In Brazil, a 29-year-old woman laments that she wants children but finds it “impossible to buy or have affordable rent” in her city. In Paraguay, a 30-year-old man observes that “bringing a child into the world is only one step. The real challenge is raising them.” In Zambia, a mother explains she cannot have more children due to “financial instability, precarious employment, unaffordable housing, and the high cost of childcare and education.”

These voices, collected in a sweeping new report from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), illuminate what researchers call the “real fertility crisis”.

It is not, they argue, the demographic doom-mongering about ‘population bombs’ or ‘demographic suicide’ that dominates headlines. Instead, it is a crisis of reproductive agency—the widespread inability of people to have the families they actually want.

When desires meet reality

The report’s most striking finding comes from a survey of over 14,000 adults across 14 countries (Brazil, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, South Korea, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand and the United States) representing more than a third of the world’s population.

Nearly one in five respondents (18 per cent) believed they would be unable to have the number of children they desired. Among those aged 50 and older, whose childbearing years are largely behind them, 31 per cent reported having fewer children than they had ideally wanted, whilst 12 per cent had more.

Perhaps most tellingly, 13 per cent of all respondents had experienced both an unintended pregnancy and a time when they wanted children but felt unable to have them. This suggests that the barriers to family formation are not simply about access to contraception or fertility treatments, but reflect deeper structural problems.

The obstacles are strikingly consistent across countries with vastly different fertility rates. Economic factors dominate: 39 per cent cited financial limitations, 21 per cent pointed to unemployment or job insecurity, and 19 per cent mentioned housing concerns. Health issues affected 24 per cent of respondents, whilst 19 per cent said fears about the future—climate change, wars, pandemics—had influenced their reproductive decisions.

The policy muddle

Governments have largely missed this crisis, focusing instead on tweaking total fertility rates up or down depending on their demographic anxieties. The report notes that between 1976 and 2015, an increasing number of countries adopted explicit fertility policies. Many that once sought to reduce births—including China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Türkiye—have now switched to promoting larger families.

However, these efforts often backfire. Romania’s 1966 ban on contraception and abortion briefly raised fertility from 1.87 to 3.59 births per woman, but the rate quickly fell below three by 1970. The policy’s human costs were severe: Romania had Europe’s highest maternal mortality rate, with 87 per cent attributable to unsafe abortions, plus thousands of abandoned children.

Even seemingly benign campaigns can prove counterproductive. Italy’s Fertility Day initiative, featuring slogans like ‘Beauty knows no age, fertility does’, sparked criticism that the government was out of touch with citizens’ real needs. South Korea’s ‘birth map’ website, showing the distribution of women of childbearing age, was shut down after contributing to the country’s 4B Movement, in which participants refuse to date, have sex, marry or bear children.

Beyond the gender wars

The report challenges narratives that blame women for declining birth rates. Men, too, face barriers to achieving their reproductive goals, and their desires for greater involvement in child-rearing are often thwarted by workplace cultures and social norms that still expect them to be primary breadwinners.

The persistence of unequal domestic labour proves to be a crucial factor. Women in the survey were nearly twice as likely as men (13 per cent versus eight per cent) to cite their partner’s insufficient involvement in housework and childcare as a barrier to having more children. Despite progress, women still perform three to ten times as much unpaid care work as men globally.

Yet the solution is not to roll back women’s empowerment, as some politicians suggest. Research shows that partnership formation actually suffers when gender equality stalls. Countries with higher levels of public spending on families and better progress towards gender equality—such as France, Norway and Sweden—tend to have higher fertility rates than those lagging behind.

A different approach

Rather than targeting fertility rates, the report argues for policies that enable reproductive agency. This means ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health services, including both contraception and fertility treatment. It means addressing economic precarity through better childcare provision, more equitable parental leave policies, and housing that young families can afford.

Sweden offers an intriguing model. A 2024 law allows parents to transfer up to 90 days of paid leave to grandparents or even family friends, acknowledging that modern families need broader support networks. Such policies recognise that reproductive decisions are influenced by entire ecosystems of support, not just individual preferences.

The report’s most radical suggestion is to abandon fertility targets altogether. As the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development declared, governmental goals should be “defined in terms of unmet needs for information and services” rather than demographic outcomes.

Measuring what matters

This shift requires new metrics. Instead of obsessing over total fertility rates, policymakers should track reproductive agency itself: whether people can access the services they need, whether they feel able to make free choices about their families, and whether social and economic conditions support their decisions.

The implications matter deeply. In an era of growing authoritarianism, reproductive rights are under threat in many countries. Some governments are restricting access to contraception and abortion in the name of boosting birth rates, whilst others deploy demographic anxiety to fuel ethno-nationalism.

The UNFPA report offers a different path: trust people to make their own reproductive choices, then create the conditions that make those choices possible. As one young activist put it: “Young people are not just thinking about their future children—they are thinking about the world those children will inherit.”

That world, the report suggests, should be one where having a family is a genuine choice, not a luxury or an accident.

The real fertility crisis, in other words, is not about the number of babies being born. It is about building societies where people can flourish as parents—or choose not to be parents at all—according to their own hopes and circumstances.

That is a goal worthy of any government’s attention, regardless of what the demographic data might suggest.

Photo: Dreamstime.