A recent headline on an article published by the BBC is astonishing. "China offers parents $1,500 in bid to boost births," it reads.
Wait a minute. China's Communist government is now paying for couples to have children? The same Communist Party that, for decades, enforced the most brutal population control regime on earth?
It's worth briefly reminding ourselves of just how extreme, how barbaric, how iron-clad China's population control measures were.
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Since the 1970s, Chinese women were only permitted to have one child. The only exceptions involved women living in more rural areas, who might be permitted to have a second child.
For those women who violated the policy - whether accidentally or intentionally - there were severe reprisals. The most brutal of these was the forcible abortion of their preborn child, up to 9 months gestation. In countless cases, women were victims of forcible sterilization.
In instances where the government failed to intervene in time, and an "illegal" child was born, that child could expect to live his or her life as a social pariah. So far as the government was concerned, the child did not exist. He or she lacked any legal identity and therefore could not access such basic things as education and healthcare, for which a person required Chinese citizenship.
The extent of the misery and trauma visited upon millions of the Chinese people over the space of decades by these inhuman policies is so vast that it is impossible to catalogue.
China's population control policies were so extreme and so ferociously defended by the government, that it often seemed as if things would never change.
The Communist Party's greatest fear, it seemed, was out-of-control population growth, which would, per the predictions of the over-population alarmists of the 1960s, lead to widespread famine, disease, war, and social collapse. And so, they pulled out all the stops, creating a vast bureaucracy and accompanying police force with total authority to do anything necessary to prevent the birth of "excess" children.
And then, everything changed.
Around about the year 2015, news began to percolate out of China that the government was beginning to relax the policy. In 2016, the government officially announced that Chinese women would now be permitted to have two children. And then, in 2021, the limit was raised to three children.
Since then, the growing impression is not one of a government gradually lifting a policy in accordance with careful population projections, but rather of a government in a state of panic.
This panic is reflected in the headlines of a growing number of articles in mainstream publications, which are peeling back the veil on the hidden costs of the brutal one-child policy. "China's fertility crisis is so dire, rates are falling below 'replacement levels' and GDP could slow by more than half in the next 30 years, study says," reported Fortune magazine recently.
Much too late, it seems, the Communist Party has realized that the unthinking enforcement of extreme population control measures would have more far-reaching consequences than expected.
Population, it turns out, is a very difficult thing to "control" in such a way as to get the desired outcomes. The effects of changes in fertility rates are significantly delayed; but once they begin to hit, they grow rapidly. While China's population stayed relatively stable over recent decades, the size of the effects of the one-child policy are just now beginning to become manifest. Demographers now predict decades of an increasingly rapidly decreasing population size, unless things turn around dramatically.
China is now learning the same lesson that many other developed nations have learned far too late, i.e. that it is much easier to reduce fertility rates than it is to increase them.
We know, after all, precisely how to prevent births: distribute massive amounts of contraceptives, conduct massive numbers of sterilizations, and then abort any preborn children that manage to make it through the gauntlet of these anti-natal efforts.
How to increase births, however, is a whole other matter. Governments the world over have experimented with everything from cash payments (sometimes quite large), to tax incentives, to free vans to try to increase birth rates. So far, these measures have had almost no impact.
The South China Morning Post recently asked the question, "How much do financial incentives and other means of support influence the decision to have children, or how many to have?" The answer? "In China, the connection appears weak."
The same is true almost everywhere else in the world. Hungary, more than any other nation, has explicitly and insistently emphasized its pro-natalist stance, offering a cornucopia of positive incentives for couples to have more children. And yet, Hungary has only experienced a very modest fertility boost in the wake of these policies, and the country's birth rate still remains far below the replacement rate. Furthermore, it's not even clear if the incentives are behind the increase, or if there might be some other cause.
As more people are beginning to realize, the elephant in the living room is that tapping into and encouraging pro-natal behavior (i.e., a couple's willingness to welcome children) is far more complex than simply offering economic incentives. In large measure, couples do not choose to welcome a child because their economic situation is just right. While there does seem to be some connection between a strong economy and birth rates, the correlation is far from absolute. In many developing nations where contraceptives are widely available couples nevertheless choose to have large families, because they value large families. Meanwhile, in affluent Western nations, extremely wealthy couples routinely choose childlessness, because they do not value creating a family.
The publication Foreign Policy recently put its finger right on the nub of the matter when they headlined an article about the fertility crisis, "China's Plunging Birth Rate Is a Crisis of Belief."
"The country's declining birth rate is not only an economic problem but a cultural one," wrote Emma Zang. "For many young people, the real barrier is not the cost of raising children. Rather, it is the conviction that parenthood no longer makes sense in a future that feels uncertain and unworthy of investment. Unless policies address this deeper malaise, subsidies and bonuses will do little to stem the decline."
This is the same point that I have made in numerous Spirit & Life columns over the years, in relation to the fertility question. Choosing to welcome a child into the world is the ultimate statement of hope. But hope cannot be manufactured by government policies. Rather, it arises in the context of a culture.
I have often noted in these columns that the culture of death begets more death, just as the Culture of Life begets more life.
It is impossible to isolate certain moral behaviors from others. Every human act has consequences one way or the other. The Natural Law, in other words, is real.
Widespread contraception and abortion have led to severe birth deficits, which are in turn leading to the rapidly growing euthanasia regime, as older couples realize that they have no one able or willing to take care of them.
And now, even in the very effort to reverse these birth deficits, couples and governments are having to resort to other technologies that are deeply enmeshed in the culture of death.
I was very saddened recently to see that the Trump administration has followed through on promises to make in vitro fertilization (IVF) much more affordable and available to women.
While this policy may look "pro-life" at face value, insofar as the government is seeking to increase the number of births, the hidden costs are far from pro-life. The Catholic Church has long warned against dystopian fertility technologies like IVF, noting that they sever procreation from its rightful place within the sexual union of a husband and wife, and that they involve the creation and destruction of countless human embryos, who are human beings in the earliest stages of their development. In other words, instead of engendering a child, "to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2378), a child is engendered through a technical process - viewed a right, and not as a gift.
The U.S. Bishops responded with dismay to the administration's announcement. "Every human life, born and preborn, is sacred and loved by God," said Bishop Robert Barron, Chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth in a statement. "Without diminishing the dignity of people born through IVF, we must recognize that children have a right to be born of a natural and exclusive act of married love, rather than a business's technological intervention. And harmful government action to expand access to IVF must not also push people of faith to be complicit in its evils."
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China's government is similarly looking to make IVF more widely available. However, experts are unconvinced that this will make much of a difference. "Even if you make IVF treatments available for free in public health, their demographic effect is insignificant," Arjan Gjonca, a professor of demography at the London School of Economics, told Think Global Health.
The problem is not a lack of availability of IVF, which only applies to the small percentage of the population that is infertile, but rather the desire or willingness to welcome children. And that, as noted above, is a matter that goes much deeper than either economics or technology.
Recently, Pope Leo XIV joined his predecessors in lamenting the low birth rate, especially in Italy, which once had one of the most vibrant family cultures in the world.
"In recent decades, we have witnessed in Europe a notable decline in the birth rate," the Pope said in a recent speech after a visit with the Italian president. "This calls for a concerted effort to promote choices at all levels in favor of the family, supporting its efforts, promoting its values, and protecting its needs and rights."
"'Father,' 'mother,' 'son,' 'daughter,' 'grandfather,' 'grandmother,'" he said. "These words that in Italian tradition naturally express and evoke sentiments of love, respect, and dedication - sometimes heroic - for the good of the family, community, and therefore for that of society as a whole."
The Holy Father exhorted his listeners to prioritize pro-family efforts. "Let us do everything possible to give confidence to families - especially young families - so that they may look to the future with serenity and grow in harmony," he said.
In other words, it is hope, not tax incentives, cash payments, or more access to fertility technologies that will reverse the birth decline. Some of these things can be good when used as part of a multi-pronged effort to create a culture of life. But ultimately, culture arises from forces that are much deeper than this: from shared values and ideals. And a culture of life will only arise when people value life as the gift that it is, and welcome new life with joy, in the confident hope that (as Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen so memorably put it) "life is worth living!"
In this, it is the Church, more than government bureaucrats, that has a central role to play. Let us pray that our spiritual leaders find new and creative ways to speak to the hearts of our younger generations, giving them the confidence needed to welcome life with joy.