A Bracing Brief.

"Mom at 16".

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1. Nick Eberstadt:

Though few yet see it coming, a momentous turning point for humanity is looming immediately ahead. We are about to enter a new age of human history. Call it the epoch of the “population implosion”. Because it is arriving quietly, without fanfare—almost on tiptoes—it is catching us by surprise. The world population explosion is almost over.

With birth rates plummeting and subreplacement fertility taking hold around the world, we are heading into an era of pervasive and indefinite de-population: starting already—and not just with countries, but entire geographic regions—eventually encompassing the planet as a whole.

There is no avoiding the great depopulations that lie ahead—they are already “baked into the cake”, fused into the foundations of societies all around the world by birth choices today’s parents have already made. The only question is how soon and how fast these coming depopulations transform life as we know it.

What lies ahead is a world of shrinking and aging societies, everywhere. “Net mortality societies” will be the new norm. Driven by unrelenting fertility collapse, family structures and living arrangements heretofore encountered only in science fiction novels will become commonplace, unremarkable features of everyday life.

Our species has no collective memory of depopulation. Total human numbers have not declined for a very long time. The last long-term global depopulation was almost 700 years ago, in the wake of the Black Death: a plague that devastated China and India as well as Europe. But over the following seven centuries, world population surged almost 20-fold. And over the past century—within the lifetimes of the world’s roughly 700,000 surviving centenarians—the human population has quadrupled.

We know what ended the last global depopulation: the procreative power of our species (once the bubonic plague ran its course). We do not know what will end the next one. The coming depopulation is intentional—a first in the human condition. This time, long-term population decline will be due to humanity’s procreative power itself—or rather the want of it, thanks to revolutionary worldwide reductions in the desire for children. So no one today can know how, or when, it might conclude—or even if it will. (Source: aei.org)

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2. The Washington Post:

(Russian President Vladimir) Putin, faced with a declining population and the added demographic peril of deploying tens of thousands of young men to the front lines, away from their wives, has found a new fixation: employing every possible incentive to persuade women to give birth early and often.

Government data showed that 599,600 children were born in Russia in the first half of 2024, the lowest birth rate since 1999, a figure the Kremlin called “catastrophic.”

Schools once again turned into a policy testing ground with a new extracurricular class, “family studies,” created to “solve demographic problems.” Course textbooks teach students that women should be obedient, demonize abortion and gloss over domestic abuse to prevent divorces.

A local version of an MTV reality show, “16 and Pregnant,” created in the 2000s, was originally intended as a cautionary tale against teenage pregnancy and drew the ire of authorities, who sought to ban it for purportedly promoting promiscuity.

That changed in 2024. The show was renamed “Mom at 16” and began to sugarcoat the challenges of raising a child as an impoverished teenager, instead emphasizing the “beauty of motherhood.” (Source: washingtonpost.com, italics mine)

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