right?
That are all interesting.
Raising the alarm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not that they're misfits, but I mean, you have these sort of pronatalists and you have, like some, like very techie people.
You've got your Elon Musks and other tech bros.
You have like that group of it.
You've sort of got, you have like You're sort of fun.
You're sort of right wing Christians on the same boat, sometimes like hey, we really got to like populate, populate the earth, you know, and it's just this interesting group together.
And I just want to know, like, OK, so are they right?
Like, is there something going on here?
Yeah, I'd like to know that, too.
All right.
So to start off here just like right out of the gate, one thing that the pronatalists are right about is that in lots of places, birth rates are going down.
Like, yes, people are having fewer kids on average.
And that is true in basically every country in the world.
Really?
Yeah.
Oh.
Wow.
I've shocked you already.
I thought it was just like I thought you're just going to say the U.S. and some parts of Europe.
And no, the trend, the downward trend for birth rates, for what's called for something called specifically, total fertility rate, is happening almost everywhere and has been for decades.
OK, so if you take the US, the total fertility rate, which is basically like a snapshot of the kind of average number of kids one woman will have in her lifetime, is a shorthand for it.
That average is right now 1.62 births per woman.
Okay.
And that's actually the lowest it's ever been.
So the concern is that if you want the population to stay where it is, if you want it not to fall, the total fertility rate needs to be 21 kids per woman.
Okay.
And that's 21, because some of these pregnancies the person who's born will die won't have their own children.
It's kind of like a little bit of an insurance policy.
I guess.
Exactly.
And just to say like, this is talked about in terms of births per woman, but it's really per couple, per set of parents, because you're using that 21 births to replace those two people, whoever they may be.
Right.
Right.
And it's just like, it's easier to track what comes out of uterus than what comes out of a penis.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm not sure I want to know where your mind went, but I can see you.
Let's move on.
Let's move on.
So the idea is for the population to be stable, to not go up or down.
The total fertility rate needs to be 2.1.
Okay.
And according to the United Nations in 2024, the global total fertility rate was 2.2.
Oh.
So in the U.S., it's 1.62.
As of right now, it's 2.2 worldwide.
So it's above that replacement level.
So if you're looking at the population of Earth, the human population of Earth...
We're good.
Yeah, at this moment.
But pretty consistently, it's going down.
And so people are like oh, even though at a global level it's above this 21 replacement level right now.
People are like, oh well, it's probably going to go down if that's what it's been doing for decades.
And so scientists do estimate that global population will peak in maybe like 60 years and then start to fall.
Like that is what current estimates do show.
Okay, but is that a bad thing?
Because you used to hear a lot about people worrying about overpopulation.
So is that good news?
You know that's a great question because like, actually even just talking about this out in the world as you know I am whenever I bring this up to people they're like oh, population might be going down.
Like, isn't that good?
Good for the environment.
Fewer.
People using up resources, spewing out trash, greenhouse gases, like all the crap that humans are currently doing.
But a lot of scientists are like, actually, it's a little more complicated than that.
They don't really think that this is going to be a climate solution.
And that's basically because the population isn't expected to actually drop soon enough.
To like really reverse our climate problems, like to actually have as big of an impact as it would need to have, to sort of save our asses.
Basically saying the stuff we need to do to reduce emissions has to be done before we'd start to actually use fewer resources.
That is exactly what people say.
Okay, that does make sense.
So it's not going to fix climate, scientists argue, to have fewer people, to have lower birth rates.
And this also means that we are pretty far from the population dropping in a super extreme way, right?
Like this idea that humans might go extinct.
Yeah, okay.
But there definitely is some nutty stuff that can start happening when your birth rates go really low.
So let's talk about that.
And I want to do that, Rose, by taking you to South Korea.
Okay.
Because South Korea is the country with the lowest total fertility rate in the world.
What is it?
It is...
0.75.
Oh, wow.
That's now that you told me what to do.
I understand that that's really low now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that is the 2024 number.
And actually, I talked to this economist about it.
It's a crazy number.
It's a number that I think people I mean all Koreans know the number now because they saw it in the news, so much.
But it's still a number that it's difficult to imagine, because we just never lived in a society with a 075 fertility rate.
That is Jisoo Hwang.
She is a professor studying economics at Seoul National University in South Korea.
So basically, a 075 birth rate means that If nothing else happens, your next generation, in terms of people born, is going to be less than half the size of your current generation.
Mm hmm.
Right.
So like every couple is producing less than one kid.
Mm hmm.
Right.
And so I wanted to talk to Jisoo, because she did a whole bunch of work to figure out like, how South Korea got here and what's going on.
And there's a few things that contributed to this, but I'm going to zoom in on one of the biggies.
Okay.
So for Jisoo, her spidey sense on this started tingling about 10 years ago, when she was a grad student.
And she noticed something kind of surprising going on.
More and more of the highly educated women were not getting married.
And now that I think about it, that was like the precursor to all of this happening.
So Jisoo noticed this with her friends, actually, she told me.
She was like oh, a lot of them have gone to college, maybe gotten good jobs, but they were staying single.
And in Korea, there was actually a name for a woman like this.
She was called a gold miss.
So the term gold miss, I'm not the one who coined it.
It was becoming a popular word in Korea to refer to women who are highly educated.
So they're gold.
They're highly educated and they have high potential earnings.
They already have high paying jobs, but they're a miss.
So they didn't get married.
That's actually a very neutral, not like somewhat flattering term.
So much better than like old maid or whatever.
Yeah, right.
So Jisoo, when she started digging into this, she realized that a lot of this trend of women not getting married, really low fertility, it seemed to be related to this massive change that had happened in South Korea's economy.
Okay.
So if you look back like 50 plus years ago, South Korea was a really, really poor country.
But then it really shifted.
Like the country starts building up its industry, starts exporting a ton of stuff.
There's lots of South Korean companies that are super successful global companies.
K-pop.
Yes.
Yeah.
K-pop is a part of this.
Definitely a part of this.
So all of this economic growth, all of this change, it also meant that, like way more women started getting educated and getting jobs.
In some cases, really demanding jobs, really long hours.
So there was this big shift in women's roles in the workforce, the workplace.
Okay.
But Jisoo told me that, as this education and workplace shift was happening, what they did not see was a huge shift in women's roles at home.
And that's because you know our norms about.
You know what it means to be a good mother or a good wife or a good worker.
You know these kind of social norms.
They can't change that quickly.
So I mean you go to college, you get a higher education, you become a dentist or a lawyer or whatever, but then you still got to go home and like do all the cooking and cleaning and child caring.
That's the expectation.
Yeah.
And obviously like painting with a really broad brush, right?
But yes.
So yes, Jisoo told me, in Korea women are still largely supposed to do the childcare, largely supposed to do most of the work around the house.
And she said that it is bigger than like any one couple's attitude about this.
So it's not like someone's fault.
It's not like so.
Even if your husband is, for example, very supportive and he has very, you know, egalitarian gender attitudes, it may still not work because, like the whole society, all the institutions around us are not designed to, you know, operate with both mom and dad working full time.
So, for example, in Korea, elementary school, first grade, second grade, they come home at 1 p.m.
So someone has to be home for the kid.
Yes.
There's like these barriers to having a kid.
Yeah.
If both parents are working, there's these huge barriers to having a kid.
Which is true here as well.
Yeah.
I mean, we're talking about Korea because it has a distinct issue, but it's some of these issues.
So far, the issues you're bringing up seem fairly broad.
Like these also seem like issues here in the U.S.
They are.
They are.
And yet we're at 1.6.
And we're at 1.6.
We're smoking their asses.
So explain that.
Actually, I can.
The argument is that the speed mattered.
Like, for example, Jisoo told me over there, women's education levels ramped up like extremely fast.
So, from a country where almost no women were college graduates, now more than half of the women are college graduates.
Okay.
They see that this change happened really fast.
And in the U.S., it happened faster.
But it just happens slower because the U.S. has been like stronger economically for longer.
There's been more time for adjustments to be made.
Right.
A little easier.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And there's other stuff that could be at play here too, like cultural differences, things like that.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
But to zoom out though, I will say you know, in a lot of countries, as women get more education, better paying jobs, our time becomes more expensive.
Mm-hmm.
That was one thing that Jisoo kept pointing out.
She's like, your time...
If you can get a job that pays you more money, the cost-benefit changes for having a kid, especially if you're going to be the one who's expected to stay home, especially if you don't have reliable childcare, like all these things right.
And all of this changes the calculus of having a kid.
We are all given 24 hours a day.
Something needs to give.
So some women are choosing.
You know what then?
I don't think I can take this package of marriage and childcare.
I'll just forego having children.
I'll forego getting married.
So it's not necessarily just that people are like my job is way more fun than hanging out with a kid all day.
No, no, no, no, no.
It's not about that, right?
Yeah, it's more about a calculation of what I can make happen in my life and feel good about doing.
So bigger picture like, even though there's other reasons people aren't having as many kids, some economists do argue that this gender shift in education and jobs and just overall more autonomy for women, it could be the biggest reason that we've seen this change worldwide.
Women becoming more educated and more likely to work.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Okay, so that's a little bit about the why, like the how we got here.
And now I want to stay in South Korea to talk about what can happen next.
So, you know, using South Korea is like sort of a worst case scenario.
What does it look like when your fertility rate goes so low?
And I want to start with kids, because when you have fewer births, you have fewer kids.
And there's a ton of headlines about this actually like South Korea becoming basically like a kid desert.
Have you seen these?
No, but that was my first thought.
Yeah.
It sounds a little sad.
Yeah, and there's tons of reports around this.
You know, this is happening.
The population of kids is shrinking in ways that is actually noticeable.
I mean there's reports of hundreds and even thousands of schools just completely having to shut down.
You know, tiny numbers of kids and classes.
I saw a headline the other day about a primary school that opened with one first grader, Rose.
Oh, wow.
One first grader.
Can you imagine being the only first grader in your class?
That's so sad.
There's reports of them turning the schools into other things, like old folks' homes.
Well, that's telling.
Yeah.
And Jisoo said that she has noticed this out in the world.
Walking around, you see so much more older people relatively than children.
Is it like you're birdwatching and you're like, look, it's a one-year-old.
Right, right.
It's much more difficult to see a baby just walking around in the streets than seeing older people, right?
Very old people.
It's much easier to see very old people than to see babies.
Yeah.
And the other thing about this is it can build on itself.
So if you're thinking, oh, like, maybe I do want to have a kid.
And you look around and you're like, oh, there's no school.
Right.
There's no pediatrician.
There's no other kids on the playground.
There's no infrastructure in place.
Right.
So that's a thing, too.
Like, maybe you hesitate.
And then the next thing that happens that freaks people out about all this it relates to the older people, right?
Like, we just heard that we have way fewer kids.
And proportionally, we have way more older people in the population, right?
And they need someone to take care of them.
Yes.
Not only do they need someone to take care of them, they also need money to take care of them.
Because there's two pieces of this, right?
There's the idea that you can run into caregiver shortages, which we do hear about.
But the thing that actually economists seem to be a little more freaked out about is that like OK, when you get old, what happens?
You're too old to work.
You retire.
You maybe have a pension, but you also generally have health care.
And the way we pay for those things is through taxes.
I know taxes.
I can see you.
I can see your eyes glazing over.
But it really matters.
This tax thing actually is really important, because What happens is, if you don't have people younger people in your population, you end up with fewer people in the workforce, you end up with fewer people paying taxes and then you end up not being able to pay for these programs for your older people.
Plus, we use taxes to pay for other stuff, right?
Like roads, parks, fire departments.
So all this could get messy.
And obviously, like, South Korea is trying to figure this out.
They are very aware of this problem, of course.
But it could get bad.
Here's what Jisoo told me.
You know, in the extreme scenario where we don't do anything, then those kind of systems will collapse right.
Like we won't have a public pension, for example, if we don't do anything.
At least the way it is now.
Well, it makes sense though, because it's like the whole society is structured in such a way that young people support old people.
So without the young people, the old people are screwed.
Yeah.
And that's bad for us future old people.
Yeah.
So South Korea?
Actually, scientists call it a super-aged society, because more than 20 of the people are older than 65.
And a lot of them are actually living in poverty.
And this isn't just because of the population stuff.
Like, there's other reasons, too.
But South Korea actually has like one of the highest rates of elderly poverty among rich countries.
And they have, like, really high suicide rates also.
Hmm.
Jesus.
At least in some cases, according to the research.
That's because people are, like you know, can't afford to live.
Oy vey.
So this is the fear, basically.
That if trends for fertility keep going the way they're going—
Other countries worldwide.
We're all going to end up in this boat where, like things kind of start to crumble.
Yeah.
Yeah, that makes sense because society is people.
So without people, you don't have society.
Yeah, I mean, it's true.
You know, it's very, it's so simple when you put it that way.
Society is people.
And so this argument and also I mean frankly, like the way we've had society now is like society is all different ages of people doing all kinds of stuff, you know, not just because we're like, you know we love the sound of children's laughter, but also because we've built a society that requires all these different parts of it to sort of function and to like, also like feel good, you know.
So it's, yeah.
So like the concerns are very real, which means the obvious question is what can we do about it?
Yeah.
And that's what we're going to talk about after the break.
We'll see you next time.
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Welcome back.
It's Blythe.
I'm here with Rose Rimler.
Hey, Rose.
Hey, Blythe.
Today we are talking about the idea that we are in a fertility crisis in the US globally, because birth rates are going down all over the world.
And the question is, what can you do?
Well, I am not volunteering to get impregnated by Elon Musk.
So don't even suggest that.
You're not signing up for the like... The Musk Express.
The Tesla sperm delivery service.
It's just a cyber truck shows up in front of your apartment with a refrigerated sample.
No, that's not what you want.
Please offer other solutions that could potentially work.
Okay.
So where I want to start here Rose, actually is with this study that I got extremely obsessed with because it involves, like a kind of surprising tactic To get people on the baby-making train.
Free tequila?
What is it?
What is it?
No, Rose, I'm taking you to church.
Oh.
Excuse me.
And one of the researchers who was involved in this study, her name is Dr. Neha Diopa.
I'm an assistant professor at the University of Exeter in the economics department.
So what she studied, it all goes down in Georgia, in Eastern Europe, back in the mid 2000s, mid to late 2000s.
And where we start is that Georgia has its fertility rate.
That maybe doesn't sound that bad by today's standards, but it is below replacement.
It's about 1.76.
Okay.
Yeah, which is, you know, kind of similar to where the U.S. is right now, right?
A little higher.
Here's Neha.
So Georgia is, let's say, one of the post-Soviet countries and it has a very typical trait of the other post-Soviet countries, which is extremely low fertility rates.
There was a concern both by the government and the church that the demographic landscape of Georgia looks like is going through a fertility crisis.
And...
Another thing going on in Georgia is that it has this very powerful national church.
This church I'm talking about called the Georgian Orthodox Church.
And as like a cultural institution, it's really strong.
More than 80 percent of Georgians belong to it.
And it also just like has it's very strongly tied to the national identity.
So people are like into this church.
And this church is led by a very powerful dude called Patriarch Ilya II.
He's not like, he's not quite Pope level, but he's like a big deal in this church.
So he is a very popular guy.
And his opinion, like he was rated the most trusted man in the country.
The most trusted man in the country.
With a rating of 94%.
Would you compare him to like, is he like Elvis?
Yeah.
I can't think of anyone who at some point had such high approval ratings.
It's so unprecedented how much this guy is beloved.
Exactly.
So Patriarch Ilya II, he sees this fertility thing in Georgia.
He thinks these fertility rates are too low and decides he's going to do something about it.
So in December 2007, Ilya II announces this new plan, saying he would personally baptize any third or higher born child within marriage to Georgian Orthodox women.
Okay, so kid number one, kid number two, you're out of luck.
Kid number three, you're blessed by the patriarch of the church.
Yeah.
When he made this announcement, he said that not only will he personally baptize, but he also said he would become their godfather.
Oh, yeah.
Then he's the godfather of that kid forever, I guess, right?
Yes, exactly.
I'm sure for someone who's just, who is not religious or just from, from an outside perspective might seem like oh, it's just going to be a godfather in the name of it.
Of course, it's not.
Yeah, you're doing air quotes.
Yeah, exactly.
So he's not going to be visiting you on every birthday of your child.
But it is it's a matter of honor and respect for a family to have that.
So that's the intervention.
That's what he decides to do.
He's like, OK, we're not having enough kids.
I'm going to baptize kids three plus.
Yeah.
So it's an incentive to have more than two children.
Exactly.
So did this actually convince people to have more children?
That's what Neha's team wanted to find out.
So several years later, they did this huge analysis to see what happened.
So what we find is that people want to start having kids so they can make use of this program.
How many kids is Ilya II responsible for?
40,000 kids is how many he's been, has mass baptized.
Yeah.
Wow.
OK.
Right.
And according to Neha's team's analysis, these were like mostly additional births.
Like they weren't like wouldn't have happened.
Right.
Would not have happened for the most part without this intervention, which is wild.
So in Georgia, remember, we said it was one point seven six to begin with.
Yeah.
And then within a space of 24 months, we actually see it rise to 2.3.
So that's quite a big jump.
So 1.7 to 2.3 in two years.
I mean...
It really feels like people like went home from church that day and started making babies.
That is what we do observe.
We see within nine months of this announcement, there is a jump, a spike in fertility.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Oh my gosh.
It's really, that's really something.
If I were Ilya the second, I'd pat myself on the back.
Okay.
But like, who would be the equivalent of Ilya II in the United States?
Like, this is not a repeatable intervention, or is it?
Right.
I mean, listen, funny you should ask.
Okay, so who's the best person to do this job in the U.S. if somebody was going to do it?
I'm like, now I'm like, okay, Tom Hanks.
Everybody loves that guy.
So if Tom Hanks was going to baptize your kid, maybe, or Beyonce.
Or Taylor Swift.
What do you think, Rose?
None of those people have the time.
No, when you said Tom Hanks, I was like, that could convince me.
That could convince you to have a kid?
You'd be like, I'd have three kids if Tom Hanks... Yeah, if he came over and circumcised them.
Well, I'm Jewish.
Oh, right.
So Tom Hanks has to do the circumcision.
If he's up for that, let's make a deal.
If Tom Hanks will be the mohel to my third and above children...
No, I don't know.
That's it's such a good question.
It's a good question.
And it's a little, it's almost something sad about it because we're so divided as a country and we have all these like microcultures within the country.
It's a little bit sad that I can't think of any one uniting beloved person.
I got it, Rose.
Yeah.
Dolly Parton.
Oh, yeah.
Dolly Parton gives witch and waves her wand over your child.
All right.
Well, I mean, should we start our letter writing campaign to Dolly Parton?
Is that what you're saying?
Okay.
That's all I need.
Okay.
So, but to go back to what happened in Georgia...
I mean, like that's one potential downside to this influencer thing, right?
Not really replicable.
You can't guarantee it's going to work, right?
And then another caveat is that their big, huge baby bump, it did not last forever.
Okay.
Yeah.
So it's since like bumped back down.
I mean, that could be because Ilya II is in his 90s now.
He's like not doing as many of these baptisms.
Overall, though, like here's where I landed with Neha.
Bottom line, don't put all your eggs in the influencer basket.
Exactly.
Exactly.
You know, instead, Neha had a different suggestion.
So what is easier, but rather maybe a more painful, is to just address women's need of how to make their motherhood easier.
Yeah.
You know, nobody wants to do that.
Yeah, it seems like a more direct approach.
Slightly more straightforward, you say?
Yeah, I mean and, of course, like this is what a lot of people say we should be doing in the US, you know, and the Trump administration is supposedly considering some of these ideas.
Mm-hmm.
So there are a few things policy-wise that might move the needle here.
One of them is making child care more available and also cheaper.
Duh.
Okay.
Yes.
And there's this big review that came out recently.
And one study that was in this review came out of Belgium.
And it found that if you increase childcare slots for young kids by just one percentage point, the odds of somebody having their first baby goes up more than 10.
So it bumps it.
Another big thing and seems to be giving people parental leave.
Yeah.
Welcome to the Rose tells me duh portion of the episode.
So in Austria they increased parental leave from one year to two years and saw that it led to about 12 additional kids per 100 women.
Oh, wow.
OK.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's not nothing.
But I do have to kind of caveat some of these a bit Rose, because although these things can make a difference, I think we have pretty good evidence that they do and they can be good for people who want to have kids.
We don't have evidence that they're like massively swinging the pendulum, right?
Like even in both these countries I just mentioned, Belgium and Austria.
It's not like their total fertility rates are now above this 21 level, right?
Like, even with these policies.
It's not like.
It's like a total, massive reversal of all these trends we've been seeing for years.
Okay, but I mean, is it possible it will?
Like it's slow, but it'll get there? at least getting to that number?
It's so hard to tell.
It's like there.
If you look at the numbers, it's like they sort of bounce up a little bit sometimes and they go back down.
It's just I don't think we have great evidence that, like anyone, has reversed the decline in the long term.
Right.
I do not think we have great evidence for that.
Okay.
All right.
So I want to talk about a couple more big ideas here that come up in terms of policy, like this thing where you basically give people money when they have a kid.
And that's an interesting one.
Right.
Cold, hard cash, like a one-time payment.
Trump administration proposal is like $5,000.
And it looks like this kind of like cash for kids thing.
I know.
Do you like it when I call it that?
You're making a face.
Well, when you say it like that, it sounds creepy.
Somehow it gets seedy.
But overall.
So there is a bit of evidence that these payments might get some people to have kids earlier than they would have otherwise.
OK.
But that can be good, you know, to sort of have if you want people to have more time to have more kids.
But generally the best evidence we have is that it probably doesn't make that much of a difference to the overall fertility rate over the long term.
OK.
Another thing that's come up a bunch is giving people better access to things like IVF.
So Trump did make some noise about this at the start of his term, but seems to have backed off actually.
And what is kind of interesting here is that making it easier to get IVF like it seems like it can increase fertility for older women, which you might expect.
But it doesn't seem to bump up fertility rates overall.
Right, right.
And you know, there's a couple of other things that have been suggested to the Trump administration, like educating people on their menstrual cycles.
That's a wild one, because it suggests that the reason women aren't getting pregnant is because they just don't know how to get pregnant.
It goes in my ear or it goes in my armpit?
You know, you laugh and I laughed, but...
But it's actually—it is true that people trying to have kids like don't always know their fertile periods, right.
Uh-huh.
So does that mean you need a class from Donald Trump on your menstruation?
I don't know, man.
But, you know, I guess the premise is not totally flawed.
Okay.
But the thing about giving people a medal, you know, I don't know if that's—
Yeah, I mean, maybe that would have some, but I'm sure no one has tested that.
Well interestingly, there's been some other famous people who have famously done this, such as Adolf Hitler.
Oh, my God.
Stalin as well.
Also, medals offered.
No clear evidence.
I actually looked.
No clear evidence that it worked.
I mean, there was some, like, post-war baby boo—you know, like, there's other stuff happening.
So I would say that I don't think there's great metal evidence.
And again, maybe on the margins you have some people who are like oh, I want to trump metal in my house, so I'm going to have—I'm going to go from four to five.
And, you know, while we are on the subject of Hitler— Uh-huh.
Where are you going?
Well, I mean, it just—
I have to say that historically, this idea of pronatalism having more babies for your country, whatever gets tied up in that, you know is also very tied up with white supremacy.
There have been papers written about this, right?
Sometimes Christian nationalism.
And people who a lot of people who study this do worry about the part of this movement that, like wants to keep women at home, out of the workforce, you know, or like come up with policies that end up being coercive, like Handmaid's Tale-y stuff, you know.
And or like really limiting contraception, really limiting abortion.
So like that is just all wrapped up in this.
Right.
That and there's this idea that it's not just babies generally.
It's a specific kind of baby that some people want, like American babies.
But by that, they mean white American babies.
Yeah.
And there is like a lot of that going on in this whole conversation.
Right.
And you know, and that is tied to another thing that I want to mention here actually because interestingly, if you are worried about your population going down, you know, worried about lack of babies, worried about having not enough workers there's one thing that you could do, which is let more people in.
Of course.
Have more immigration.
Yeah.
And there's actually some evidence that you know.
Historically, immigration is one of the things that has like, buoyed the US.
That has sort of kept its fertility rates a little higher.
That's kept its population more stable and growing.
And actually so.
The Congressional Budget Office calculates that if immigration goes away, like if immigration stops in the US right, that the US population would start to shrink, like actually get smaller, in 2033, like just eight years from now.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
So I mean the fact that the administration is like deporting so many people.
Starting to really limit immigration could end up making this problem worse.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Although, having said that, it's not necessarily a solution forever, because if the world fertility rate is generally going down, then you can't just rely on other countries.
Right, right.
Exactly.
No, that is totally true.
Like it's not going to fix the global problem if your global population is going down eventually.
Okay, so Blythe, at this point, you've done all this research.
You've really looked into this.
What do you think the U.S. should do?
Yeah, so here's where I land.
I do not see a silver bullet here that will fix this, right?
I don't think we've got evidence for that.
But I think it would be smart to do these policies that could move the needle, that help people have kids if they want them.
This stuff we're talking about, like affordable child care, parental leave.
And plus I just think those things are good to do for parents if you want people to want to be parents.
So, even though we don't have evidence that will totally turn things around and fix the problem, we have some evidence that it could help.
And who knows how far it'll go if we really put a lot of weight into those policies.
Yeah, exactly.
That's where I am right now.
So given that, how freaked out are you about this?
So I think the U.S. fertility rate is pretty far from being at a crisis level.
I actually.
I talked to a bunch of nerds about this demographers, economists who told me that, like okay, if your fertility rate is below one, that is concerning.
Like that is low.
And you're going to start to see some of these effects we talked about.
But most of them were actually like not panicking about rates that were like 15 or more, which is where we are.
They were like if you can keep that, if you can keep that kind of stable, if you can make it sort of stable, you can adjust other stuff.
Like you can do things to make it so that you're your healthcare, your other services, like don't fall off a cliff right.
Like you can plan for it.
You have a smaller society, but it's stable.
Right.
And nobody that I talked to thought that humanity was in danger of going extinct anytime soon.
That crossed off my list of things that keep me up at night.
So I think you safely can.
There's actually another thing that makes this not feel like a crisis to me.
And that is that by and large, lots of people still do want kids.
And actually there was this.
A lot of scientists pointed me to this big UN report that said that, on average, people want more kids than they are currently having.
Like, they were like, the real crisis is actually people can't have the kids they want.
And I was like, well, then this is not a crisis of desire.
So to me, weirdly, it kind of leaves me a little more optimistic, actually.
At least that we're not headed toward like Children of Men, if you remember that famous movie right.
It's like, no children anywhere.
Yeah, I guess it's better than that.
The bar.
That's where the bar is.
That's a pretty low bar, but okay.
But I am a little bit like, okay, well, people want to have kids.
I am a little bit like if we can help them figure out how to make that happen.
That does make me feel better.
All right.
What about you?
Where does it leave you?
I'm worried.
I'm more worried than I was.
Oh, wow.
I would say.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
You sufficiently freaked me out.
Good job, Blythe.
Oh, really?
Oh, no.
Why are you freaked out?
It just.
The things that you say will help or are likely to help are not things that I see the world's governments doing right now.
Well, ours isn't.
True.
You know, I mean, I think other countries, maybe there's a little bit more movement, right?
So you, however, are just going to have to wait for your period class and your medal.
Okay.
I'll get started on that right away.
Okay.
Thanks for joining me for this, Rose.
Thanks, Blythe.
That's Science Versus.
This week's episode has more than 100 citations.
If you want to check those out, you can find them in our transcript, which is linked in our show notes.
Now, I want to give a quick shout out to another fun science show.
It's called Sing for Science.
And this is an interview show that pairs musicians and scientists in conversation.
Every episode focuses on a song by the artist and how it connects to that scientist's area of expertise.
Their latest ep features one of my favorites country star, Casey Musgraves, talking with mycologist Paul Stamets about psilocybin-containing mushrooms.
So check it out.
That's Sing for Science.
This episode was produced by me, Blythe Terrell, with help from Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn, Michelle Dang and Aketi Foster-Keys.
We're edited by me and our executive producer is Wendy Zuckerman.
Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord.
Fact-checking by Diane Kelly and research help from Erica Akiko Howard.
Music written by Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, So Wiley, Emma Munger, and Bumi Hidaka.
A very special thanks to all the researchers who spoke to me for this episode.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Including Professor Ronway Caldiger-Hart, Dr Jana Bergzwig, Professor Amy Choi, Dr Gretchen Dunauer, Dr Emily Clancher-Merchant and Professor Landon Schnabel.
Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original.
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