Why Are Birth Rates Declining?

On 28th January 2025, The Daily Telegraph ran an article entitled “How soaring housing costs have crushed the birth rate”. This article detailed the very real and potentially devastating problem of Britain’s declining birth rate and made a link, albeit tenuous, between this seemingly inexorable decline and the availability of affordable housing.

The lowest birth rate in the world is in the de facto US colony of South Korea, which has a birth rate of just 1.12 children per woman, but across the imperialist bloc the birth rate is below replacement rate (that is the number of births per woman required to maintain the population level). In Italy, for example, for every seven people born, twelve people leave this mortal coil. Countries including Singapore and Ukraine have similarly low birth rates and, for governments, this presents a real issue given that with low birth rates comes a skewing of the age demographic, with retirees becoming the dominant group, whose retirement under the ‘pay-as-you-go’ system so beloved of late-stage capitalism is paid for by the younger, employed cohort.

At issue is that governments have very little scope to incentivise people to have children – the main tool that they have at their disposal is financial incentives, be it long-term paid maternity leave (as in Germany) or mortgage relief for new parents (as in Hungary). These incentives work on the obvious premise that the reason that people aren’t having children at the rate we used to is because of financial constraints. The Daily Telegraph article postulates that the slashing of interest rates in the post-2008 crash era led to an uptick in birth rates as people paying mortgages had far more disposable income than before 2008, particularly if they had either a variable rate or tracker mortgage on their home. This is a technically correct postulation, although the rise of the birth rate in itself was not substantial.

As I covered in an article on the Class Consciousness Project website in June 2023, the average age of a first-time home buyer is a few months short of 34 years old and is 36 for home buyers in London. The average amount borrowed by first-time buyers to purchase a home as at May 2024 was £209,000. Amassing the enormous deposit required to buy a home in this country means either saving for years, waiting for parents to die and inheriting their estate, or else it is living parents giving their offspring the money, or at least a part of it, to put down on a place of their own. It is little wonder that, on the basis of these figures alone, anyone would consider having children well into their thirties having only just secured their own home and with it the expense of any required renovations or remodelling.

But is it as simple as this? Are our declining birth rates just because of the prohibitive cost of housing or are there other factors?

The Atomisation of Society

In my article The Loneliness Phenomenon, I highlighted the issues facing people across all age groups in finding a partner. Clearly, the starting point for anyone looking to start a family is having a partner to start one with and people of prime child-rearing age (which I would put in the 25 to 35 years-old age group, you may have a different view) are finding it more and more difficult to find a partner, certainly more difficult than their parents or grandparents did. Capitalism has created an ever-increasingly atomised world, where people consider contacting friends via social networking apps to be socialising and live with their parents into their late twenties and early thirties.

Yet it is capitalism that desires of this atomised, fractured society – it knows that with community comes solidarity, with solidarity comes organisation and with organisation comes a considerable potential adversary. Given the parlous state of many working class areas across the country, an organised and solid working class with an understanding of the communities that they live in and – most critically – a shrewd idea of who is responsible for running them into the ground would be a considerable opponent to the ruling class and the potential for their overthrow would be enormous. This is one of the many contradictions that capitalism creates for itself – Marx and others have written extensively about the capitalist’s requirement to maintain the working man or woman to the extent where they can replace themselves, yet at the same time destroys all the communitarian and familial bonds which in part create an environment where that replacement can most successfully take place.

The trade unions must also bear their fair share of the responsibility for this atomisation. Another of the contradictions of capitalism is that it brings workers together in places of social production – factories, mills, mines and, in modern parlance, call centres, offices and the like – to work together. This process of proletarianisation creates the same potentially explosive environment as that in communities: Workers having the opportunity to talk over their machines, across their desks or in their mess rooms and canteens, about the things that affect them all in work. Capitalism creates its own mortal enemy.

This is fertile ground for trade unions yet, when Covid struck in early 2020, they were at the vanguard of casting their own members out of their workplaces and into their homes. Apart from the cost in terms of domestic violence, which went up during lockdowns but was part of an already existing trend of rising domestic violence, the number of divorces jumped by 10% and, for those who were without partners or people that co-habited with them, lockdowns were particularly lonely times and bereft of opportunities for social interaction, not only in their workplaces, but in pubs, theatres, restaurants and cinemas, which were all were closed down.

The trade unions movement were all-in on lockdowns – they took the contemporary leftist line of the time that the lockdowns were not imposed early enough, for not long enough and certainly weren’t brutal enough. I recall chatting with a union rep, who organised mainly administrative workers, who was dumbfounded that the number of people taking sick leave had slumped during Covid: I proffered the theory that people who were banished to their living rooms and were checking their emails in their pyjamas would be far less inclined to take sick leave, even if they were genuinely ill, unless of course they were seriously injured and/or taken into hospital. The trade unions not only failed to either understand or acknowledge the further atomisation that lockdowns would cause, they also failed to understand that the mass closure of schools was in and of itself anti-working class: Whether we like the fact or not, schools are an integral part of the family support network – they take care of children while parents, usually both parents, work to provide for them.

During lockdowns, schools were open, but only to the children of ‘essential workers’ – parents had to provide letters from their employers to prove that they had no choice but to go to work before their children could be left there, meaning that thousands of working class parents in ‘non-essential’ work were forced to either cut their hours or stop work entirely, all with the complete complicity and support of the trade unions, including the teaching unions. In the post-Covid period, society continues to be much more atomised than its was in the pre-Covid period. It’s conceivable that, short of a workers’ revolution, under the current system we may never again see the level of societal integration and cohesion that we had before Covid.

Pornography and Young People

If we continue on the premise that a key reason for people having fewer children is that building relationships is becoming increasingly difficult, then we have to examine the pernicious effect that pornography is having on young people and how it is not only distorting young people’s views of each other sexually, but is stymieing their development in terms of finding a partner to settle down and have children with.

A short report published by the Children’s Commissioner makes deeply troubling reading on the subject of pornography. It reveals that 27% of children had seen pornography by the time they reached the age of 11 and that half of children had seen pornography by the time that they had reached the age of 13. The proliferation of smart phones, which parents have determined that their children need, has meant that access to hardcore pornography is within much easier reach than it was for children of previous generations.

The days of video cassettes of fuzzy 1970s porn films and contraband copies of Escort being passed amongst friends are long gone – instead, children have ready and easy access to pornography which includes sexual abuse of women, overt racism and can give young people a deeply distorted view of what are typical sexual behaviours. Young men with ready access to pornography are being led to believe that the pursuit of their own gratification has total primacy and young women are being led to believe that engaging in painful, humiliating and/or degrading sexual behaviours is a demand likely to be made of them by men.

Generation Z, which I have written about previously, have real difficulties in finding and keeping jobs – they also have difficulties finding not only partners, but intimate contact with anyone, no matter how fleeting. As Abigail Shrier wrote in her book Irreversible Damage: Teenage Girls and the Transgender Craze:

“Extensive daily internet use provides casual conversance with every sort of sexual fetish. They know what a “furry” is and have seen bondage porn. They’re au fait with the “lesbian” videos so popular on PornHub. The average age at which they first viewed pornography is eleven.

Adolescents are far less likely to have had actual sex than the women of my generation were at their age—or even to have proceeded along the traditional bases. As Kate Julian observed in The Atlantic, we are in the midst of a “sex recession”, especially severe among members of Gen Z. In 1994, 74 percent of seventeen-year-old women had had a “special romantic relationship” in the past eighteen months. “In 2014, when the Pew Research Center asked seventeen-year-olds whether they had ‘ever dated, hooked up with or otherwise had a romantic relationship with another person’—seemingly a broader category than the earlier one—only 46 percent said yes.”

If the foundation of human procreation is the forming of relationships, which it arguably is, then it is clear that pornography has had a serious and deleterious effect on young men and women, their respective outlooks on interactions and relationships with the opposite sex and what constitutes normal, healthy and mutually satisfying sexual connections between people.

The Precarious Nature of Modern Life

Another key reason for our declining birth rate, and the final reason that we’ll examine in this article, is the precarious and unstable nature of modern life in general. With the average age of a first-time homebuyer being around 34 years old, it is fair to say that people who are younger than 34 years of age will, on average, have to find some living arrangement once they have left school and/or university and enter the world of work.

The most likely option is to remain living at home with parents, however as anyone of a certain age will know, staying with parents presents its own challenges and finding a place of one’s own to live will often become the better option. That said, finding a place to live isn’t easy – putting your name down on the list for a council house or flat isn’t really an option for most young people in 2025 and getting the money together to buy a home of your own is extremely difficulty unless parents are able to help. This leaves private renting to be the only ‘viable’ option, though it has to be said that the word ‘viable’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

I have rented privately myself and, notwithstanding the trials of having the worst combi-boiler in the world and the rather fussy inspections carried out by the letting agency, it was a fairly trouble-free five and a half years. That said, I and I’m you you are aware of examples of people who have been given notice to quit from their home because the landlord had decided to sell the property, or repurpose it (for instance by moving back in themselves). Assured Shorthold Tenancies, which are the most common type of private tenancy, generally only last for a year at a time and the worry of receiving the notice to quit at the end of the current tenancy is always there.

I’ve moved home three times and that’s more than enough for me given the stresses involved, but for people with children it is conceivably even worse. Having a steady and dependable home environment is essential for the stable and healthy development of children and living in a situation where the family could be driven to move every twelve months could in and of itself deter couples from having children in the first place.

Another key factor which can deter people from having children is the precarious nature of work. A report entitled Scale and nature of precarious work in the UK shows that, in the period 2009-2018, almost 10% of the workforce are ‘precarious’ workers – those being defined in the report’s executive summary as “a combination of two or more of the following (weighted) factors: non-traditional work; low income; working at a small workplace; and immigrant/ethnic minority background”. The report claims that precarious work is not increasing in prevalence, however work which would be reasonably perceived to be steady can become precarious overnight.

In March 2022, ferry company P&O fired 800 of its workers and replaced them with workers paid less than minimum wage. P&O entered no discussions with their trade union RMT on the plan to make these mass redundancies and instead published a short video which explained that the company was losing money hand over fist and that the decision to sack all the staff and replace them with precious workers was a fait accompli. They then sent in security staff to forcibly remove the now-sacked workers from the premises whilst scab labour, some of whom were being paid as little as £1.86 an hour, were bussed in to replace them. The militant trade union RMT, which decided to act within the boundaries of pernicious anti-trade union legislation, was rendered powerless to respond.

Meanwhile, workers on zero-hour contracts or working in jobs where a phone app determines whether they work or not and therefore whether they get paid or not continue to exist and deepen the perception that the world of work is not only in a precarious state, but is getting worse. Young people are attending university to gain degrees which are becoming less and less valuable when they enter the world of work – the notion that gaining a degree in and of itself demonstrates to employers that the person showed hard work and diligence is evaporating.

A Problem that Capitalism Cannot Solve

With all of these factors and more besides, it’s little wonder that the birth rate in this country and across the imperialist bloc is as low as it is and shows no signs of recovery. The severity of the problem varies from country to country across the bloc, but the direction of travel is the same – towards societal collapse as the number of older people grows to the point where they massively outnumber younger people. Japan’s birth rate has hit the lowest point since records began 125 years ago and, with a shrinking population and an age demographic which is heavily weighted towards (30%) towards people over 65.

Socialism in and of itself won’t turn this declining birth rate around. Socialist countries, including the former Soviet Union, were forced to tackle the issue of declining or flatlining birth rates. But with socialism being able to provide free health care, a strong nursery and creche system, longer paid maternity leave and greater access to flexible working in a society where workers own, nurture and develop the world around them, the foundations for the growing of this country’s population would be laid.