People across the world have been having fewer and fewer children, and it’s not always because they don’t want them.
The global fertility rate has, on average, dropped to less than half what it was in the 1960s, the United Nations has found, falling below the “replacement level” required to maintain the current population in the majority of countries.
Amid that historic decline, nearly 20% of adults of reproductive age from 14 countries around the globe believe they won’t be able to have the number of children they want to, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN’s sexual and reproductive health and rights agency, said in a report released this week. For most of them, the report found it isn’t infertility keeping them from doing so. They pointed to factors including financial limitations, barriers to fertility or pregnancy-related medical care, and fears of the state of the world that they say are hindering them from making their own fertility and reproductive choices.
“There are a lot of people out there who are willing to have children—and have more children than they have—if the conditions were right, and the government’s obligation is to provide those measures of well-being, of welfare, which enable good work-life balance, secure employment, reduce the legal barriers, provide better health care and services,” says Shalini Randeria, the president of the Central European University in Vienna and the senior external advisor for the UNFPA report. But she says policies that some governments are implementing—such as cutting Medicaid in the U.S. and enforcing restrictions on reproductive health and autonomy—are both a step backward for people’s rights and “counterproductive from a demographic point of view.”
Read more: Why So Many Women Are Waiting Longer to Have Kids
For the report, UNFPA conducted a survey, in collaboration with YouGov, of people in 14 countries in Asia, Europe, North America, South America, and Africa that, together, represent more than a third of the world’s population.
“There is a gap between the number of children people would have liked to have had and the number they had,” Randeria says. “For us, it was important to then figure out—by asking them—what it is that causes this gap.”
Financial barriers
The most significant barriers survey respondents identified to having the number of children they desired were economic: 39% cited financial limitations, 19% housing limitations, 12% lack of sufficient or quality childcare options, and 21% unemployment or job insecurity.
The prices for all kinds of goods and services have climbed precipitously in recent years. Global inflation reached the highest level seen since the mid-1990s in July 2022, according to the World Bank Group. While it has declined since then, the current levels are still significantly above those seen before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read more: Why Affordable Childcare Is Out of Reach for So Many People
Rising costs have hit both housing and childcare hard. In the U.S., for instance, the Treasury Department has found that housing costs have increased faster than incomes for the past two decades, surging about 65% since 2000 when adjusted for inflation. And research has found that the cost of child care in the U.S. has shot up in recent years, surpassing what many Americans pay for housing or college.
The current housing crisis is impacting “every region and country,” the United Nations Human Settlements Programme said in a report last year, estimating that between 1.6 billion and 3 billion people around the world do not have adequate housing.
Reproductive obstacles
People cited other factors getting in the way of them having as many children as they want as well, including barriers to assisted reproduction and surrogacy.
Several countries—including France, Spain, Germany, and Italy—have banned surrogacy. The UNFPA report also points out that many countries restrict or ban access to assisted reproduction and surrogacy for same-sex couples. In Europe, for instance, only 17 out of 49 countries allow medically-assisted insemination for people, no matter their sexual orientation or gender identity, according to the report.
The UNFPA notes that, as global fertility rates are declining, some governments are taking “drastic measures to incentivize young people to make fertility decisions in line with national targets.” But the report argues that the “real crisis” is “a crisis in reproductive agency—in the ability of individuals to make their own free, informed and unfettered choices about everything from having sex to using contraception to starting a family.”
According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, 40% of women of reproductive age around the world live under restrictive abortion laws. Many countries—including Brazil, the Philippines, and Poland, among others—have severely restricted abortion. In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark ruling Roe v. Wade, striking down the constitutional right to abortion. Since then, more than a dozen states have enacted near-total bans or restricted abortion. There have been many reports of pregnant people being denied critical care because of state laws restricting abortions, and many women have said they don’t feel safe being pregnant in states where abortion is banned.
And while a growing share of women around the world are having their family planning needs met, around 164 million still were not as of 2021, the UN found in a report released in 2022.
In addition to considering access to family planning a human right, the UN also notes that it is key to reducing poverty.
Fear for the future
About 14% of respondents in the UNFPA report said concerns about political or social situations, such as wars and pandemics, would lead or have already led to them having fewer children than they had wanted. And about 9% of respondents said concerns about climate change or environmental degradation would lead or had already led to them having fewer children than they had desired.
Read more: Terrified of Climate Change? You Might Have Eco-Anxiety
Violence and conflict have been on the rise around the globe in recent years. The period between 2021 and 2023 was the most violent since the end of the Cold War, according to the World Bank Group, and the numbers of both battle-deaths and violent conflicts have climbed over the past decade.
That violence has contributed to years of rising displacement: More than 122 million people across the world have been forcibly displaced, the UN’s refugee agency reported Thursday, nearly double the number recorded a decade ago.
The impact of the global pandemic has been even more widely felt, and is unlikely to fade from anyone’s memory any time soon as COVID-19 continues to spread, develop new variants, and take a toll on people whose recovery from the virus can take months, or even years. Even beyond COVID, outbreaks of infectious diseases are becoming more commonplace—and experts predict that, in the years ahead, the risk of those outbreaks escalating into epidemics and pandemics will only rise.
In a 2024 UN Development Programme survey, which statistically represents about 87% of the global population, about 56% of respondents said they were thinking about climate change on a daily or weekly basis. About 53% of the respondents also said they were more concerned about climate change now than they were a year before. A third of respondents said that climate change is significantly affecting their major life decisions.
“I want children, but it’s becoming more difficult as time passes by,” a 29-year-old woman from Mexico is quoted as saying in the report. “It is impossible to buy or have affordable rent in my city. I also would not like to give birth to a child in war times and worsened planetary conditions if that means the baby would suffer because of it.”
