What's the solution?

The short answer

A pronatal culture. Children counted among the highest things a country produces, said in public, repeated for years, until having them is a personal choice and a national one.

That is rarer than it sounds. Most rich countries talk about fertility as a private lifestyle decision, then act surprised when the next cohort of workers is smaller than the last. A few countries have done the opposite, and their birth rates show it. Israel is the high-income country still above replacement — 2.87 in 2024 on this site’s series. Mongolia is at 2.50 (2024), about 2.5× China (1.01 in 2024) on the same series. Its 2023 Social Indicator Sample Survey printed 3.3 for the three years before the survey — 3.3 in urban areas, 3.6 in rural areas — which sits above the UN annual line.

Building that belief is slow. It is also the piece every other pronatal policy sits on. Subsidies, housing, and parental leave work better in a country that already thinks children are worth having. They struggle in a country that has spent decades saying the opposite.

Open the same six countries in Compare, or read why the level of fertility matters for pensions, schools, and coalitions. The rest of this page is the case for how a country gets the level back up.

Coercion and subsidies

The frightening versions of a fertility policy are real history, not hypotheticals. Romania’s Decree 770 banned abortion and contraception and produced a brief spike in births, a generation of institutionalised children, and a collapse as soon as the decree fell. A theocratic script in which the state assigns women a reproductive duty is the same idea in fiction. Neither is a model anyone should copy, and neither is what the countries above did.

The respectable alternative is the Nordic one: large child benefits, long paid leave, cheap childcare. Those are good policies for the children who are born. They have a weak record as a way to raise the birth rate. Latest estimates on this site: Sweden 1.43 (2024), Norway 1.45 (2024), Finland 1.25 (2024). A lot of public money buys a modest movement in the rate, and the rate remains near 1.5 or under.

There is a third record. Israel and Mongolia reached healthy birth rates by making the need for children a public fact. Kazakhstan and Georgia are the cases where a country that had already fallen climbed back. The mechanism is cultural, and it has a few properties worth naming.

1. Say what society needs

A person can have a good life with no children. A country that gets no children does not get a next workforce, a next tax base, or a next set of parents. Most governments know this and talk around it. They sell parenthood as a private happiness product that has to outcompete restaurants and travel, then wonder why the people who do the arithmetic choose the easier good.

Stephanie Murray put the distinction cleanly in “Are We Willing to Admit That We Need Parents?” (The Dispatch, January 2025). The conversation exists because society needs parents. Treating it as a counselling session about whether parenthood will make the adult happier dodges the ask. The ask is allowed. Countries already make it of soldiers, nurses, and teachers: the work matters beyond the person who does it, and no one is conscripted to do it.

Nations that can say this in the first person — we need children, and raising them is a contribution — are the ones whose fertility has held up or come back. Identity helps. A country that knows who it is can ask its people to continue it.

2. Raise the status of parents

Money cannot fully pay for work that costs more than money. Societies handle that by honouring it. A soldier is not told that the risk was a hobby. Parents, and mothers especially, are often told exactly that: the sacrifice was their lifestyle choice, so the honour is optional.

Mongolia has kept the opposite practice since 1957. The Order of Maternal Glory goes to mothers who bear and raise four children (second class) or six or more (first class). The president receives them at the State Palace. In 2025 the state doubled the cash award that comes with the order and conferred it on about 14,500 mothers. The cash is the smaller half. The public rank is the point: a mother of many is someone the country stands up for.

Israel does the same thing through family, congregation, and public life. A large family there has a standing that a large family in Seoul or in most American suburbs does not. South Korea’s prestige image, after decades of being told the country had too many people, runs toward the child-free life. Status is a fertility policy. It is just rarely written down as one.

3. Keep the freedom to say no

In Israel and Mongolia, contraception is ordinary and abortion is legal. People marry or they don’t. They have children or they don’t. The society has a strong view — children are good, and more of them is better — and it leaves the decision with the person.

That combination is the whole trick. A culture can honour a choice without making it compulsory, the way it honours medicine without drafting medical students. Decree 770 and a reproductive theocracy are what you get when a state skips the honour and goes straight to force. They are not the alternative on offer.

4. Drop the blame

Every theory of the decline eventually picks a culprit, and the culprit is usually the other sex. Men are said to be unfit partners. Women are said to have been talked out of motherhood. Both stories can cite a fact. A public fight organised around them produces fewer marriages and fewer babies, which is the outcome the fight claimed to be solving.

The useful question is the next child, this decade. How a country arrived at 1.3 is a research programme. It is a poor organising slogan.

5. A wide welcome

People disagree, sharply, about which household is the best place to raise a child. A country that actually wants children can keep that argument and still count every child as a gain. Married, unmarried, religious, secular: the baby is the scarce good. A campaign that blesses only one kind of family throws away births it says it is desperate for.

Israel’s fertility is high inside several family cultures at once, which is why the national rate sits above replacement and a briefing that quotes only one subgroup misses the country. The Israel briefing splits them. The cultural point survives the split. Children are wanted across the tent, so the tent has children.

6. Another child, from people who already have one

The practical path is easier than “persuade every young adult to start.” People who are not ready to be parents stay that way. People who already have a child decide the next one is worth it. That decision moves the rate, because a third or fourth birth is where low-fertility countries have gone missing.

Georgia is the clean published case. In December 2007 Patriarch Ilia II of the Georgian Orthodox Church said he would personally baptise any third or later child of married Georgian Orthodox parents, and stand as the child’s godfather. Chung, Deopa, Saxena, and Stone, in the Journal of Population Economics (2025), estimate that the national fertility rate then rose about 17 percent — 0.3 children per woman — and that third and higher-order births within those marriages roughly doubled. Marriage rose with it. The authors are frank that Georgian vital statistics before the mid-2010s are messy. The result that survives that mess is specific: a status offer aimed at the next child, made by someone the parents already revered.

Kazakhstan is the large modern climb. On this site’s series the rate bottomed at 1.90 in 2000 and is 2.98 in 2024. It did what Mongolia does: celebrate motherhood, and ask people in plain language to have more children for the country’s future. Published breakdowns of births by order describe a flat first-birth series and a sharp rise in third and later births. This site does not yet carry parity series, so the chart above is total fertility only. The many-mothers decomposition is the related question we can already show: the same rate can be many women having one child, or fewer women having several.

That is the generous version of the policy. Nobody who does not want a first child is told to have one. Parents who can imagine a third are asked, honoured, and sometimes paid a little, to have it.

7. The message already worked

Late-twentieth-century population-control campaigns were effective. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Iran all paired a public message — there are too many of us — with policy, and fertility fell hard and stayed down. The “population bomb” idea did not do this alone. It did supply the sentence people repeated until it felt like common sense.

A sentence about family size is a powerful instrument. The open question is whether anyone will use it in the other direction, for long enough, without embarrassment: children are good, and we need more of them.

South Korea’s series is what the first sentence achieved. Kazakhstan’s and Mongolia’s are what the second one can do. The charts are on this site. The sentence is a political choice.

Sources

• Fertility lines and the figures in the boxes are the UN World Population Prospects series carried on this site. Country pages name the release.
• Mongolia National Statistics Office, Social Indicator Sample Survey 2023, Table TM.1.1. Total fertility rate 3.3 (urban 3.3, rural 3.6) for the three years preceding the survey.
• Order of Maternal Glory: established 1957; second class at four children, first class at six or more. Ceremony and the 2025 doubling of the award reported by MONTSAME.
• Seung-Hun Chung, Neha Deopa, Kritika Saxena, and Lyman Stone, “Religiously inspired baby boom: evidence from Georgia,” Journal of Population Economics (2025). doi:10.1007/s00148-025-01092-5.
• Stephanie H. Murray, “Are We Willing to Admit That We Need Parents?”, The Dispatch, 27 January 2025.

The shape of this argument — culture first, freedom intact, extra children from people who are already parents — has been made in public by More Births. This page is birthrate.io’s version, tied to the series here.