With Fertility as Low as Never, Norway's Birth Rate Committee Meets

A long-ish update on the population collapse, courtesy of legacy media, experts™, and official number-crunchers shows--massive cognitive dissonance and stupidity

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recently put out his quarterly update concerning European birth rates for Q1 2025:

European births, Q1 2025 update

And since birth rates are a hot-button issue in many countries, here’s some more particulars from Norway, courtesy of both the number-crunchers over at Statistics Norway (SSB) and whatever passes for legacy media reporting™ these days.

Oh, lest I forget, I last wrote about this issue, too, about a year ago, and for those data sleuths out there, please venture over to this posting:

How Big is the 'Baby Bust' since 2021?

There’s but one more thing to mention now—all non-English content comes to you in my translation, with emphases and [snark] added.

Act I: Total Fertility Goes Up, SSB Claimed in March

You see, the number-crunchers over at Statistics Norway claimed not that long ago—in fact: on 11 March 2025—that ‘Total Fertility Goes Up’ (orig. Fruktbarheten går opp). SSB’s Karstein Sørlien informed the reading public (pun intended) about the following hard facts:

A total of 54,000 children were born in Norway in 2024, 2,030 more than in the previous year, according to new figures from the Births statistics.

Based on the total number of births, Statistics Norway calculates the total fertility rate (TFR). This is a measure of how many children women will have on average over the course of their lives, given that the fertility pattern remains the same. Therefore, TFR says something about the fertility trend in society [no shit, Sherlock].

‘Although fertility rose in 2024, it is important to emphasise that TFR is still low. A total fertility rate of 1.44 is the third lowest on record in Norway’, says Espen Andersen, Senior Adviser at Statistics Norway.

What a bummer, eh? Care to ‘guess’ the second-lowest and lowest-ever annual TFR, by the way? If your answer was 2022 (1.41) and 2023 (1.40), you’d be correct…

Yes, I’m inferring (lol) that something is very, very rotten in the state of Norway; incidentally, the below graph gives away what needs to be talked about:

The decline in fertility in recent years is due in particular to falling birth rates among women under the age of 30. These had a stable development in 2024, while fertility increased among women in their 30s.

‘Women aged 30-34 in particular contributed to last year’s increase in fertility’, says Andersen.

Fig. 2: live births per 1,000 women, broken down into age brackets

As you can clearly see in this figure—note that the numbers behind the graph are even more staggering: there was an incredible ‘phase shift’ from 1986 when 20-24 year-old women (92.2) and 25-29 year-old women (129.4) were responsible for a combined total of 222.6 children per 1,000 women, which corresponded to almost two thirds (64.4) of all live births across all age brackets (345.8).

Fast-forward to 2024, and these numbers are: 21.2 for 20-24yo women and 81.2 for 25-29yo women for a combined total of 102.5 children per 1,000 women, which corresponds to little over a third (35.3) of all live births. By contrast, there were 113.6 births per 1,000 women in the 30-34 age bracket, which corresponds to some 39.1% of all live births across all age brackets (290.1).

This is mostly due to the age of the mother at (first) birth went up from 23.3 (1970) to 30.4 (2024), which—as number-crunchers understand it—has mostly to do with extended time spent on education™ and careers™, i.e., the golden calves of welfare statist policies that cannot be discussed in polite society.

And if this thorny issue is discussed, we typically end up in lala land, sprinkled with wishful thinking and denial of reality, to which we now turn.

Act II: ‘The Stork Has Fewer Tasks’

And thus we shift to how these data are discussed™ by state broadcaster NRK in a long-ish exposé™ that went live on 3 May 2025:

Our birth rates are at a historically low level. In recent weeks, there have been several political proposals to stimulate more work for storks.

Well, among the more hare-brained proposals™ was the consideration of the gov’t paying women to have children (which, as any even historically literate person understands, has been done in Communist Romania: guess what—it didn’t work).

At least, the journos™ ask a relevant question:

Why do we have so few children?

And then they answer the question in the following graph:

In 1967, hormonal birth control was introduced, and virtually instantly, birth rates plummeted; this coincided with riots across the West (1968) and the oil crisis of the 1970s, which gives away the two main aspects:

• hormonal birth control removed from—mostly men (sorry, not sorry, women, but that’s a fact)—the most obvious consequences of FAFO, which is the prospect of parenthood; while hormonal birth control may appear as liberation™ to women, its effect was to render pointless, casual intercourse both mundane and, if our weird present is any indication, essentially without most, if any, short-term consequences (although it shall be duly noted that the stigma of what’s commonly referred to as ‘body count’ may have receded, but here’s a nugget of insight into the male psyche: men don’t want to have meaningful relationships with harlots)

• shitty economic prospects—as seen in the steep decline of births in the 1970s—compounded the demographic decline as many young couples apparently postponed parenthood; this is basically what we can observe in the past 15+ years, too, with the main difference being, as noted before, that first-time mothers are now around 30, as opposed to 23.5; we note, in passing, that economic prospects since the Great Recession (sic) of 2007/08 have not markedly improved, if birth rates are any indication (but we’ll set the increasingly absurd economy of ours aside for now)

And then there’s a third, very inconvenient aspect to the declining TFR:

The number of children born via assisted fertilisation is steadily increasing, according to figures from the Norwegian Directorate of Health.

Setting aside the clear cognitive problems of the journos™ who use the term ‘steadily’ to relate to this phenomenon, there is literally no discussion about the long-term consequences of doing so, and we shall discuss these below.

For the time being, we note the sane way of discussing Gender™-related issues in this context here in Norway:

The biological clock is ticking. After the age of 45, very few women can have children.

In practice/reality, this means that there were 22% of 45 year-old women in Norway in 1980 who had four or more children; that share had dropped to around 6% in 2024. (As an aside, I was born in 1982 as the second of what turned out four children; one of my brothers has no children and no plans to have any, and my other two brothers have two and one children, respectively: this is a very distinct reality-check I can personally relate to.)

Apart from a woman’s age, another critical aspect is that male fertility also goes down as men age: the number of viable sperm and their motility decreases over time, and this leads us down yet another rabbit-hole.

In a crucial review paper entitled ‘Environmental factors in declining human fertility’, Nature Reviews Endocrinology volume 18, pages 139–157 (2022), which was published in mid-December 2021—that means that none of the Covid poison/death juice-related issues is included in this discussion by ‘the Science™’ (yet)—we may find tentative answers:

A crucial question is whether this decline can be explained by economic and behavioural factors alone, as suggested by demographic reports, or to what degree biological factors are also involved…

We hypothesize that declines in fertility rates might be linked to exposures to chemicals originating from fossil fuels causing human reproductive problems and cancer; early gestation might be a sensitive period.

So, we’re talking environmental exposure over time, which may derive from the following factors (which I deem highly likely to contribute to varying degrees) to this debacle-in-the-making:

• diet: the turn towards hyper-processed food™ isn’t healthy

• home-style cooking: the wealthier a society appears, the less people seem to prefer home-cooked meals (and the associated family dinner)

• changes to the food we eat, which incl. Monsanto’s Frankenstein seeds (GMOs), massively increased numbers of additives (the Es on food labels), and, of course, concerns over the amount of animal protein intake

• pesticide use, esp. Glyphosate, whose use exploded from the mid-1990s onwards and which I believe to be a causal agent in many food-related allergies and intolerances (e.g., against gluten, which didn’t exist when I was a kid)

• forever chemicals: we also note their massive increase in so-called personal-care products, which I discussed at-length here

• the normalisation of hormonal birth control, which massively increased the amount of oestrogen floating around us

• social/behavioural aspects, incl. dating apps and the like, which indicates a Pareto-like 80 : 20 split of ‘unsuccessful’ users vs. hyper-successful bangers

I’ve discussed these aspects a year ago, and I’ll invite you to check it out:

'The Science™' Discusses Population Decline

None of this is discussed in that NRK piece, which cites one Sara Cools, introduced as ‘social economist’, as follows:

A steady relationship, secure finances and a steady job are the three things people consider most important to have in place before they have their first child.

Sounds eminently reasonable, yet it flies in the face of virtually everything teachers, mass media, and the entertainment industry throw at children.

While women used to stay at home with children, they are now getting more education and working more.

But it is not busy career women who are dropping out of having children.

‘It is among those with the lowest levels of education and income that the birth rate has fallen the most’, adds Sara Cools.

Oh, look, isn’t that what our globalist overlords actually like to see?

Absurdly, and I think Ms. Cools might consider her and her ilk above and beyond reproach, I’d think that AI™ will do away with most white-collar jobs while advances in robotics, battery tech, and the so-called internet of things will render most blue-collar jobs redundant.

Speaking of redundancies, here’s what the experts™ are proposing:

Anne Eskild, attending physician at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Åhus [that would be Oslo University’s research & teaching hospital]…‘I would like to propose NOK 1 million [c. US$ 100K] for all women who have children.’ [hasn’t worked before, but this time will be different, I pinky-pie promise]

[Sara Cools] I think it’s difficult to change people's minds about what is a natural time to have children [no shit analysis].

In a recent report, the Birth Rate Committee [orig. Fødselstalsutvalet] suggests more money for young parents. [here’s their interim report in English]

Needless to say, given that the committee’s focus is spot-on—‘the committee should particularly assess measures relevant to birth rates among young adults. The decline in total fertility is to a large extent driven by men and women in their 20s having fewer children’—the mentioning of virtually everything and the kitchen sink as reasons™ is particularly appalling, with the authors adding, for good measure, that ‘more knowledge is needed in this context’ (p. 3). There is some form of a reality-check on the same page (3), which is worth noting:

A desire for economic security, career development, and self-realization [hedonism/narcissism] may contribute to the increase in average age for first-time births…Norwegian family policies provide incentives to postpone family formation: 40 percent of young men and over 60 percent of young women pursue higher education, and they will receive significantly better compensated leave if they postpone childbearing.

And there you have essentially the same realisation as the number-crunchers in Austria pointed to. Good luck reversing 50-odd years of basically all-partisan family (sic) policies. Some of the consequences are drastic (p. 4):

In the short term—in demography, one generation—fewer children will allow the welfare state to save money because fewer attend kindergarten and school [municipalities are trying to close schools, kindergartens, but people are protesting this; in Bergen, proposed closures—despite there being no children—of seven schools were rescinded earlier this month]. In the medium term, when today’s children are fully grown adults, the declining birth rates of today will lead to fewer and older people in work, and a smaller population. Institutions must shift from supporting families with children to caring for the elderly, which can result in fragmentation of the institutional support for families with children.

If this weren’t all too stupid, it’s basically obvious for everyone with more than one functioning brain cell to consider:

• welfare statism is failing, hence we must change

• if we change to keep welfare statism in place, we’ll alienate the remaining families

• if families are alienated, support for welfare statism will end, for the simple reason that there’s no future

I know that, as per Keynes, ‘in the long run, we’re all dead’, but this is a recipe for medium-term disaster.

SSB’s forecasts indicate that fertility will ‘rise again to 1.57 in 2030 and stabilise at 1.66 in the longer term’—this is how NRK closes its piece.

What they don’t tell you is that these are prognostications related to ‘high net immigration’. In the ‘low net immigration’ scenarios, fertility rates decline to 1.22 in 2030 and remain at this level (which I personally doubt as this appears implausible given that fewer and older parents beget fewer children who, in turn, will have even fewer offspring).

Bottom Lines (Act III)

So, more evidence of the massive problems bedevilling legacy media and most experts™.

Sure, fertility/child-rearing is a touchy issue for many, but the single best one-stop treatment I’ve found is the work by Stephen J. Shaw (X profile).

Involuntary celibacy leads to involuntary childless-ness.

Then there’s the apparent impossibility of politicos™, experts™, and journos™ to both do what would be their jobs—which is compounded by their unwillingness to admit past mistakes, such as the family (sic) policies of the past half-century. Or the failures of welfare statism.

And then there’s the entire shit-show related to official gov’t policies, here exemplified in the website the Birth Rate Committee report can be found:

Note the Pride™ banner on top.

I humbly suggest to stop pushing anti-life policies, such as offering synthetic hormones to teen girls upon their routine check-ups; stop pushing Pride™ stuff down the throats of society, which glorifies hedonism and normalises sexual fetishes over family values.

Penultimately, I suppose that the re-segregation according to the sex binary for career choices, trajectories—generous support for women in the 20s and delayed entry into higher education and the labour force without disadvantages vs. keeping the current model for men—might go a long way towards changing these very bad trajectories. I think doing that, by removing a sizeable chunk of women from the labour market, would do wonders for real wage growth and stable employment for men, which in turn is a clear incentive to start a family, perhaps coupled with low-interest home loans for families.

Finally, let’s consider the rule-of-holes: the sooner politicos™, experts™, and journos™ admit their mistakes, the better we’ll be off at some point. The longer we continue down these worn-out paths, the ruder the awakening.