There are more people dying in the UK every year than there are people being born. It’s a stark news story to read over toast, containing as it does all of life and all of death, and the shape and perfume of ancient fables, so I read it again, with tea. Even after stripping out the numbers of excess deaths during Covid, there were an estimated 16,300 fewer births than deaths in the year to mid-2023, the first time this has happened since the 1970s. A recent Lancet study suggests the world population will fall within decades, for the first time since the Black Death. Elon Musk, who has 11 children (although he might say fewer: he claimed his transgender daughter was figuratively “dead”), has described “population collapse” as “a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming”, and joins a growing chorus warning of the death of birth.

The statistic sounds dramatic perhaps, but it’s not a huge surprise. As women gain access to contraception (which correlates with higher levels of education and countries becoming more wealthy), they tend to have fewer children. Yet still, every story on the subject is framed in 50 shades of panic, with experts being interviewed about the reasons behind the drop in births in empty playgrounds beside, perhaps, peeling circus posters. The reasons typically given are economic – housing costs, salary stagnation, insecure employment, the weight of student loans, childcare fees and government policies that punish parents – with a marked shift from the conservative messaging of my youth. Where they used to lambast young mothers for their vile irresponsibility, now they’re telling off older childfree women for ruining the world. But while the economic reasons for people not having kids are real and infuriating and sorry, libido-sapping, there is another crucial reason that these experts seem less keen to touch.

In July, a Pew Research Center survey looking at American adults found that 57% of those who say they’re unlikely ever to have kids report the main reason is “they just don’t want to”. They just don’t want to! It’s that simple! Instead of the hand wringing about the poor women of 2024, desperate for babies but unable to afford them, it’s worth taking a moment to enjoy the fact that, for perhaps the first time in history, people feel empowered enough to be open about their preference to remain childfree. While their grandparents’ generation might have had kids even if they didn’t want to, due to societal expectations, or religious beliefs, or so that the children could, I don’t know, work on the farm or bring up the babies, today it is possible to say: no thank you.

To do so, however, is not yet seen as a neutral choice, either morally or politically. There is still a sense, as pro-natalist policies spread across the world, and attacks on “childless cat ladies” include attempts to punish them financially and undermine their vote, that the only way women can justify their place in society is by procreating. One weapon that Donald Trump’s people continue to use against Kamala Harris is that she’s unqualified to lead the country because she hasn’t had children, and that this choice reveals a fundamental depravity at her core. Perhaps this sense that women only become real once they have given birth is partly why, when discussing a falling population, it’s easier to focus on the economics of the matter, or even families’ fertility struggles. But that focus works to compound the idea that having kids is the only moral choice of two (those who yearn for it, or try but fail, can be pitied, and gain this way a flake of legitimacy). It reminds me of the arguments around abortion. Yes, some people need access to abortion because they might die without it, but others need access to abortion because they just do not want to have a child – both are valid, and important, and both require us to fight for them.

Something that always pricks at me in these discussions about increasing population rates, and then of childless women in opposition to parents, is the lack of humanity granted to the children – they become an object, a silent and obedient marker of status. It’s this, I think, that exposes one fantasy at the core of the argument: there is little thought given to or interest in the lives of the real people on either side. The children are trophies, invitations into society, the childfree are either victims or villains, the parents are fulfilled, complete and valuable. And populations might fall, but if the alternative is to pressure people to raise children they don’t want, what kind of world are we building?

It’s both an exciting and a terrifying time to stand up and say you don’t want kids, understanding that this choice is an unusual privilege, one that’s historically important, but also one that some are desperate to remove. The real shift will come when women are not only empowered to remain childfree, but allowed to do so without discussion or judgment. If asked to explain their journey, their reasons, they’ll say they “just don’t want to” debate the matter, and continue with their lives undefined by children, neither martyr or villain, just a person in the world.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman