But what if a different crisis gets us first? What if the biggest problem we face is that billions of people are getting old at a faster rate than babies are being born? In Italy there are so few children that schools are “vanishing like the melting glaciers”. In Japan, adult nappies have outsold the baby variety for over a decade. Indeed, there is such a superabundance of waste from incontinence products that one town has started burning them for fuel. The problem is global: for countless millennia, forming families was the most intuitive thing imaginable, but no longer.

Of course, not everybody sees this as a problem. The glass-half-full take is that the declining birthrate has finally put our Malthusian terrors to bed. The threat of exponential overpopulation has corrected itself: for instance, China’s population is set to drop from 1.4 billion today to 800 million by 2100. The glass-half-empty view is that there won’t be enough young people to sustain this vastly expanded older population. The advice offered by economists is simple and utilitarian: countries that are depopulating must increase immigration.

But the materialist nature of today’s discussion, where it is being had, obscures the many profound existential questions posed by the impending arrival of a grey planet. In fact, there is only one forum in which these are being addressed: science fiction. Here, a handful of stories have tried to imagine what a world without children would look like.

The most famous of these thought experiments is Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film, Children of Men, based on the PD James novel, in which an ecological catastrophe has rendered the human race infertile, and civilisation stands on the brink of collapse. But while Children of Men is bleak enough, and contains generous helpings of man’s inhumanity to man, it is only set 18 years after the last birth. As a result, there are still plenty of young people about, among them a vigorous 40-ish-year-old Clive Owen, who ultimately discovers a mother and baby. The film ends with their rescue, and choral music, and the sound of children laughing. Crisis averted!

But if Children of Men loses its nerve, ultimately resisting the full ramifications of its premise, the same cannot be said of Greybeard, a novel by the British Grand Master of science fiction, Brian Aldiss. Written in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it imagines that a nuclear catastrophe has left all humans and many animal species infertile. Crucially, Aldiss begins his story half a century after the event, when humanity is on the verge of extinction. The youngest people in the novel are Algy Timberlane, aka “Greybeard”, and his wife, Martha, who are both 56. Most of the characters are in their seventies or older.

More from this author

The heroic failure of Cumbernauld

By Daniel Kalder

This enables Aldiss to explore the nature of an aging planet in detail. His first assumption is that a physically frail, and therefore vulnerable, community is a much more fearful one. At the start of his novel, Greybeard and his wife have spent a decade living in the village of Sparcot, which is run by a petty local tyrant. They have accepted his irascible rule in exchange for the promise of security. The residents squabble and complain about toothache while living in fear of invading Scotsmen and, of all creatures, stoats — one of the few species of mammal to have escaped the catastrophe with their reproductive organs intact, meaning they proliferate. The choice of animal is inspired: if Aldiss’s protagonists had feared feral dogs, their weakness would have been less obvious; how much worse that this diminished population cannot control a pest that nobody today gives a second thought. How alarming that Aldiss’s prophecy is starting to come true, on depopulated Japanese islands where cats vastly outnumber pensioners.

Loss of strength is only part of the problem, however. Civilisation is also undone by a collective loss of will. In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, the survivors hope that the infertility is a transient phase from which they will recover. Then, as the years pass, and it becomes clear that there will be no children to inherit the fruits of their labour, people lose interest in maintaining society beyond the bare necessities required to survive. The economy collapses and the result is a simpler, reduced world, of villages without businesses and new technologies. But this is not the pastoral dream of today’s “degrowth” proponents; it is an impoverished, dilapidated world that has given up on itself, and awaits oblivion.

Darkest of all, however, is Aldiss’s take on how this ageing remnant of humanity would treat children. Ownership and exploitation are the dominant attitudes. Initially, a global effort is made to gather the surviving minors in three “Childsweep” centres, where there are “three psychiatrists to every child”, to help them cope with the trauma of the world they have inherited. But like any scarce resource, the children become the subject of an international dispute, which leads to a catastrophic war. When, decades later, Greybeard arrives in a village which has a handful of mutant children, he finds that they are periodically put on display as a “treat” for the inhabitants of a village. Later still, when he discovers a few healthy youths, the first one he meets is being kept as a sex slave by a con man. Aldiss’ bitterness may be partly explained by the fact that when he wrote the book, he had lost custody of his children following a divorce, but his point is universal: as we saw during the pandemic, when humanity is under pressure, it does not treat its children well.

Of course, Greybeard is extreme by design. I’m not arguing that our leaders should abandon all thoughts of climate change and prepare for a crumbling world overrun by feral stoats in which most adults abuse the dwindling number of children. But the thing about the real world, as opposed to the world inside a novel, is that we can have many intersecting (and insurmountable) problems at the same time. Today’s climate change activists think too much like novelists: they are performing one simple thought experiment, by imagining our world as it is now — the same balance of young and old, the same technologies, the same governments — and extrapolating the future along one central theme, in search of a tidy resolution. But the warmer planet they imagine will also be a grey planet, filled with elderly people.

There will be many more Joe Bidens unable to make it to the end of a speech or climb stairs unaided, many more Mitch McConnells freezing before the cameras, many more geriatric pop stars miming to songs they first performed 50 years earlier. And they will be the lucky ones. A great many others will be alone, ill, vulnerable, surrounded by decaying infrastructure, while rats and other creatures run wild. In this context, we may want to reconsider some of our anxieties about the AI apocalypse. Indeed, this could be one area where it would benefit us to be a little less existential and a little more materialist. An older, depopulated world will clearly require a far higher degree of automation and augmentation; there’s a reason that Japan is known for its robot technology.

Aldiss’s conceit rules out some possibilities that are open to us, of course, including the economists’ favourite: immigration. But you don’t need to be a science fiction grand master to imagine how this policy might go awry. They are assuming that older, poorer countries will remain attractive destinations for the inhabitants of younger ones; that there will not be significant backlash from the existing populations; that the immigrants themselves will not adopt the customs of their host societies, stop reproducing, and also grow old.

Suggested reading

The rise of baby doomers

By Jennie Bristow

Those countries that cannot stomach more immigration will seek to incentivise larger families. This is the approach of Hungary, which grants mothers under 30 an exemption from income tax. Historically, however, the idea of rewarding families for great feats of reproduction has had mixed results. And the time may be coming when no matter how attractive the tax breaks, couples simply can’t have children. Sperm counts are plummeting worldwide. Scientists have suggested that everything from obesity to “endocrine-disrupting chemicals” may be responsible, but without firm conclusions, humans may yet end up like French bulldogs, unable to reproduce without direct medical intervention. And of course, some communities opt for extinction over change: today, for every 150 Parsi Zoroastrians born in India, 600 die, but the community refuses to recognise the children of women who marry outsiders. In the 200 years of their existence, the Shakers have had ample opportunity to reconsider their celibacy, but have declined to do so, relying on conversion to keep the numbers up. Today, two remain.

You would think that — given its inevitability — we would put a bit more effort into imagining this grey new world. But Greybeard is one of very few attempts to confront a planet in which most people are very, very old. In politics, the story is worse than in literature. All the signs are that we would rather not think about it: China, for instance, stopped reporting on its fertility rate in 2017. Perhaps this is because we have already made our decision: like the Parsis, we are not going to have more children, and so all we can do is wait for the great die-off to unfold.

Sofia’s are physical, a bullet hole over her left breast and a jagged line down her left arm from where surgeons had to cut open to repair the shattered bone. “There’s a saying here,” she says. “Small town, big hell.” Sofia (a pseudonym) is 42 and beautiful, slender with high cheekbones and almond eyes, square white teeth, and a kebab stick through a low bun of thick hair. A curly-haired toddler, her granddaughter, pads across a room that doubles as Sofia’s studio: she’s a self-taught seamstress, although it’s hard to sew with a hand that doesn’t fully close anymore.

Back in 2003, she was a teenage-mother-turned-sex-worker who had left small Fundación for a town on the Magdalena river in the state of Santander. She was kidnapped by a local paramilitary group and forced her to have sex with the leader, a man called Tiburón – “shark”. He was the one who shot her after she tried to run away on her third day of captivity. The man who had her kidnapped was a doctor, and he splinted her shattered arm. On the fifth day, he let her go.

She told no one about the rape, not even doctors at the hospital when she finally sought care weeks later. It was a motorcycle accident, she said; the clinic owner was friends with her brother, so he looked the other way.

Years later, a woman named Estella came knocking on Sofia’s door. Estella was helping sexual assault survivors connect with each other and seek recompence from the government; her program also offered contraception and sex education in a town where one residual effect of the trauma of war is astoundingly high rates of teen pregnancy and sexual violence. Sofia’s story began, slowly, to trickle out.

And then, in a country thousands of miles to the north,  Donald Trump was elected president.

No single nation has as much influence on abortion rights and access for the world’s women as the USA, and no single nation has worked as diligently to prevent women outside its borders from being able to end their pregnancies. Anti-abortion activists have agitated against liberalisation in countries across Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. The Trump administration made common cause with the authoritarian governments of Poland, Saudi Arabia, and others in restricting even open conversation about women’s reproductive needs on the international stage. And the long arm of US anti-abortion policy — which comes along with the alternate handing-out or grabbing-back of US money — continues to determine whether or not women who are not American citizens and may have never set foot on US territory can prevent pregnancy, decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy, or even find assistance if they’ve been raped.

That long arm has reached from hectic cities to far-flung villages to tiny towns, such as Fundación.

Trump effectively shuttered the Fundación program, along with hundreds of others across the globe, all combating sexual violence and funding family planning. Some may get back on their feet; many won’t. And even though he has left the White House, his legacy of anti-abortion alliances with some of the world’s worst human rights offenders remains.

Suggested article

Imagine a world without contraception

By Mary Harrington

The United States has been on a zig-zag path of extreme restrictions met, impotently, by occasional recalibration to a conservative status quo. Texas is only the most recent state to have functionally banned most abortions. The US Supreme Court has accepted a case that challenges Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalised abortion across the United States; the Court could flat-out overturn Roe, making abortion immediately illegal in several states, or it could keep the decision technically in place but gut it into an empty legal shell.

And even though a Democratic president has been in office since January, USAID money to the Fundación program has not been restored. And after the election in 2024, a shift in power would almost surely mean being defunded yet again.

This has left international healthcare workers spinning, and trying to keep up with the Americans and their whiplash-inducing policy changes.

Fundación is less than an hour’s drive from Aracataca, the childhood home of Colombia’s beloved native son Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the purported inspiration for the village at the center of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Estella, 54, guides our driver over the town’s bumpy roads as she makes calls on her pre-smartphone cell, tapping out the phone numbers with her carefully manicured nails. We arrive at the door of 65-year-old twins Doris and Francia, who live in a ramshackle house cluttered with old objects and well-loved collections, both women have the same dyed caramel-colored hair, both raspy-voiced and tired-eyed. Doris wears glasses and a pink-striped spaghetti-strap tank top; Francia totes a bald, big-eyed baby, one of her 21 grandchildren.

Both women have lived the story of Colombia’s brutal civil war, and both women know that their lives were forever changed by the whims of more-powerful men who decided, for reasons that remain mysterious to them, to target their town – and then to target Doris and Francia and many other women in it. That story lives in their flesh, and even two decades later, they carry its heavy memory.

In 2001, Colombia’s civil war was raging, and paramilitaries had captured Doris and Francia’s town and forced their business to shutter. Doris and Francia turned to picking bananas for money, hitching rides on the backs of cattle trucks to get home. One evening, both women were plucked from the side of the road and gang-raped by soldiers. They could never go back to picking bananas – they could barely leave the house. They saw friends, neighbours, and family members threatened and even murdered. They stayed silent.

Suggested article

Why women fear the police

By Julie Bindel

That is, until they met Estella. Like nearly all of the women she works with, Estella is from somewhere else. She came here in 2002 when her family was displaced by the fighting, joining the many displaced families around Fundación who live in fear and poverty, and may never go back home. Estella encouraged the women she met to talk about their experiences, eventually forming an ad-hoc therapy group.

In 2016, Profamilia came to town. Colombia’s version of Planned Parenthood, it is the country’s largest provider of reproductive health services. In partnership with USAID, it conceived an ambitious outreach program to combat the high rates of unintended pregnancy and violence in Colombia’s rural reaches. Places with limited access to reproductive health care were targeted, as well as those with high rates of internally displaced people, extreme poverty, young people who were dropping out of school because of displacement, and adolescent pregnancy. One of these was Fundación.

“Some of these areas are where the biggest concentration of drug lands are,” says Marta Royo, the executive director of Profamilia. “So [USAID and Profamilia] were really focused on developing programs that could empower adolescents and give them an idea that there were other possibilities for a different future.”

They started with contraception, but quickly realised this didn’t capture the full scope of hardships rural Colombian women face. The high rate of teenage pregnancy in Fundación and many of the country’s other rural areas cannot be separated from the 50-year conflict that has made Colombia the nation with the highest number of internally displaced people on the planet, and second only to Syria in the number of forcibly displaced people generally (while most Syrians have left their country, 98% of displaced Colombians remain within their nation’s borders).

Violence against women was pervasive in the Colombian conflict, a tidal wave of trauma that rippled out for generations. In these same towns where families were ripped apart, women were raped, and people were forced to flee. There is now a generation of devastated people, uprooted, vulnerable, and trying to raise children and grandchildren in the shadow of a lingering catastrophe.

Suggested article

Inside the longest lockdown in the world

By Luke Taylor

Profamilia met Estella and women like her to ensure they, their children, and grandchildren had access to contraception and sex education. But less than a year into the program, Trump’s election victory upset everything. In his first week in office, the new President used his powers to issue the Promoting Life in Global Health Assistance Act (PLGHA), an executive order opponents call the Global Gag Rule that cut off funding to any organisation that provided abortions with its own non-US funds, advocated for abortion rights, or referred women for safe, legal abortions. This was just the latest and most expansive iteration of a policy put into place by American president Ronald Reagan in 1985, and alternately rescinded by Democratic presidents and restored by Republican ones.

Profamilia’s funding was cut because the organisation provides safe abortions in accordance with Colombian law. The USAID-funded program was stopped a year early, having only spent half of its $2 million grant.

Colombia wasn’t the only nation hit hard. The PLGHA applied not just US family planning spending, but all US dollars spent abroad, including money spent on HIV/AIDS, malaria, and nutrition — some $12 billion in 2018. It applied even to organisations that didn’t receive US funds — if they accepted money from groups that did, they had to agree to be bound by the PLGHA limitations.

When organisations sued over previous versions of the rule and argued that it violated First Amendment free speech protections, their cases were dismissed because of lack of standing. The First Amendment doesn’t apply to foreign organisations or foreign nationals working overseas, and there’s no law saying the US government cannot attempt to restrict free speech abroad.

The Trump administration’s position on women’s rights and health extended far beyond abortion, and was more conservative than previous Republican administrations. In 2019, the US issued its annual human rights report, and had made some notable edits. Much of the information on reproductive health that had been standard in earlier versions was stripped out, including statistics about contraception access and maternal mortality. Had those figures been included, they would have indicated that there remains a significant unmet need for contraception, and that unsafe abortion is a leading cause of maternal death.

It is this erasing of the politically inconvenient and the enforced silence that most rankles. In Colombia, abortion is legal under several circumstances, including for rape survivors. How, Royo asks, could the US come in and say, “let’s talk about democracy, let’s talk about freedom of speech, let’s talk about respect of the law,” and then implement a rule that doesn’t allow health organisations to work according to the laws of their own country? “The message that as a country they’re sending is the opposite of believing in women’s equal rights.”

Other Western governments agreed. In response to the Trump cuts, and perhaps seeking to distinguish themselves from the Americans as exemplars of feminism and human rights, Canada, Europe and the UK rallied behind women’s health. The Netherlands set up the #SheDecides fund so donors could fill the $600 million shortfall created by US cuts, and began by donating 10 million euros. Norway announced it would give $10 million. Canada gave $20 million. Along with the Gates Foundation and UNFPA, the UK co-hosted an international family planning summit which raised $2.5 billion, including a five-year annual commitment of £45 million from the British government for services abroad.

Suggested article

America has always been a basket case

By Justin Webb

Trump’s reactionary views on reproductive health pushed more progressive nations not just into the funding space, but into the discourse. To have countries like Sweden and Canada in the mix, Royo says, brought an explicitly feminist frame to the discussion, allowed solutions to be more expansive and creative, and gave health care providers more freedom to address the real problems in their country without tiptoeing around American abortion politics.

Shortly after he took office, Joe Biden undid Trump’s Gag Rule, restoring the US to a still-uneasy compromise of refusing to pay for legal abortion services, but at least funding pro-choice organisations for other services. The sweep of a pen, however, can’t build back dismantled infrastructure or immediately reestablish hard-earned trust. Pre-existing USAID contracts don’t just snap back; any NGO that was getting money now has to start from square one, identifying areas of need, drawing up plans, and jumping through American bureaucratic hoops for money that could very well be pulled four years from now.

Also, while his policies were devastating to reproductive healthcare access worldwide, Trumpism gave other nations something to publicly stand up against. Now that he’s out, and with Covid-19 wreaking havoc on economies, some countries are backing away from their Trump-era commitments. The UK is the most prominent: it announced a reduction in its foreign aid commitments from 0.7 percent of its gross national income to 0.5 percent, which creates a gap of more than £4 billion. Although the government has not yet said exactly where all the cuts will be made, women’s health organisations say they seem to be first on the chopping block: UNFPA, the UN’s primary family planning arm, said their UK funding had been slashed by 85%. Just a year ago, the FCDO promised UNFPA a whopping £425 million through 2025. Now, they’re reneging on that commitment.

Suggested article

Charting the decline of the American Republic

By Ed West

In Colombia, money comes and goes as the rules change, but the need doesn’t dwindle – especially for the country’s many rape survivors.

“Here in Colombia, rape is like, how can I put it – it’s part of the essence, it’s taken totally for granted,” Royo says. “Women and girls are raped and no one says anything. Part of the counseling we provide, it starts with recognising, no, that is not normal.” This is part of Royo’s frustration with the US funding fluctuations: much-needed money is conditioned on reinforcing broad stigma and silence on the sensitive topic of abortion. That feels uncomfortably akin to how women who are raped here are coerced and sometimes forced into shame and silence.

You hear this in the stories Estella’s women tell. Most are like Sofia’s and Doris’s and Francia’s: there is a rape, there follows years of secrecy, maybe there is an attempt to report, to make real what was for so long hidden, and then there is nothing – layers of secrecy and silence, a covering of ears even when women try to speak. In 2013, Estella told Sofia that the Colombian government was documenting the many war crimes and offering compensation to victims. Sofia was scared – “It was the paramilitaries. They had a lot of power. They still do” – but filed the report anyway.

That was years ago, and compensation still hasn’t materialised. “I haven’t even gotten a potato,” she says.

Still, Estella was proud of her. And after being so quiet for so long, it felt good to speak.

This article forms part of a project by Jill Filipovic and Nichole Sobecki: Abortion Access in Crisis and Conflict Zones

Of course, women in the modern world have options. My GP was happy to prescribe me the Pill when I was a teenager. When I was in my twenties in 00’s London, sexual health clinics plied drop-in clients with great fistfuls of condoms packed in brown paper bags like party favours. My years of prime fertility unfolded in a culture where an active sex life is seen as normal and healthy, and contraception as a basic healthcare right.

More from this author

Why aren't women having more babies?

By Mary Harrington

We seem sometimes to have forgotten that birth control is at least as central to women’s participation in public life as universal suffrage. Today, it’s expected that women will join the workforce on reaching adulthood, and pursue careers on equal terms with their male colleagues. But that couldn’t happen without contraception.

Shorn of the ability to control our fertility, a woman might pay others (if she can afford it) to care for her children, give her babies away to be adopted, or avoid sex altogether to ensure she doesn’t have them in the first place. But as for ‘having it all’ (or ‘having it’ at all without getting pregnant), forget it.

A century or so before I reached my prime shagging years, Margaret Sanger was making this case in a very different world. “Enforced motherhood”, she wrote in 1914, “is the most complete denial of a woman’s right to life and liberty.”

Sanger is no less controversial today than she was a century ago, albeit for different reasons. Recently Planned Parenthood, the contraception and abortion charity she helped found, disavowed Sanger for her enthusiasm for eugenics, which was considered a progressive cause in Sanger’s time. But 100 years ago, Sanger faced threats and even arrest for campaigning to make contraception and contraceptive knowledge widely available.

In 1929, she published Motherhood in Bondage, a collection of excerpts from letters sent to her by women desperate for help with fertility. The book gives an inkling of what life looks like when you’re poor and your fertility is not within your control: a litany of exhausted, ground-down, ill and impoverished women, many on their seventh or eighth pregnancy in their mid-twenties, begging Sanger for information or help on “how to don’t have more children”, as one correspondent put it. One writes:

My smallest baby is three months old and I’m afraid I’ll get pregnant any time from now on. So please give me some kind of advice because I cannot support what I got and when they are four I don’t know what to do. I’m only twenty years of age.

Sanger was one of the first feminists to campaign for a woman’s right to be, as she put it, “the absolute mistress of her own body”. A century on, in the developed West, her goal has been largely reached. While accidental pregnancies still happen, the vast majority of women are able to access contraception, emergency contraception and — should they wish it — abortion services.

Suggested reading

How the establishment fell for eugenics

By Peter Franklin

The grim condition of those impoverished early twentieth-century women, struggling to feed and clothe an ever-growing brood, is happily a thing of the past. But I wonder if we can take this for granted in perpetuity.

The story of contraceptive manufacturing is, broadly speaking, the story of manufacturing generally: offshored to Asia to reduce overheads, with only branding, administration and R&D still predominantly based in Europe. Durex, once the British Rubber Company, has based its entire condom manufacturing capacity in China, India and Thailand. The vast majority of oral contraceptives, as well as the component ingredients used in their creation, are manufactured in China and India. No one makes contraceptives in Britain.

This is just fine in a situation where relatively frictionless international trade is assumed as a permanent feature of the modern world. But this turns out to have some drawbacks when there’s a political, economic or biomedical shock to supply chains.

It doesn’t even take a pandemic. Last year, doctors were worrying about the impact of Brexit on contraceptive supplies. In February this year, the estimated 3.1 million British women who use the contraceptive pill faced severe shortages, for reasons that still remain unclear.

Then when Covid-19 hit in the spring, India banned the export of pharmaceuticals, including progesterone — one of the key ingredients in the Pill. The ban only lasted three weeks, but still caused shortages of oral contraceptives. According to the global development organisation Devex, the ripple effects of coronavirus-related disruption to manufacturing also triggered a condom shortage in Mozambique and import delays in IUDs to Iran.

Suggested reading

The disturbing history of 'artificial mothers'

By Louise Perry

An optimist might tell me that none of these incidents is likely to be more than a blip. And perhaps they’d be right. Provided, at least, that the global economy stays stable, China stays friendly (and doesn’t go to war with India), global commercial shipping is able to continue, and there are no more surprises in store that threaten the fabric of globalised trade. A year ago I’d have said that scenario looks a reasonably safe bet. Halfway through the madness of 2020, I’m not so confident.

Of course, new factories can be built closer to home, if they seem economically viable. Women’s contraceptive security, though, is threatened not just by de-globalisation but also environmental concerns.

The contraceptive pill is one of the most widely used pharmaceuticals on the planet. 3.1 million British women use it, making it our most common prescribed contraceptive. It works by mimicking the hormones released during pregnancy, and its main hormonal component is a synthetic estrogen known as 17α-ethinylestradiol — a compound that is disastrous for aquatic life. Its presence in rivers and groundwater disrupts the endocrine systems of a range of species, causing intersex conditions in frogs and fish and severely harming their ability to reproduce. It is also difficult and expensive to clean from waste water.

Environmentalists tend to be broadly liberal-feminist in their sympathies, which may help to explain why this issue generally gets soft-pedalled. No one who supports women’s reproductive autonomy will be enthusiastic about confronting the ecological harms done by synthetic estrogens. So the topic remains, to date, mostly a talking-point for the Weird Right.

But there’s a clear trade off between a woman’s desire to be “absolute mistress of her own body”, and our collective duty to ensure oryzia latipes (and all the other aquatic species turned intersex by 17α-ethinylestradiol) can remain even to a degree masters of theirs. Eventually, we will have to confront this issue.

Let’s hope that when we do, science prevails, and we come up with a better way of cleaning waste water. If we don’t, sooner or later the contraceptive pill will be banned.

Suggested reading

Can India keep China at bay?

By Tim Marshall

Such a ban might be hastened by demographic fears. The BBC recently reported a “jaw-dropping” global crash in fertility rates. In the developed West, fertility has been below replacement for generations, but the report predicts that the global birth rate — currently around 2.4 — will on current trends plummet to 1.7 by 2100. Extrapolated long-term, this is an existential threat to humanity: as Professor Christopher Murray, one of the reports’ authors, puts it: “If you can’t [find a solution] then eventually the species disappears.”

I doubt we’ll remain so committed as a species to reproductive autonomy that we shrug our shoulders while the birth rate plummets toward human extinction. Far more likely is that we’ll see growing pressure on women to get gestating. Oryzia latipes may yet find itself championed by pro-natalists, keen to use the ecological downsides of the Pill as an argument for restricting women’s contraceptive choices.

Though not (yet) on ecological grounds, some countries are already restricting contraception as part of efforts to drive up the birth rate. Iran has ceased to offer birth control and vasectomies via state healthcare — a policy that explicitly targets the country’s slumping birth rate. In effect, for Iranian women, worry-free sex has become a bit like cashmere jumpers or safari holidays: nice, but only if you can afford it.

Should contraceptive manufacturing be expensively re-shored, in response to de-globalisation, we might face an analogous situation in Britain: birth control still available, but only as a luxury product.

None of these scenarios is inevitable. But those of us concerned for women’s welfare should take the question of contraceptive security seriously. We should also take seriously the question of why women don’t seem to want to have babies.

Suggested reading

Has Hungary conceived a baby boom?

By Paul Morland

The Left tends to blame this on sexism and the immiserating effects of capitalism (see for example Laurie Penny here), arguing that these factors make child-rearing arduous and unaffordable. The reactionary Right, on the other hand, tends to blame the baby strike on the pernicious effects of feminism. They’re both partly correct.

As that “jaw-dropping” BBC article puts it, falling birth rates are partly a result of “more women in education and work, as well as greater access to contraception”. In other words, they’re a consequence of the increase in women’s choices and as such are — in the article’s words — a feminist “success story”.

But recent research from the US-based Institute for Family Studies also shows that, worldwide, women are having fewer children than they’d like to. This implies that the supposedly ‘free’ choice to have fewer children is indeed, as Laurie Penny suggests, constrained by structural factors.

It ought to be possible for public policy to recognise that unwanted pregnancies are a nightmarish prospect for women — especially given today’s uncertain economic outlook — while also acknowledging that many women wish they could have more babies. Hungary’s birth rate has increased by 5.5% following Viktor Orbán’s introduction of subsidies aimed at encouraging larger families; this implies that state intervention can indeed tip the balance for would-be mothers, without coercive measures such as taking birth control away.

Those Right-wingers who are indifferent to women’s interests, safety or subjectivity might be tempted to leap on the prospect of contraceptive shortages as a straightforward solution to shrinking populations. But this would mean returning women to forms of bondage that Margaret Sanger fought to end a century ago. If we’re to stabilise the birth rate without embracing this kind of anti-women approach, the Right will need to learn from Hungary and embrace an activist, pro-family state.

Meanwhile, the Left will need to get over its obsession with abolishing the family. Both these perspectives, in different ways, treat human reproduction as a matter solely of individual choice. But bringing new generations into the world is the responsibility not just of individuals and families, nor just of women. Rather, it’s on all of us: a shared duty to our collective human future.