Nicholas Wade

And whatever joy they may be, it requires a lot of effort to bring them up.

And many women are deciding not to do it.

Fine.

But

that road does lead to extinction.

And it's very hard to reverse.

I mean, you might think it's easy to make more babies if more babies were needed.

But in fact, many governments have had strong pro-natalist policies.

The Soviet Union, for most of its existence, had strong pro-natalist policies that banned abortion.

and contraceptives, and nothing that any government has found has reversed this trend, with one exception, which is the former Soviet Republic of Georgia that has an archbishop.

He's called Elia II, and he announced that for any couple married in the Orthodox Church and had two children, had a third child,

He personally would baptize it and be its godfather.

He said this in 2005.

And the next year, the birth rate took off like a rocket.

Everyone started having children.

This is the only...

known example of a government policy that has reversed the declining birth rate.

All those things you mentioned are definitely important factors.

I think that the most important way of looking at this problem is that the one thing that in one country after another correlates with the fertility rate

is what women want, is the number of children women in each country say they want.