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Bottom Line Up Front

1. The birthrate cliff is now a defense issue. Countries below 2.1 births per woman are scrambling for manpower and GDP.

2. Surrogacy has gone offshore—and on-war. Ukraine still supplies up to a quarter of the $14 billion global market despite active shelling; Georgia’s 2024 foreign-surrogacy ban is shunting demand to riskier hubs like Kenya. 

3. Pronatal policy is partisan. Having babies is seen as a right wing issue while abstaining is seen as a left wing duty. Both points of view are obscured by dangerous idealogical capture.

4. Biotech is hard power. China, India, Israel, Russia, and the US are looking to technological answers to boost birth rates and drawing a map of the brave new world.

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Today's brief is inspired by a conversation I had at a dive bar in LA last weekend. Check out my tinfoil hat at the end for context.

— Eric

P.S. Check out this global population pyramid from Our World in Data.

1 | Demographics are Destiny

The future of a country is written in its birth rate and geography. For a country to exist it must have people, land to provide resources and barriers to protect populations. A shrinking demography means a slowly diminishing country. Traditionally, the population has been boosted in two ways, either import more humanity through immigration, or get your people to make… more people.

This is where we run into a problem. As populations ascend the hierarchy of wealth (moving from agrarian lifestyles to value added labor and ending in knowledge work) the birth rate drops. A big family on a farm is an asset, but a couple kids in a dense metropolis can become a liability. Furthermore, knowledge-worker roles often require years more education which delays having children. So, countries that do well financially often suffer demographically. This is leading some countries to get creative.

China’s population has shrunk for three straight years. Provinces now hand new parents vouchers for milk, free preschool, and tax breaks. Inner Mongolia pays around $1,400 a year for each child until age ten. South Korea’s central and corporate incentives bumped its record-low fertility rate from 0.72 to 0.75 in 2024—small, but the first uptick in nine years. Defense economists openly link troop shortfalls to cradle counts. You can't fight wars with people you don't have. But if birthrates are so important then why have they slowed?

Reality is shaped by ideology and constrained by economics.

2 | The Baby Bomb

For decades, Americans were told the world was overpopulated. Family planning was framed as a moral duty while large broods were reckless and outdated. Now, the narrative is flipping. U.S. fertility rates hitting historic lows with just 1.62 births per woman in 2023. This is well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Now, both think tanks and tech billionaires alike sounding the alarm. 

But American pronatalism isn’t centrally planned like in China or Hungary. It’s fragmented and often ideological, surfacing in conservative state policies, religious movements, and even venture-backed projects. Given that there’s no federal parental leave or large-scale fertility subsidy (other than Donald Trump's proposed "baby bonus” policy) parenthood remains a bridge too far for many.

Individuals face skyrocketing housing costs, childcare burdens, and a lack of social safety nets while being told (now) they should reproduce for the good of the nation. Some women report delaying or opting out of pregnancy not due to biology, but due to burnout, instability, or fear. A 2023 Pew survey found that 44% of childless adults under 50 say they’re unlikely to have children. This is up from 37% in 2018. 

But, for those that can afford it, surrogacy is rapidly becoming the best option to conceive. But this isn't without challenges, because everything is geopolitics.

3 | Surrogacy’s Front-Line Shuffle

Potential parents are looking to emerging economies and conflict zones in order to conceive. In spite of the fact that Ukraine is an active war zone, it remains one of the world's surrogacy hubs. Surrogacy clinics luring customers with prices 60 percent below US rates have stayed open and operational even during bombardment. 

Meanwhile, the Republic of Georgia has recently banned foreign surrogacy due to fears of child-trafficking and degradation of "moral reputation.” But demand for conception remains high and desperate parents-to-be are now looking to new markets like Mexico and Kenya. The risk of globe-trotting surrogacy is compounded by the fact that international standards are patchy and contracts are often unenforceable.

The bottom line is this: parents with the financial ability to seek surrogacy are being drawn into conflict zones and fragile legal systems. Not only does this show the desire for conception from advanced economies, but that a global marketplace is being built around it. However, this small group of well-heeled parents likely won't be able to boost the birth rate sufficiently, which is why countries are looking to biotech solutions.

4 | The Birth Race Speeds Up

If demography is destiny, then biology is now doctrine. From Singapore’s national egg-freezing program to India’s subsidized IVF networks, governments are treating reproduction as strategic capacity. China maintains large genetic banks while Israel has long been a pioneer in state-backed IVF. Meanwhile the U.S. public and private sectors are looking for ways to boost “reproductive resilience” as a core defense concern. 

The darker edge of this innovation could open the door to new legal frontiers: Who owns the embryo? Who gets access to genetic enhancement or cryobank space? Who controls the code of the next generation? The next arms race may be written in newborns, not nukes.

Eric’s Tinfoil Hat 🎩 

Do you think it’s unethical to have children?

It was a big question for a small dive bar in Los Angeles last Saturday. It was an hour before last call and a mutual friend had thrown down the gauntlet. She had just graduated medical school and the future was on her mind. To baby or not to baby, that is the question.

Decades ago we believed that the world would collapse under the collective weight of new humanity. It hasn't. Overpopulation became another addition to the cabinet of apocalypses that didn't happen (placed somewhere between y2k and peak oil). Given that I was sitting in a dive bar and not a scholarly seminar the question came down to a gut feeling. Here is mine:

I think that humans solve human problems. Each new person is a shot on target at changing the world for the better. Global warming and climate change represent some of our most pernicious transnational problems, but we've solved those before. Polio was one of these unmovable challenges until Jonas Salk created the vaccine. 

The world is more peaceful, stable, and better educated now than it has ever been in history. I know it doesn't feel like that, but I'm right. One person can nudge the world for the better. A group of humans properly incentivized to pool their collective ingenuity and effort can create a revolution. This is the rule and not the exception.

Going backwards is not an option. Human problems require human solutions and every day a new soul enters the world and sees with fresh eyes. Have kids if you want to have kids. 

As Shakespeare once said…"The world must be peopled”

About Eric

Eric Czuleger is a journalist and travel writer who has lived and worked in over 47 countries. He holds a masters degree from the University of Oxford and he is completing a National Security degree from the RAND school of public policy. He's the author of You Are Not Here: Travels Through Countries That Don’t Exist, and host of the “This Is Not a PsyOp” TikTok channel. 

📚 Liked today’s brief? Dive deeper—check out my book You Are Not Here: Travels Through Countries That Don't Exist and explore the world’s unrecognized countries.

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