It’s 2045, and inflation has skyrocketed. China is no longer a global manufacturer, thanks to its elderly population and the price of household goods has become unaffordable. The majority of people worldwide now dedicate their resources to caring for the old. Countries with larger, younger populations are mobilising their armies.
This is the future that Tom Davenport fears. To stop this, he believes the world needs more babies, and fast. “I’m most worried about, for example, what happens when South Korea’s population is less than a third of what it is now, and then North Korea just goes and slaughters the rest of them,” he says.
South Korea’s birth rate is indeed slowing, but then so is North Korea’s. “Or when Germany’s industry is decimated because it doesn’t have skilled workers. In the next 20 years, I’m not sure that there will even be a Germany [as its population will decrease] and if you have a vacuum in the centre of Europe, really hairy things can happen.”
Davenport, 38 from Wiltshire, is a pro-natalist: he subscribes to a pro-birth ideology that dictates that women need to have more children to secure the future of the human race. The controversial movement is gaining popularity as growing numbers of nations battle with low birth rates.
Pro-natalism has become trendy among Silicon Valley’s so-called “tech bros” and its most famous proponent is the billionaire and US goverment adviser Elon Musk. Musk has 12 children with four different women – this week, it was reported that he has fathered a 13th with a 26-year-old Maga influencer. He has described population collapse as “the biggest danger” to humanity (exceeding climate change) and warned that Japan, which has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, “will eventually cease to exist”. US Vice President JD Vance has argued that parents in the US should have more voting power than childless adults. During the 2024 election, he rallied against the Democrat’s “childless cat women.
Davenport is a fan of Musk’s statements. “I’m supportive of anyone trying to help raise awareness on this issue,” he says. “We need proper innovation. And he’s demonstrably done that in several fields.”
Davenport is a father of three. He had his first child at 22, a decade before he discovered pro-natalism. Then, in 2011, he became interested in declining birth rates in Japan and South Korea and was galvanised. “I realised that some pretty crazy stuff is coming up in the next few decades,” he says. “I’m concerned that the next generation won’t grow up in as stable a world [economically and geo-politically] as we’ve had; a world that we’ve been able to take for granted.”
Pro-natalism has been associated with authoritarian and anti-women policies, but several times in our conversation, Davenport points to the fact that on average, UK women want 2.35 children. But they have 1.44. “It isn’t that they don’t want children,” he tells me, “but there are obstacles.”
He says these obstacles are mainly economic. Despite being a staunch believer in pro-natalism, he and his partner do not plan to expand their family of three children: 16, 11 and 9. “We can’t afford a bigger house,” he explains.
Davenport’s wife doesn’t share his strong views on population growth. “She is extremely supportive and an extremely good listener,” he says. “She loves children and works full-time with kids. We’re quite different [in our interests] but she’s aware of the problem through me.”
The global population isn’t declining, but it is slowing. In the 60s, the growth rate was about 2.1 per cent per year. Today it’s closer to 1.1 per cent per year. In Japan, Italy, and Germany, populations are shrinking due to low fertility rates and ageing demographics. But that isn’t the whole picture. Elsewhere fertility rates are thriving. Nigeria, India, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are seeing rapid population increases.
Last year, the United Nations released World Population Prospects 2024, with projections for the year 2100. It reported that “women today bear one child fewer, on average than they did around 1990”. It predicted that the world’s population is expected to peak at about 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s (up from about 8.2 billion today) before beginning to plateau and fall as older generations who have lived for longer than any other die.
The UN’s targets aim to facilitate a shift towards “smaller families in populations that are growing rapidly and where individuals and couples often have more children than they desire, and enabling parents to have larger families in populations that are declining and where people often fail to achieve their desired family size.”
Davenport believes we are sleepwalking into an economic crisis because of this birth rate decline. “My big concern is most people don’t recognise this, or worse, they somehow think we have to choose between fertility or the environment. We can actually have both,” he argues. “If we don’t have lots of smart people being born, how are we actually going to solve anything in 34 years? Imagine if Japan has three adults per pensioner. Who’s going to look after all these people?”
Davenport, founder of an AI digital marketing agency, puts part of the blame on men. “There are a lot of men who are stressed about having children. I was really young and I was scared. I thought: ‘This is way too soon’. I was really focused on my career and making something of myself. I gave up on some of that to focus on my family, which was a sad moment but you do it for kids,” he says. “And it actually turned out to be the thing that made me work at a higher level than I ever originally dreamed.
“Until people have kids, they don’t realise how motivating that can be. I know guys who spend 90 hours playing a video game. It’s tragic. They could be putting that energy into the world. Many need to wake up to their own responsibilities.”
Phoebe Arslanagić-Little, 28, is another pro-natalist, and co-director of Boom, a campaign to make starting a family in the UK easier. She is swaddling her first baby, a seven-week-old daughter, when we speak on the phone. “I’ve always known that I would really like to have children. I knew it would be a sad thing in my life if that ended up being difficult,” she says. But until 2022, she hadn’t thought much about the birth rate. “I heard people talk about it, and then I came across really good evidence that people in the UK are having fewer children than they want to,” she says. It spurred her to start her research.
Some campaigners are deeply worried by the pro-natalist push to procreate. “Harmful lies and myths spread by the pronatalist movement wage a war on women’s bodies and choices,” says Amy Jankiewicz, CEO of Population Matters. “The pronatalist movement seeks to restrict individuals freely exercising their reproductive rights, seeking a world where access to family planning services – specifically safe abortion – are banned or severely restricted, as evident in countries such as America, Hungary and China.”
This, argues Jankiewicz, de-centres the choice of women. “When individuals, specifically women and girls, have access to education, sexual and reproductive services and information, the evidence demonstrates they themselves choose smaller families,” she says. “Transformative human rights-centred leadership is what we need and deserve for the betterment of people and the planet.”
Arslanagić-Little is aware that this issue is spiky. “When we see people talking about it publicly, it’s often in an US culture war context, which doesn’t actually help people to expand their families,” she says. “Often, people are making values-based arguments about the issue, but they’re really coming from a place of faith, for example, or they’re thinking about it from a political, tribal sense.”
Arslanagić-Little doesn’t align with those views. She is based in London and believes she has only been able to start her family at 28, four years younger than the national average, because she lives close to her parents and her in-laws, giving her more support than many first-time mothers can expect. “If it wasn’t for that I think I would have waited a little longer,” she says.
“I have friends who don’t want children, but that doesn’t concern me,” she says. “What does deeply concern me is that there are far too many people who really want to become parents but are unable to do so.”
Thanks to her support network, she aspires to expand her family to two to three children. “It’s not that I’m driven ideologically in everyday life. I want to have two or three children because I really enjoy being a parent,” she says. “We’re really bad at talking about this issue in the UK. Even though we have this very strong evidence that people have fewer children than they want, even though we know that fertility rates have been falling for a long time, it’s just not part of our mainstream political discourse.”
She tells me about the Gordon Brown baby boom of the early Noughties. “When he was chancellor, he made some benefit reforms, including the introduction of the working families tax credit,” she says. The IFS reports that it caused an extra 45,000 babies born between 1999 and 2003.
Arslanagić-Little believes there is no silver bullet. “But it’s a misconception that there are no solutions,” she says. “Solving it would make a real difference to many people’s lives and also to our future as a country.”
Policy solutions are fairly simple to imagine. “It’s about making being a parent easier,” she says. “The barriers people face are things like not being able to move into a larger home; maternity and paternity leave not being generous enough.”
But the more complex problem for hopeful parents is the hurdles that come in the years before. “That’s much more about the kind of career that people have had in their twenties and the extent to which people have been able to establish themselves and find a job that they like. It’s also about how easy it is to find a relationship,” she says. “All of that is more complicated to solve.”
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