On World Population Day, the World Faces an Underpopulation Crisis

On July 11, the United Nations will observe World Population Day. The annual event comes wrapped in the language of health, rights, development, and human dignity. But its history tells a darker story.

The United Nations established World Population Day in 1989 after the publicity surrounding the “Day of Five Billion,” observed on July 11, 1987. The stated purpose was to draw attention to the “urgency and importance” of population issues.

But the population establishment had already spent decades defining the birth of children as a global problem to manage.

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Now the nations that embraced that message face a crisis that no slogan can conceal. They do not have too many children. They have too few. There are fewer people.

Schools are closing. Rural communities are disappearing. Workforces are contracting. Pension systems strain under the weight of aging populations. Governments that once financed campaigns to reduce births now offer money, housing, tax relief, subsidized fertility treatment, and parental benefits in desperate attempts to persuade their citizens to have children.

Now, the demographic winter has arrived.

The United Nations did not begin with a worldwide population-policy apparatus. Its early work centered largely on collecting census information, studying mortality and migration, and producing demographic estimates.

That changed during the 1960s and was largely propelled by Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, and the lingering Malthusian mindset among UN elites. The solution was fewer people.

Political leaders, wealthy foundations, population-control organizations, and international bureaucracies increasingly portrayed population growth, especially in poorer nations, as a threat to economic development, food supplies, political stability, and the environment.

In 1965, the United Nations Economic and Social Council called for the expansion of the UN’s population work. In 1967, the UN created the United Nations Trust Fund for Population Activities. It began operations in 1969 and later became the United Nations Population Fund, or UNFPA.

UNFPA itself says the fund arose from “growing global concern about demographic change” and the development of new family-planning technologies. Its officers visited 84 developing countries within the fund’s first two years. You know, the countries where all the black and brown people live. The plan was to have fewer people.

And this marked a fundamental shift. Population questions no longer remained a matter of observation. They became the subject of programs, financing, political pressure, national planning, and international intervention.

When the United Nations began facing pushback to its population-control agenda, it adopted a new tactic. It softened the language without abandoning the goal.

At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, explicit demographic targets gave way to phrases such as “sexual and reproductive health and rights,” women’s empowerment, and individual choice. The new vocabulary sounded less coercive and more humane. The machinery, however, grew larger. Cairo preserved and expanded the global network of family-planning programs, reproductive-health initiatives, international financing, data collection, and political oversight first built under the 1974 population plan.

The language grew softer, but its reach and intensity widened. The goal remained fewer people.

The United Nations now insists that population policy concerns individual rights rather than population control. Yet the institutions, funding streams, measurements, and advocacy networks grew from an era when powerful actors openly sought lower fertility.

The goal remained fewer births; they just gave it a more digestible turn of phrase.

The results now surround us.

Across the developed world, fertility has fallen far below the replacement level of roughly 2.1 children per woman.

The European Union recorded a fertility rate of only 1.34 in 2024, the lowest in its history. EU nations recorded 3.55 million births that year, compared with 6.8 million in 1964. In six decades, the annual number of babies born in the European Union has nearly fallen by half.

Japan has warned the United Nations repeatedly about the consequences. Its population has declined for years. Nearly three in ten Japanese citizens are 65 or older. The country confronts labor shortages, abandoned communities, shrinking schools, pension pressures, and rising health-care costs.

Japanese representatives have urged the international community to pay greater attention to low fertility after decades in which UN institutions concentrated on population growth.

South Korea presents an even more severe warning. They report a fertility rate of 0.72 in 2023. At that level, a generation of 200 people would produce roughly 70 children and only about 20 grandchildren. That does not describe a temporary fluctuation. It describes demographic disappearance and future financial collapse.

China offers the most bitter example. For decades, its government enforced a brutal one-child policy through coercive birth restrictions, forced abortions, sterilizations, fines, and surveillance. Now China faces population decline, rapid aging, a shrinking workforce, and too few young people to support its elderly population.

A government cannot spend decades teaching its people that children constitute an economic liability and then reverse the damage with a new slogan.

Nations across Europe and Asia now scramble to reverse the collapse.

South Korea has spent enormous sums on cash grants, parental leave, childcare, housing assistance, fertility treatment, and monthly child allowances.

Hungary offers subsidized family loans, mortgage assistance, tax exemptions, and debt forgiveness linked to the birth of children. Poland created large monthly child benefits. Italy has expanded family allowances and childcare assistance. Japan funds childcare, parental leave, education assistance, and programs intended to make marriage and family life more attainable.

China has moved from punishing larger families to promoting them.

These new policies may ease the burden on parents, and governments should support mothers, fathers, and children. But financial incentives alone cannot repair a culture that has spent generations treating fertility as a danger, motherhood as an obstacle, fatherhood as optional, and abortion as a social solution.

The population crisis did not begin when birth rates appeared on a multinational spreadsheet. It began when societies stopped seeing children as gifts. And a nation cannot eliminate millions of its children and then express surprise when its population ages out.

The unborn child represents more than future economic output. His value does not depend on whether a government needs another worker, taxpayer, soldier, or caregiver. He possesses value because he is human.

World Population Day should no longer glorify the management of human numbers. It should stand as an indictment of the ideology that taught nations to fear their own children.

The world’s gravest demographic error was not that too many people were born. It was that too many societies forgot that every child is a gift, every birth is a promise, and no civilization can survive once it loses the will to welcome life.

LifeNews.com Note: Raimundo Rojas is the Outreach Director for the National Right to Life Committee. He is a former president of Florida Right to Life and has presented the pro-life message to millions in Spanish-language media outlets. He represents NRLC at the United Nations as an NGO. Rojas was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Havana, Cuba and he and his family escaped to the United States in 1968.