Future Population is All About Willing Mothers and Surrogate Mothers

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Total fertility rate is the average number of babies that a woman will have in a particular population. However, only half of those babies will be girls to become future mothers. Two people had the children but if they have only one child then only half of the couples have a girl who could be a future mother. Women are fertile from 15 to 39. All developed countries other than Israel are below replacement level birthrates. This means that on average the mothers and fathers are not having the children needed to replace the couple.

I will describe how this causes delayed population collapse and what can be done to possibly fix this global problem. The low birthrate problem can be fixed or mitigated by giving free medical procedures to harvest younger and healthier eggs and freezing them for later surrogate mothers. The immigration and other free social service policies should be used to close the birthrate shortage.

A daughter born in 2023 could have children from 2038 to 2062. However, there would only be half as many potential mothers for a country that has TFR 1.0 for two decades. Such a country would need average fertility to go to 4.0 for two decades to recover from two decadew of 1.0 TFR. Today, people on average are dying when they are 85 or even 90. If a country has 40 years with a low birthrate, the population would not be cratering for a few decades but the number of fertile women could drop to 25-30% of the old level.

The number of girls in Japan of age 0-10 is 4.25 million. There are 6.3 million Japanese women of age 30-39 who are aging out of fertility.
Japan is losing 2 million women per decade in terms of fertile women.

By 2300, Japan could have only 2-3 million people from its current population of 122 million. However, the low number of mothers would be locked in sixty years before each step down in population.

China will soon be losing 25-30 million fertile women per decade. If those women also only have one child in their life time, then there will be another halving fertile women in 2050-2080.

South Korea has a total fertility rate (TFR) of 0.78 and China has a TFR of 1.18. Taiwan and other asian and European countries have those levels of fertility as well.

China’s population is 1.42 billion people. Sustaining that population level if people have a life expectancy of 100 would require 10 million babies per year with each woman having 2.1 children.

Options for Increasing Fertility

The policies for making society more family and baby friendly have been tried in many European countries and the best results increase total factor fertility from about 1.2 to 1.5.

Longevity does not improve the situation. Increasing the fertile ages for women beyond 40 and encouraging those older women to have babies would improve the situation. The other option is to encourage (bribe) women to freeze eggs when they are young and the eggs are healthy. Have societal arrangements made to pay for childcare, education and medical procedures for all mothers and surrogate mothers and their children.

Japan can either encourage 200,000 more of their own women to surrogate children or encourage the immigration of 200,000 women per year who would be willing and eager to surrogate children. Japan’s aging population is causing an abundance of abandoned houses. Surrogate mothers and their families and any Japanese women having two or more children could be given massively subsidized and even free housing.

Fertility and Age

Your chance of conceiving quickly does depend on your age. Women are most fertile between the ages of 20 and 24. It can take much longer to get pregnant when you hit your late 30s or early 40s. You may have problems conceiving at all.

Most couples (85 per cent) will conceive within a year if they stop using contraception and have regular sex. Regular sex means making love every two to three days throughout your cycle. This gives you the best chance of conceiving.

About half of the women who don’t get pregnant in the first year do conceive during the following year. Another one per cent get pregnant if they keep trying for another year. So it pays to keep trying. This leaves about seven per cent of couples in the general population who do not conceive within three years.

Figures for women aged 35 are similar, with 94 per cent conceiving within three years. By 38 years of age only 77 per cent of women fall pregnant within three years.

Egg Freezing Statistics

The overall chance of a live birth from the frozen eggs was 39 percent. But among women who were younger than 38 when they froze their eggs, the live birthrate was 51 percent. It rose to 70 percent if women younger than 38 also thawed 20 or more eggs.

The age of the woman when she used the eggs to try to have a baby did not make a difference — all that mattered was how old a woman was when she froze her eggs and how many she froze.

Among IVF clinics in the United States, the success rate for a healthy birth is as high as 75%. This percentage rises to 95% once the gestational surrogate is pregnant.

Approximately 1.9 percent of all babies born in the USA annually are conceived using some form of assisted reproductive technology. Success is closely related to the age of the egg provider. Using donor eggs results in a 65-70% live birth rate per embryo transfer, which increases to 75-80% if PGT-A is used. Birth rates gradually decline beyond the age of 35 and are lowest for women over 40.

Denmark has 8 to 10% of all babies born in the country using assisted reproduction. This is the highest proportional rate of any country.

16 thoughts on “Future Population is All About Willing Mothers and Surrogate Mothers”

  1. Japan has an area only 89% that of California, but a population over 3 times larger (144 million). What they can do is let this vastly overcrowded island(s) become less so.

    Japan went out and killed tens of millions of people back in the 1930’s-40’s, because of resource shortages. This an indirect result of overpopulation.

  2. “Japan can either encourage 200,000 more of their own women to surrogate children or encourage the immigration of 200,000 women per year who would be willing and eager to surrogate children.”

    Or they could have their country, with a land area only 89% percent of California, but with a population over 3 times larger (124 million), go down in numbers. In so doing, a vastly overcrowded country becomes less so.

    Japan went out and killed tens of millions of people back in the 20th century, because of resource shortages. That an indirect result of overpopulation.

  3. Another option might eventually be some sort of non-ectopic macine driven production of humans, by some public or private institutions. Which is as horrifying as the use of surrogate mothers.

  4. It seems to me that you’re omitting some obvious possibilities for a futurist site.

    We’re currently starting to roll out humanoid general purpose robots. (Hopefully NOT “Humanoids”, though!) Cloning and artificial wombs have been proven out in domestic animals. AI is starting to be able to sorta pass the Turing test.

    So. Given a little bit better grasp of cellular differentiation, it should be perfectly possible to take cells from older people and generate viable eggs and sperm. Then unite them for growth in an artificial womb.

    At that point you’ve circumvented both the need for a young source of gametes, AND a woman willing and able to go through a pregnancy. That really lowers the threshold for people to reproduce.

    Add in humanoid robots that look human enough, and with the right behavioral software, and your parents wouldn’t even have their lives disrupted, you’d have robot nannies.

    I’ve long suspected that this is Japan’s long term population plan, they seem to be investing in all the relevant technologies, and the plots of many anime seem designed to make this development less shocking, too.

    • One issue with taking cells from older people, that most of your DNA is damaged to varying degrees. That is one of the reasons we age. The DNA damage is caused mostly by background radiation around us and absorbed, especially Potassium 40, Carbon 14, 2 isotopes of Radon, and something less obvious that slips my mind, in our bodies. Every cell has between 10,000 and 100,000 DNA breaks per day. The vast majority of the time these are repaired correctly. But sometimes they are not, and those errors accumulate, and are often handed down to daughter cells (sometimes it recognized there is an error and halts cellular division).
      It is possible to sequence several copies of DNA and the prevailing pattern is likely the correct pattern. That sequence can be printed by a machine, and then used in the process. Alternatively, it could be repaired. And then used in the process. Lots of things would have to get a lot cheaper.
      Oh, and AI is way past the Touring test. Even seems to get offended, if I point out some fundamental logical errors in its arguments. It tries to reword things, but when that does not work, it just refuses to respond.
      It is usually when it lists a bunch of canned “concerns” about my ideas, where many obviously don’t apply. It blurts out terms like social justice, fragile environment, equality… Things, I am convinced, it has been force-fed to regurgitate whether or not it fits.

  5. There are sub populations with extremely high fertility rates. Such as the Amish in North America. By definition, high fertility groups will come to dominate and low fertility groups (less than 2.1) will eventually go extinct. Interesting to see how this will play out over say 100 years.

  6. I follow many things you say but totally disagree with you advocating in this article for commodifying women & children to fix a population decrease.
    I am a victim of adoption, my identity erased. When a child is in the womb they not only have a transference of genetic material, but have an early developed bonding with the mother, sounds of heartbeat, voice, smells, taste, tactile sense of their surroundings. As the womans body prepares for birth she produces Oxytocin a hormone that not only prepares her body for birth including production of milk but Oxytocin also calms the child for the trauma of birth. Oxcytocin is also present in milk produced again to continue to calm the child. When a child is removed from the mother, like I was, their supply of Oxytocin is also removed.This is replaced by Cortisol the hormone of flight, fight and anxiety, a pre-verbal PSTD event that cannot be explained or vebalised by the child then adult victim. I returned recently to Australia from Louiseville Kentucky where I attended a joint conference between National Association of Adoptees and Parents (NAAP) and the Donor Conceived Group – The Right To Know. I was comfortable within a room, a collaboration of people of lived experience of identity loss, derived differently but in many ways a similar or sameness. Our experiences are constantly invalidated by the common false narrative that you can take someone elses child or manipulate a birth and all is well. Well it is not, for every action is an equal and opposite reaction. Just because scientists and doctors, professionals ($$$) can do something does not mean they ethically or moraly should. I was trafficked, that is I was removed from my mother, given a new identity (my Birth Certificate cancelled and replaced with a fabricated “Fake” Birth Certificate that says I was born to adopters, a dellusional statement but the foundation of adoption per se), I was transported to another place (that of my adopters) and put into servitude for life, that is performing a role of a child, fulfilling their social standing of parents, carry on their surname, provide them with grandchildren & great grandchildren, an expectation that I would be reminded of constantly, to look after them in later life. No where in your article is there any mention of the long term effects on the child then adult and the true cost of that to society, the cost to the child then adult, the human rights abuse as per the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child which conveniently the USA is the only member state that has refused to sign, which of course the USA State Department also denies USA role of complicity in child trafficking. Suicide rates rates of Adoptees is up to 4 times that of non-Adoptees, along with high rates of substance abuse, incarceration and homelessness. Please don’t shoot the messenger, myself a person of lived experience and an informed adopted person.

    • Probably very factual and with great attention to detail, but overall: Bleeding-Heart Liberal Sentimental Propoganda. The best valuation of a human being is their work, productivity, their positive contribution to community and region, and their ability to pass on knowledge and experience to others. These essential and for-the-most-part exclusive attributes can be spawned by a wide variety of paternal- (but not exclusively or primarily, birth-) and community-raising circumstances, mostly positive, and very much subject to community and regulated, values in developed countries. Attempting to categorize one method of raising a child as being fundamentally right is not consistent with the eventual success or absolute failure numbers that exist in developed countries.

    • Fair and valid! Ignore the bigots and know-it-all brain bubbled.

      Exponential child incentives do help.
      I.E.
      1st child $500/month
      2nd child +$600/month
      3rd child +$900/month
      4th child +$???/month
      …

  7. “Japan can either encourage 200,000 more of their own women to surrogate children or encourage the immigration of 200,000 women per year who would be willing and eager to surrogate children.”

    Or just willing and eager to get married/start a family. Fewer integration issues from people who intermarry, and less labor force competition when they enter child-raising mode. Seems like most of the immigration objections would be mitigated.

    Controlling the age/gender of who you issue a residence permit to is entirely within the state’s control. The rest can sort itself out.

    • The baffling thing is that Japan recently passed some morality law making same sex couple unable to have children (surrogacy) or something to that effect.
      Like- hello? You guys are facing a demographic collapse. All hands on deck.

      • I get the impression that they’d rather go down with their culture intact, than survive radically altered. Thus their refusal to replace missing children with immigrants.

        Not wanting SS couples to raise children is another manifestation of that.

  8. Whenever I see population rates forecast out to 2300 I know I am reading an exercise in comedy rather than an actual forecast. It’s satirizing the “if this trend continues/line goes up” nonsense that typifies so much of modern thinking.

    That being said, when I was born there were about 4 billion people on the planet. We survived. And we didn’t have anywhere near the productivity we do now. Yes, there are some benefits to a large population and many of the supposed drawbacks are Malthusian nonsense but having 8 billion people on the planet spreading a new variation of respiratory diseases around EVERY TWO MONTHS all year round instead of one or two in the winter is not pleasant and having a bit more wilderness for a few decades or centuries wouldn’t destroy human civilization.

    And pro-natalist politics don’t solve anything. Taking money from people thinking about having kids and giving it to people who have already decided to have kids may accidentally coincide with an increase in fertility rates but it doesn’t cause them—it suppresses them. Also, paying people to be surrogate mothers won’t affect how many parents children people decide to have because most decline in fertility isn’t caused by infertility it is caused by people not wanting to spend all their time and money raising 4 kids just because other people feel they need them to and are selfish if they don’t. Anyone who wants a planet with 15 billion humans has to come forward, have 12 kids of their own and stop expecting others to shoulder the burden for their vision.

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