Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk suggested this week that countries should pay more attention to the societal problems posed by childlessness instead of painting pregnancy as a disease.
In an X post on Sunday, Musk reacted to information about fertility rates in Sweden and Great Britain. According to Swedish journalist Peter Imanuelsen, “Birthrates in Sweden is now at the lowest level since records began [in] 1749. Birthrates in Britain is now at the lowest level since records began in 1938.”
Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla and X, shared Imanuelsen’s post and offered his thoughts by writing a caption reading, “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness.”
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The billionaire’s remarks suggesting that the low fertility rates plaguing Western countries stem from a cultural hostility toward pregnancy and child-rearing echo comments he made during an interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson last month.
“We need to stop scaring women that having a kid destroys your life,” he said. “This is false. […] We terrify girls into saying that if you get pregnant, your life’s over. This is what schools teach.”
While Musk agreed that teenage pregnancies are problematic for American society, he identified having a child as “one of the most delightful, happiness-inducing things you could possibly do.” He attributed the effort to convince Americans not to have children to an “extreme” version of the “environmental movement.”
“They started seeing humans as a plague, a blight on the surface of the Earth, that Earth would be this paradise if only humans weren’t here,” Musk maintained. “We have this totally wrong idea that the Earth is overpopulated when, in fact, it is underpopulated.”
A report published earlier this year in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet found that fertility rates, which measure the number of children born per woman, are below replacement level in nearly every region of the world except North Africa and the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa as of 2021. The term “replacement level” is defined as the “minimum rate necessary for generational replacement of the population.”
In “high income” countries, a category that includes the U.S. as well as the countries classified as part of Western civilization, the fertility rate is 1.51 as of 2021, below the replacement rate of 2.1. In Sweden, one of the two countries mentioned in the post shared by Musk, the fertility rate was measured at 1.71 in 2021. In the U.K., the fertility rate was even lower in 2021, coming in at 1.49.
The report projected that every region in the world, including those that have fertility rates above replacement level, will see birth rates drop below replacement level by 2040. It listed the consequences of falling fertility rates, along with the “resulting contraction and [aging] of the population,” as “serious economic challenges and increasing pressure on health systems, social security [programs], and the [labor] force.”
The report suggested that the implementation of “pro-natal” policies may slow the continued decrease in fertility rates. Examples of such policies include “childcare subsidies, extended parental leave, [and] insurance coverage expansion for infertility treatment.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
