Embracing the Birth Dearth: The Futility of Pro-Natalism

• Nathanial Gronewold
• March 25, 2025
• Forum Papers
• Forum Paper
• 0 Comments

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An NPG Forum Paper
by Dr. Nathanial Gronewold
March 2025

ABSTRACT

The governments of 55 countries worldwide have policies in place aimed at encouraging women and couples in their societies to give birth to more babies. These administrations fear collapsing birth rates and the population declines that this trend is either already causing or will soon cause. Billions of dollars have already been spent trying to reverse the global collapse in birth rates, despite a mountain of evidence—gathered over decades—that conclusively shows these pro-natalist government policies simply don’t work. And this is a good thing—we don’t want these policies to work because the world’s population needs to decline.

So far, the United States hasn’t followed suit, but influential voices in government and popular punditry are increasingly expressing concern about our own American birth dearth. This may compel Washington to have a go at it. If it does, then our government will fail, just like all the other governments that have already tried and/or continue to try to stop this force of nature that can’t be stopped.

AN EXERCISE IN FUTILITY

Broadly speaking, there are two types of experiments: controlled and natural. This is an oversimplification, of course, but I’m prone to doing this; it’s a nasty habit of mine. Nevertheless, for the sake of what I’m about to show you, let’s just agree that experiments can either be organized and controlled by researchers or they can just sort of happen, producing valuable data that we can use anyway even though there are no actual organized experiments involved.

I published my second book, A Tale of Two Cranes: Lessons Learned from 50 Years of the Endangered Species Act, in 2023. The entirety of this book is built around a natural experiment I stumbled upon while pursuing graduate degrees in Texas and Hokkaido, Japan. Independently, the American and Japanese governments orchestrated two endangered species recovery programs on opposite sides of the planet for almost 80 years (actually, longer—but I focused on 80 years). The whooping crane in southeast Texas nearly became extinct before the US government intervened. The red-crowned crane in southeast Hokkaido was believed to have already been driven to extinction before a surviving population was discovered by a Japanese government expedition in the early 1900s. These two remarkably similar species are so close in appearance and genetics that they can probably interbreed… Continue reading the full Forum paper by clicking here.

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