George Orwell was on to it almost 80 years ago — the problem of below-replacement level birth rates. In a short book written for the Britain in Pictures series in 1947, written just as Britain was emerging from wartime rigors into an uncharted postwar future, Orwell noted that despite an upward blip in birth rates during the war, “the general curve is downward. The position is not quite so dangerous as it is sometimes said to be, but can only be put right if the curve not only rises sharply but does so within ten or at most twenty years.”

“Otherwise,” he went on, forebodingly, “the population will not only fall, but, what is worse, will consist predominantly of middle-aged people. If that point is reached, the decline may never be retrievable.” Orwell did not live to see it — he died at the age of 46 in 1950 — but the danger was averted. Postwar birth rates rose in Britain and parts of Europe, though not so robustly as in the United States, where the baby boom peaked in 1957 and petered out after the introduction of the birth control pill in 1962.

The peak U.S. fertility rate, or the projection of how many children the median woman would have if current birth rates continued, hovered above 3.5 and then plunged to 1.74 in the bicentennial year of 1976, just about the same as 2025’s 1.79.

Fertility rates remained low in the 1980s, then rose and occasionally reached the replacement rate of 2.1 in the high-immigration 1990s through the Great Recession of 2007. The latest rate was an uptick from the 1.6 levels of the COVID-19-affected 2020-24 period, leaving the U.S. with something similar to the dilemma Orwell warned Britons against.

And it’s not just the U.S. Plunging birth rates are a worldwide phenomenon. Europe’s fertility rates have been well below replacement for years, with nations’ under-70 populations set to fall by 20% in the next decade, not only in economically stagnant Britain and France, where births are tilted toward immigrants, but also in rapidly growing, low-immigration Poland.

Birth rates have dropped below replacement rates since 2000 in most of Latin America, largely because of lower-income mothers, such as Hispanic women in the U.S., having fewer children.

China, despite the repeal of its one-child policy in 2015, saw its fertility rate plunge to 0.9 in 2025. If births continued at current numbers, the lowest evidently since the 18th century, China’s population would shrink by more than half, from 1.4 billion to 625 million. Elsewhere in East Asia, the latest birth rates have fallen to 0.8 in Taiwan and Thailand, and even lower in South Korea.

Koreans have shown the determination to maintain their culture, including their alphabet and independence, in a neighborhood with many more Japanese and Chinese. They have risen from abject poverty to become world-class exporters since the 1953 armistice. But they may be at risk of disappearing: At current birth rates, every 100 South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren.