By Father Shenan J. Boquet
The 1992 book Children of Men (later turned into a blockbuster film) is set in the year 2027, just one year from now. It tells the story of a world in the throes of an infertility epidemic. For two decades, the entire human race has been rendered infertile, for unknown reasons. Not a single child has been born for 20 years.
The result of this infertility crisis is the complete loss of hope. The world depicted in the novel and movie is riven by warfare, violence, social instability, and an overall sense of nihilism and despair. It is a dystopia.
And then, into this world comes a miracle: a pregnant woman. And suddenly, hope is kindled.
It’s impossible not to think of Children of Men when reading a recent article published in The Guardian, titled, “A child is born: Italians celebrate village’s first baby in 30 years.”
The article describes the “rapturous celebrations” that occurred in the village of Pagliara dei Marsi, when Lara Bussi Trabucco was born.
The article reports, “Her christening in the church opposite her home was attended by the entire community … and such is the novelty of having a baby in the village, she is now the main tourist attraction.”
Pagliara dei Marsi is a tiny village, of just 20 people. And so, perhaps, it isn’t surprising that there are so few children. However, this is a chicken and egg question. The village is so small in part because population has plunged in recent years, as the elderly have died with no children to replace them.
As Angela Giuffrida, the author of the article, notes, the situation is “emblematic of a country-wide landscape that is becoming dominated by ageing populations and emptying schools.”
In 2024, Italy experienced yet another drop in birth rates, to the lowest level in recent history, just 369,944. The fertility rate in Italy is the lowest in history, at just 1.18 children born per woman.
The replacement-level birth rate is the total fertility rate (TFR) needed to maintain a population at a constant size—2.1 births per woman. However, as discussed in a previous Spirit & Life article, some argue that because of variations in fertility, mortality, lifestyles, and the fact that many adults choose not to welcome children, the estimated global TFR may actually be too low to reliably avoid population decline.
A Negative Feedback Loop
Italy’s conservative government, led by Georgia Meloni, has identified the demographic crisis as a top priority. However, while the government has introduced measures to boost fertility, including cash payments for new parents, the data suggests that the birth rate is continuing to fall.
In part, this is because (as so many nations are discovering), depopulation feeds depopulation. That is, depopulation produced a negative feedback loop in which the fewer children there are, the less likely couples are to welcome children.
Lara’s parents note that they are worried about the educational prospects for their daughter. With schools all across Italy shuttering doors, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ensure a proper education for a child.
Meanwhile, consider the thousand other ways that endemic childlessness produces childlessness. Lara’s parents are the first couple in three decades in their village to welcome a child. This means that their daughter will have no playmates her age in town. It means that the parents cannot lean on the experiences and support of their slightly older peers, or even their elders, who never had children, and who cannot therefore give authoritative advice or support on the parenting process.
For most of human history, starting a family was the most natural thing in the world. For Lara’s parents, however, there is undoubtedly little that feels “natural” about the decision to have a family. They’re doing something extraordinary, something nobody else in their peer group has done.
Parenthood naturally comes with many in-built pressures. However, the pressure on Lara’s parents must feel immense, as they try to navigate a novel path, under the spotlight, and to get it right. Such is the pressure that many couples considering parenthood feel that they are under. Many respond by choosing childlessness.
The Demography Panic
The story of Baby Lara is powerful, not because it reveals anything we didn’t know about the state of the world. We’ve known for years now that villages like Pagliara dei Marsi are myriad, all over the world.
However, what Baby Lara’s story does do is help us feel the reality of what is going on globally, in countless countries and communities, in much the same way that Children of Men helped millions of people feel what a childless world would be like.
For decades now, pro-life leaders have been warning about the coming demographic winter, caused by the normalization of abortion, the demolition of marriage, the nearly-universal reliance on contraception, and the sexual revolution’s far-reaching impact on how we understand sexuality and the meaning of life.
However, it’s one thing to read statistics about the rock-bottom birth rates in Italy, Japan, China, South Korea, and so many other nations. But it’s another thing to understand the stories behind the statistics: the stories of the elderly dying without ever having experienced the joy of holding a grandchild on their lap; the towns in which the sounds of children playing hasn’t been heard for decades; the children with few friends, and little extended family, that they can depend upon; the couples who are terrified of having a child, because of the lack of support, and fears over what the demographic winter means for the future of their society; the closing schools, etc.
Whiplash
For those of us who have paid attention to the demographic issue for decades, it is almost overwhelming how much attention the issue is finally getting. For decades, our views were dismissed, as governments and the media continued their drumbeat of overpopulation fear-mongering.
And then, almost overnight, it seems that everybody woke up and realized that a childless world is not a world that any of us want to live in, and that the economic, sociological, and cultural consequences of below-replacement birth rates just might be as devastating as we had been warning them for decades.
It’s become increasingly difficult to keep up with the flood of news articles announcing yet another “record low” year of births and fertility in yet another nation and ruminating in depth on the far-reaching and potentially devastating consequences of each drop.
This lengthy recent article about South Korea, for instance, notes that the Asian nation’s “population is (optimistically) projected to shrink by over two thirds over the next 100 years.” The article continues, “If current fertility rates persist, every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them.”
While the article attempts to make the case that some of South Korea’s pro-natalist policies have been effective, it concludes drearily:
It may be too late for South Korea. It is surrounded by real and potential enemies, including one which is committed to its destruction, and its army relies on a rapidly waning number of young conscripts. As its population gets older, more and more resources are going to be spent sustaining the elderly. This means less money for baby bonuses and more for nursing homes, as well as perpetually increasing taxes and hours. At some point, the few youngsters that are left may start to leave for less burdensome futures elsewhere, worsening the load on those that remain.
It’s also hard to keep up with the flood of measures being taken by governments to boost birth rates, which are often implemented without any particular fanfare in the media. Indeed, initiatives aimed at boosting birth rates have become almost boringly normal all across the developed world. Nations are experimenting with everything from large cash payments to tax breaks for families, to publicly-funded childcare, to (as in Hungary) free vehicles.
China Taxes Contraceptives
However, few stories in recent years have driven home to me just how heightened the panic over depopulation is becoming, than the news that China recently decided to begin taxing contraceptives, in the hope of raising birth rates.
Yes, China. The nation that, for decades, terrorized its population with the most brutal population control measures on the planet. The nation that had identified overpopulation as the single greatest threat to its existence.
As The Guardian reports:
China is set to impose a value-added tax (VAT) on condoms and other contraceptives for the first time in three decades, as the country tries to boost its birthrate and modernise its tax laws.
From 1 January, condoms and contraceptives will be subject to a 13% VAT rate – a tax from which the goods have been exempt since China introduced nationwide VAT in 1993.
This comes after China has, in what must feel like a case of whiplash to most of the Chinese population, moved from the brutal one-child policy to a liberalized two-child policy, to a three-child policy, and now an actively pro-reproduction program, which in some provinces includes cash payments to new parents.
In fact, there are reports that China is now repurposing some of the intrusive population control apparatus for pro-natal efforts. The Guardian adds,
Women in some areas have reported receiving phone calls from local government officers asking about their menstrual cycles and childbearing plans. In December, Chinese media reported that women in a county in south-west China’s Yunnan province were being required to report the date of their last period to the local authorities. The local health bureau said the data collection was necessary to identify pregnant and expectant mothers.
Children are a Blessing
Sacred Scripture consistently presents children not as burdens or mere personal projects, but as gifts—signs of God’s favor and tangible expressions of His blessing. “Children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward,” writes the psalmist (Ps 127:3).
In the biblical imagination, life flows from God’s creative love, and to be entrusted with new life is to participate, in a finite way, in that divine generosity. From the earliest pages of Genesis, fruitfulness is linked with blessing. God blesses man and woman and commands them to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28), not as a demand imposed from without, but as a sharing in His life-giving work.
This conviction is reinforced throughout the Old and New Testaments, where barrenness is often experienced as a trial, and the gift of children is received with gratitude, wonder, and praise.
The stories of Sarah, Hannah, and Elizabeth all reveal that children are answers to prayer and signs of God’s fidelity. Even in the Psalms, the presence of children is portrayed as a source of joy and strength: “Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them” (Ps 127:5).
In the New Testament, Christ Himself affirms the value of children, welcoming them, blessing them, and holding them up as exemplars of the Kingdom (cf. Mt 19:14). Scripture thus teaches that openness to children is inseparable from trust in God’s providence; to welcome life is to acknowledge that God’s blessings often arrive not in forms we fully control, but as gifts that call forth love, sacrifice, and hope.
Somewhere along the line, our world lost sight of this timeless wisdom. Never before have humans experienced such widespread wealth, comfort, and pleasure. And yet, rather than using the security provided to open our hearts to the gift of children, we have closed off our hearts.
Now, we are learning the hard way that turning inward in this way has consequences. Let us pray that a spiritual renewal sweeps the globe, that gives parents the courage they need to open their hearts, and to reverse this trend towards sterility.
The world of Children of Men is portrayed as a dystopia for a reason. A world without children is a bleak, barren, joyless world. However, unlike in Children of Men, we are not suffering from universal infertility. Where there is life, there is hope.
And there is certainly hope for our world. But it will take a widespread conversion of heart to turn hope into reality.
This article has been reprinted with permission and can be found at hli.org/2026/01/a-christian-vision-of-family-life-seeing-children-as-a-gift-not-a-burden.