(LifeSiteNews) — A filmmaker and data analyst warned that the falling birth rate crisis across the globe couldn’t be “any worse.”

Stephen Shaw, who interviewed people around the world to investigate plummeting birthrates for his documentary Birthgap, recently told podcaster Brendan O’Neill that population collapse is a uniquely dangerous problem. This is because unlike the dangers of, say, nuclear proliferation and environmental issues, there are no known solutions to declining birth rates, according to Shaw.

“This is in a category of one in terms of how bad it is,” he told O’Neill. The majority of countries now have a fertility rate below replacement level, and as of 2024, the world fertility rate was 2.2, only very slightly above replacement, according to the Population Reference Bureau. 

Unlike commentators who pin the crisis on intentional choices to remain childless, Shaw says the reality is more complicated. In his analysis, he has found that unplanned childlessness is the main driver of falling birth rates. In fact, mothers who do have children have the same average family size as mothers decades ago.

It was in the 1970s that fertility rates in Western nations began to converge in a rapid decline. Shaw pointed out in Birthgap that from about 1973 to 1978, childlessness rates skyrocketed in many countries, including Italy and Japan, driving the declining birth rates.

Asked by O’Neill about cultural contributing factors, Shaw pointed out that the current cultural norm is for young people to not take relationships seriously, let alone think about children, until they are in their mid- to late 20s.

“What do you do if you’re 18 in high school and you’re like your other classmates. You’re probably not thinking they’re the person you’re going to settle down and have a family with … probably college age too.”

By mid- to late 20s, “even if you wanted to take it seriously, you might get a different reaction from your love interest, who (thinks) you’re mad even to talk about children at those ages,” Shaw said in an effort to explain why the average age of starting a family today is 30.

“I think a lot of the issues we’re seeing in societies and particularly in younger people are actually consequences of the reengineering of our societies to deprioritize parenthood,” he said.

Shaw noted that most people aren’t aware of how short a woman’s fertility window is, and this means they can’t make a truly informed choice about whether to delay children, if they are in a position to have children in the first place.

However, he stressed that “You don’t get to make a choice to become a parent.”

“No one does. You get to make a choice to want to be a parent, to hope to be a parent, to intend to be a parent … But to become a parent requires certain other things. A partner, usually. And that’s uncertain. And biology. And certain other things as well, having a form of a roof over the head, a stable income,” Shaw said.

He has refuted the common idea that rising costs of living, including housing costs, are responsible for falling birth rates. In an interview with Tammy Peterson, he pointed out that greater wealth is actually associated with smaller family sizes.

Shaw’s interviews with women around the world featured in Birthgap show many young women sharing that they intend to focus on higher education before having a family. He believes this is a major reason for unplanned childlessness: Women put off having children until they are too old to have them.

He has also found that a significant number of women have had trouble finding a “suitable partner” with whom to have children.

His findings appear to be substantiated by a 2024 Pew Research survey of childless people over 50. Asked for major reasons why they didn’t have children, 39% said “it just never happened”; 33% said they didn’t find the right partner; and 31% said “they just didn’t want to.”

Shaw paints a dim picture of society after population collapse. He told O’Neill that when schools begin to close, “the community around it collapses.”

“Why? Because young parents, or potential parents, move to where there still is a school … What you’re left with are areas abundant in housing where nobody really wants to live, because there’s no community. The older people who remain there can’t afford to move, because the areas where the younger people are going – where the jobs are, where the schools are – are getting more and more expensive.”

“So the idea that there will be some good things to come out of this, that you’ll be able to have ‘more space,’ is wishful thinking. Parts of society will simply be left to decline. Buildings won’t be repaired, streets won’t be maintained and vermin will appear,” said Shaw, adding that he had seen this phenomenon when he was living in the suburbs of Detroit and the auto industry had moved out of the city.

While Shaw acknowledges changed cultural norms as important drivers of childlessness and falling birth rates, he regards the root causes as difficult to identify.

In Birthgap, Shaw does not discuss or show fertility rates around the world before 1970 and fails to mention that a decline in fertility rates had already begun in the 1960s in countries such as the U.S., the U.K., and Australia, shortly after the introduction of the birth control pill in those nations.

Shaw dismisses the birth control pill as a root cause in part because birthrates dropped in Japan before it legalized the birth control pill in 1990. However, an argument can be made that the sexual revolution came to Japan long beforehand, and with it came changed relationship dynamics, including a big rise in premarital sex.

​​While the birth control pill wasn’t legal in Japan until 1990, a combination of other birth control methods, permissive abortion laws, and the cultural practice of infanticide meant that the pill was not necessary for the country to dramatically reduce birth rates. A December 8, 1973, New York Times article entitled “Infanticide in Japan: Sign of the Times?” tells how that year saw a drastic increase in the discovery of babies abandoned at railway stations.

There is evidence that the sexual revolution, which was empowered by the birth control pill and decoupled sex from babies in practice, is a primary root cause of plummeting birth rates. The birth control pill and sexual revolution triggered an explosion in the casual relationships that Shaw refers to and enabled a culture in which babies can be delayed or avoided altogether.

Shaw suggested to O’Neill that societies make their educational systems more flexible and accommodating of “lifelong learning” so that young couples, and women in particular, are encouraged to prioritize having families, with the assurance that they can continue education later in life.

The nations that will “survive” are those in which the average age of motherhood is 24, 25, and 26. Shaw believes many countries will not escape the pain of population collapse but is encouraged by the response he receives from young people when he explains the problem to them.

“When I talk to young people, college age, high school age people about this, and I see the fire in their eyes and often the anger in their eyes — ‘What do you mean I might not have the children I want to have? What do you mean you’re telling me to focus on college and training and career development and you’re not even telling me about the fertility window?’”

“When I see that fire in the eyes of young people, that’s when I realize that the younger generation, I believe, has got enough desire, and I believe the ability to make fundamental changes that we need to listen to.”