On Dec. 26, 2025, Pagliara Dei Marsi, a shrinking village on the slopes of Italy’s Abruzzo mountains with barely 20 residents and more cats than people, welcomed its first baby in almost three decades, as reported by The Guardian.
Italy recorded just 369,944 births in 2024, the lowest in its history, with fertility falling to 1.18 children per woman. The decline is most acute in fragile rural regions, where ageing populations, youth emigration, insecure work, inadequate child care, school closures and collapsing services reinforce a cycle of abandonment. Financial incentives such as baby bonuses offer symbolic relief but fail to address deeper structural failures, precarious employment, weak maternal health care, and the steady retreat of the state from peripheral regions.
A few months earlier, Greece, alarmed by similar trends, announced a 1.6 billion euros package to counter population decline. Framed by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis as a national threat, Greece’s fertility rate stands at 1.3, with projections showing the population could fall below 8 million by 2050. Yet, can financial packages resolve a crisis rooted in modern, materialist lifestyles and ingrained social behaviors?
Back home in Türkiye, too, a highly urbanized society with an Human Development Index (HDI) nearing Europe, the fertility crisis is severe. Despite state incentives and declaring 2025 the “Year of the Family,” fertility has fallen to around 1.48, well below replacement, reflecting a structural demographic decline.
Falling fertility is now a global phenomenon, with most countries below the replacement rate of 2.1. Japan (1.2), South Korea (0.7), China (1.0), Italy (1.2), Portugal (1.4), Chile (1.2), Ireland (1.6), Lithuania (1.3), Denmark (1.5), and Vietnam (2.0) illustrate the trend. Governments are scrambling, deploying cash incentives, housing schemes, child care subsidies, parental leave and relocation bonuses, but treating depopulation as a purely economic problem risks missing its deeper civilizational roots.
A hundred years ago, the planet held barely 2.5 billion people, and most societies were demographically modest by today’s standards. Türkiye's population counted 14 million, Greece around 6 million, Italy 41 million, Japan had fewer than 60 million, Korea had about 20 million, China had under half a billion; much of Europe and Asia consisted of relatively small populations by contemporary measures. A century on, every one of these countries is vastly larger. In raw numerical terms, this long arc of growth complicates the language of demographic alarm. Some, for instance, are still projected to have more people in 2050 than they did in 1925.
The crisis, however, is structural; in 1925, populations were youthful, fertility was high, and shorter life expectancy ensured renewal. Even catastrophic mortality shocks, such as the Spanish flu, which killed an estimated 50 million people, or the two world wars, were offset by high birth rates. Today, mortality has fallen sharply: infant mortality is below 30 per 1,000 live births, and maternal mortality has declined by over 40% since 2000. Yet, fertility has collapsed. In countries such as South Korea, Japan, China and Italy, the capacity for population regeneration is eroding. As demographer Wolfgang Lutz observes, this is the first historical moment in which population decline is driven not by death, but by social structure, choice and lifestyle.
Humanity has never been more numerous; however, its ability to reproduce itself is faltering. Ageing populations, rising dependency ratios and shrinking workforces threaten economic stability and social welfare, pressures that the smaller but youthful populations of 1925 never faced. Societies have conquered famine, disease and war, but now risk depopulation from within. Treating it as a short-term fiscal gap is akin to prescribing painkillers for an illness that demands chemotherapy.
The core insight is that the demographic challenge cannot be solved through incentives alone. Pensions, bonuses and subsidies manage symptoms, not causes. The problem is structural: modern lifestyles with career prioritization, urbanization, delayed family formation and materialist values have fundamentally reshaped reproductive behavior.
As of 2025, the 10 countries with the lowest fertility rates – Macao (0.69), Hong Kong (0.73), South Korea (0.80), Taiwan (1.09), Singapore (1.17), Japan (1.22), Italy (1.23), Spain (1.23), Greece (1.40) and Germany (1.40) – are overwhelmingly high-income, urbanized and developed societies. Despite high gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, strong HDI scores, universal education, low infant and maternal mortality, and advanced health care systems, these nations struggle to sustain fertility. Common traits include delayed marriage and childbirth, demanding work cultures, and difficult work-life balance.
By contrast, the highest fertility rates are concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa. Countries such as Niger (6.7), Angola (5.8) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (5.6) maintain high fertility despite low incomes, limited urbanization and weaker infrastructure. Niger’s GDP per capita, for example, is under $1,000, and literacy rates remain low. This is the paradox of modernity: prosperity and development correlate with demographic decline, not renewal.
Framing history solely through patriarchal or feminist lenses oversimplifies human experience. Men and women bore distinct but profound burdens. Women have sustained social continuity through care, men through war, forced labor and economic hardship. But in the modern era, women face a sharper contradiction: motherhood, once revered, is subordinated to economic productivity. Expected to be full-time workers while anchoring family life, many experience exhaustion as much as liberation. Treating women as interchangeable labor units while relying only on them for social regeneration has unavoidable demographic consequences.
At its core, the demographic crisis exposes a structural flaw of modernity. By reducing individuals to producers and consumers, the modern state treats child-rearing as lost productivity, eroding the foundations of future economies, an Ouroboros consuming its own future. Care work, once society’s moral center, is now relegated to a private burden, reflecting a systemic “care-blindness” that measures industrial output while assigning no value to the reproductive labor that sustains society. This is a shift from Malthusian fears of overpopulation to a Lutzian reality in which social structures no longer reproduce themselves, revealing a fundamental design flaw of the high-income, urban model of modern life.
