Something is wrong with human reproduction.
Not only did the "population bomb” environmentalists warned us about fail to blow, but humanity is now facing a population implosion like nothing in history.
Birthrates have plummeted over recent decades to crisis levels, below replacement level in America, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Denmark, France, Italy, Japan—just about every westernized country where economies are beginning to strain under aging demographics. They are dropping in countries with traditionally high levels, like India and China, too.
It’s not just that fertility has fallen because women are choosing to delay childbirth and have smaller families. It’s that more and more young people in countries worldwide are unable to conceive or bring a baby to term when they want to, and the problem seems to be getting worse.
Among American women aged 15-49 years who have never given birth, 19 percent do not succeed at getting pregnant after trying for a year—the medical definition of infertility, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).1 That’s up 13 percent from the percentage found among women aged 15-44 just 12 years ago.2
It’s a trend around the globe, and the trouble is not just with women. In 2017, leading reproductive epidemiologist Shanna Swan published a study that quickly went viral for its staggering statistical findings: the sperm counts of men worldwide had dropped a whopping 59.3 percent from 1973 to 2011.3
Not only that, but as Swan revealed in her 2021 book Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race (Scribner, 2021), it isn’t just men's sperm counts that are dropping at a rate of 1 percent per year. So are their testosterone levels, and rates of testicular cancer and miscarriage are simultaneously climbing at the same rate.
Swan's conclusions about the reproductive health of the current generation of young people are jawdropping: a young man today has about half the sperm his grandfather had at the same age, and in many countries, a woman in her 20s today is less fertile than her grandmother was at age 35.
Swan, a professor at the Icahn School of Medicine in Mount Sinai, New York, has researched reproduction for decades and began looking at sperm counts in 1992, when the British Medical Journal first reported a nearly 50 percent decline in the quality of human semen.4 It’s chilling to hear how she interprets the numbers.
“I felt and remain genuinely scared by these findings on a personal level,” she says. “We really are in a dangerous situation for mankind and world fertility.” where there is no hope because there are no children.
