Fewer babies are not automatically good news, and more are not automatically bad
While researching the politics of social protection in Bangladesh for my doctoral degree, one document sat at the centre of my work: the government's 2015 National Social Security Strategy. I noticed a tension almost immediately.
Its opening pages celebrate Bangladesh's falling population growth rate: women are having fewer children, so each new generation is smaller than the one before it.
But several pages later, the strategy turns to those same generations, now entering the labour force in large numbers, and calls them a "demographic dividend". Bangladesh, it argues, has more adults working, earning and paying taxes, while fewer children depend on them. That, it says, is the country's great competitive advantage.
Only deep in the financing annex does the strategy acknowledge what comes next. As today's smaller generations grow up, fewer young people will enter the workforce while their parents grow old and require support.
The strategy celebrated falling fertility and built its hopes on its short-term benefits, with little attention to what would follow. While working with officials involved in the strategy, I never heard anyone ask: who will sustain the economy while supporting a much larger elderly population?
That question has returned to the policy conversation.
The Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey estimated Bangladesh's fertility rate at 2.4 children per woman in 2025, up slightly from 2.3 in 2019. Much of the reaction has treated this as an obvious reversal of progress.
The accompanying indicators are serious. Government procurement data shows contraceptive supplies and use have both declined, child marriage remains widespread, and the adolescent birth rate has risen. Each is a genuine concern. No woman should become pregnant because contraception was unavailable, because she married as a child, or because she lacked the power to decide when to have children.
But that does not make every rise in the national fertility rate automatically bad, or every decline automatically good.
These are different questions. One concerns reproductive rights: whether pregnancies are chosen, children are protected from early marriage, and women can access healthcare. The other concerns demography: how many children a society needs, wants and can support over generations.
Bangladesh's debate too often conflates the two. It assumes that because some causes of the increase are harmful, the increase itself must be harmful. It also treats movement toward replacement-level fertility as progress by definition.
Fertility is not a development score
Other countries show why reaching replacement level does not mean fertility will stop falling.
Replacement level is roughly 2.1 children per woman—enough, on average, for two parents to be replaced by about two children in the next generation. Yet across much of East Asia and Europe, fertility has continued to fall well below that threshold.
South Korea's rate is now 0.80, the lowest in the world. The European Union averages 1.34, and every member state is below replacement level.
Bangladesh is nowhere near that situation. The MICS estimate stands at 2.4, and the causes are different. In richer countries, fertility often falls because people delay parenthood or choose to have fewer children as housing, employment and childcare become more expensive. Bangladesh's recent increase, by contrast, is partly linked to failures in contraceptive supply.
The lesson is not that Bangladesh is about to become South Korea. It is that fertility does not naturally stop at 2.1. Once countries cross that threshold, many continue falling.
The number of births can also keep declining even if fertility stabilises. When a smaller generation reaches adulthood, there are simply fewer women of childbearing age. Even if each woman has the same number of children as before, total births still fall because there are fewer potential mothers.
The consequences of sustained low fertility emerge gradually but spread across the economy and everyday family life.
As fewer children grow up, schools lose pupils, employers struggle to recruit workers and industries face labour shortages. A smaller workforce must support a growing elderly population, while fewer sons and daughters share the financial and caregiving responsibilities of ageing parents.
Pension, healthcare and long-term care systems come under increasing pressure from a shrinking tax base. Migration and later retirement can ease some of these pressures but cannot reverse the demographic transition.
Even wealthy societies with comprehensive welfare systems are struggling with these realities. Bangladesh is far less prepared.
Most Bangladeshis work in the informal sector, making contributory pension systems difficult to expand at scale. Families, rather than the state, still bear primary responsibility for supporting older relatives. As families become smaller, those caregiving responsibilities will fall on fewer children, especially daughters and daughters-in-law.
This is the problem the NSSS recognised without fully confronting. Falling fertility initially expanded Bangladesh's working-age population, but over time fewer births mean fewer young workers. The strategy relied heavily on the first advantage while paying far less attention to what would happen after it faded.
Once fertility becomes very low, governments have proved remarkably ineffective at reversing it.
Turkey and Denmark offer instructive contrasts because they represent opposite responses to the same challenge yet have reached similar outcomes.
Turkey has pursued an explicitly religious and nationalist approach. For more than a decade, its government has urged families to have at least three children, with President Erdoğan at times calling for four or five, framing larger families as both a religious duty and a safeguard against national decline.
The campaign has included marriage loans, child payments and tax exemptions. Yet Turkey's fertility rate fell from 2.17 in 2014 to 1.48 in 2024.
Denmark represents the secular welfare-state model. It already offers generous parental leave and subsidised childcare. The government has expanded publicly funded fertility treatment by doubling the number of funded attempts and proposing free treatment for a second child. Yet its fertility rate remains around 1.5.
The intellectual legacy of population control
Whether the appeal is religious or secular, neither country has found a reliable way to raise fertility substantially. Governments can make it easier for people to have the children they already want. They are far less successful at persuading people to want more.
Despite this evidence, Bangladesh's policy establishment still tends to treat lower fertility as synonymous with progress.
Part of the answer lies in the intellectual history of development policy.
Thomas Malthus argued in 1798 that population would always outgrow the food supply unless restrained. The fear resurfaced in 1968 when Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb predicted imminent mass famine. The famine never materialised, but the anxiety shaped a generation of development thinking.
Modernisation theory embedded the same instinct, portraying development as a progression from rural, poor and high-fertility societies to urban, wealthy and low-fertility ones. Falling fertility became not only an outcome of development but evidence of it.
This paradigm drove important investments in family planning and women's health. But it also reduced fertility to a numerical measure of development, allowing donors and governments to judge success by how quickly women could be encouraged—or compelled—to have fewer children.
During the 1960s and 1970s these targets spread across the developing world, with some governments resorting to coercion, most notoriously India's mass sterilisation campaign during the Emergency.
The pushback came at the 1974 World Population Conference in Bucharest, where India's delegate Karan Singh offered a different formulation: "Development is the best contraceptive."
Education, income and healthcare, he argued, would lower birth rates without coercion. By the 1990s, international policy had shifted toward reproductive choice, health and women's autonomy.
Yet the underlying assumption survived. Fewer children continued to signify greater modernity and development, even as many countries fell well below replacement fertility and encountered a different set of economic and social challenges.
The contradiction within the NSSS therefore extends beyond a single policy document. It reflects a broader habit of treating fertility decline as an achievement regardless of where it leads, while leaving its long-term consequences to future governments and future generations.
Development, not fertility, should be the goal
Bangladesh should not replace one crude fertility target with another. The objective should be reproductive autonomy.
Women should be able to avoid pregnancies they do not want and have the children they do want without economic or social penalties. That means restoring contraceptive access and improving maternal healthcare.
It also means affordable childcare, safer employment, decent housing and a fairer distribution of unpaid care. These policies matter whether they raise fertility, lower it or leave it unchanged.
That answers the first question: whether women have genuine reproductive choice. The second is whether Bangladesh is investing adequately in the people already here. On that question, the fertility rate tells us remarkably little.
Bangladesh should stop treating fertility as a substitute for development.
A lower fertility rate is not a development score. World Bank estimates place Bangladesh's learning poverty rate at 51 percent: about half of children cannot read and understand a simple text by age ten. That is not a fertility problem. It is an education problem.
Nor will reducing the fertility rate from 2.4 to 2.1 solve the looming gap in old-age support. That requires social protection that reaches informal workers and healthcare and care systems built before the population grows old.
The real question is not whether Bangladesh has marginally more or fewer babies this year. It is whether those children are wanted, whether their mothers have meaningful choices, whether they will learn, whether they will find productive work and whether they will inherit a society capable of supporting them when they themselves grow old.
Fewer babies are not automatically good news. More are not automatically bad. The number means little unless we ask what kind of lives lie behind it.
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Nabila Idris did her PhD in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge