No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children  
by Paul Morland | Forum, 2024, 264 pages

The spectre of depopulation, this book argues, is haunting Europe and many other places and is reflected in labour shortages, ballooning government debt, growing welfare costs, pressure for rising taxes, and a lack of youth, creativity and innovation. 

Making the case for children, author Paul Morland contends, has never been more urgent. While the number of people on the planet is still growing, the rate of growth has halved since the 1970s and is continuing to fall.

Morland, who is a British demographer, offers striking statistics to illustrate his arguments about population ageing. In Italy in 1950, there were about seventeen persons under ten for every one person over eighty. Today, the two groups are matched roughly one to one.

In the mid-1960s, Japan had more than nine people of working age to every one person of retirement age. Three decades from now, it will have barely one and a half people of working age for each retiree.

According to the author, no United Kingdom government has ever suggested, explicitly or implicitly, that the fertility rate should be higher, despite the fact that the UK has had sub-replacement fertility for half a century.

Depopulation crisis

In the past, there was great anxiety about "over-population", and this drew on the warnings of Thomas Malthus over 200 years ago. Expressions like "population bomb" and "population explosion" were used by modern Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich, and concerns about population growth fuelled aggressive and sometimes coercive family planning programmes in developing countries. China developed its notorious "one-child" policy, while India introduced forced sterilisation programmes under Indira Gandhi.

Perspectives have gradually changed over the years, and there is now a greater focus on the risks of depopulation.

While some have acknowledged that there could be population ageing problems in the long term, Morland suggests that the "long term" has finally arrived and is reflected, for example, in estimates that Japan could face a worker shortfall of eleven million by 2040.

We can’t just "muddle through", Morland maintains, as the crisis is deeper, wider and longer than anything in the past.

He explains today’s low fertility by reference to causes such as secularism, arguing that "there seems to be a strong connection between societies losing their faith and losing their fertility".

Other factors include a drop in fertility rates in certain ethnic groups, increasing education, giving women the opportunity to pursue other interests outside the family, economics (as people get richer, they have fewer children), and worries about the impact of climate change on the future of the planet.

Morland discusses feminist concerns about "natalism" and argues in favour of "the rights women have gained over recent decades". He adds that it is important to listen to what women actually say they want, which is often more children than they actually have today – the gap being accounted for by various barriers to having children, such as a lack of flexibility in career organisation and in the workplace. He adds that there is a need to celebrate parenthood, and not just motherhood.

Abortion receives surprisingly brief attention in a reflection on population ageing and depopulation. In Ireland alone, there were an estimated 10,000 abortions in 2023, that is, between one-sixth and one-fifth of the number of registered births, while similar or higher figures are reported in many other countries. Clearly, abortion causes the loss of unique unborn lives, and is a fundamental moral issue as well as having demographic implications.