There’s what experts have called a “quiet revolution” underway in the Middle East, one that doesn’t involve protests on the street or the toppling of governments. This revolution, happening in the privacy of locals’ own homes, is concerned with fertility rates in the region. Because in almost all countries in the Middle East, the number of babies a woman has during her childbearing years has fallen dramatically over the past two to three decades.
The total fertility rate, or TFR — the rate refers to how many babies a female has between the ages of 15 and 49 — has more than halved in the Middle East since the 1960s. Women in the region used to have around seven children each but by the early 2010s, they were only having three.
. But by 2016, researchers reported that the Middle East was seeing “the greatest fertility decline in the world over the past 30 years.”
Over the past decade, those numbers have kept falling. As a study published in the Middle East Fertility Society journal in October last year showed, countries in the region saw a decline in TFR of anywhere between 3.8% and 24.3% between 2011 and 2021, with the biggest drops in , Iraq and .
According to World Bank statistics, in 2023, five of the 22 member states of the were operating with a TFR below 2.1, the number of babies per woman required to maintain population levels, and another four were coming close. For example, the has a TFR of just 1.2, well below population replacement levels. That’s even lower than some European states: In 2024, Germany’s national TFR is estimated at 1.38 children per woman of childbearing age.
Why are people in the MIddle East having fewer babies?
Experts have come up with a number of hypotheses as to why this is happening. These tend to fall into two connected categories: economic and political, or social and cultural.
The former — people don’t want to bring children into an unsafe world. Economic changes, including things like the removal of national subsidies in Egypt and Jordan, inflation, or fewer public sector jobs in oil states, mean it’s becoming more difficult to pay for marriage and children. And the grim reality of climate change is likely also a growing factor for young couples in the Middle East, an area warming faster than many others.
Social and cultural changes include the increased availability and acceptance of contraception (including by religious conservatives) and divorce, as well as , including women’s access to education and their entry into the labor force.
It also likely involves urbanization. For example, in rural areas in Jordan and Egypt, the fertility rate has regularly been double that in larger cities. It may even involve social media: Some analysts have argued that access to information about a so-called “Western lifestyle” is changing minds about what an ideal family looks like.
All of these factors are interconnected, say experts like Marcia Inhorn, a professor of anthropology and international affairs at Yale university in the US, who has extensively researched changing attitudes to children and marriage in the region. At the intersection of both categories is what social scientists are calling “waithood,” she told DW.
Marriage customs in the Middle East often require a transfer of wealth — for example, in , this might include gold jewelry, cash or a fully furnished home, often paid for by the groom. “And young people are just not having the economic wherewithal to pull all that together to marry,” Inhorn says, so they choose to wait instead.
There’s also a growing cohort of women who are waiting for the right partner or who may never to get married, she continued. “And across the region, there’s also been a decline in interest in having large families,” Inhorn added. “There’s this notion of ‘I’d rather have a high-quality, small family where I can give my children the things they deserve’ than a high-quantity family.”
The impact of falling Arab fertility
“Humans are about to enter a new era of history. Call it ‘the age of depopulation’,” Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist at Washington-based think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, wrote for Foreign Affairs magazine late last year. “For the first time since the Black Death in the 1300s, the planetary population will decline.”
In general, experts are divided about the impact of 76% of the world’s countries having TFRs below population replacement levels over the next two and a half decades.
“What this will mean for the future of humanity is rather ambiguous,” researchers from the International Monetary Fund wrote last month about the debate. “On one hand, some fear that it could hinder economic progress as there will be fewer workers, scientists and innovators …on the other hand, fewer children and smaller populations will mean less need for spending on housing and childcare, freeing resources for other uses,” the IMF researchers continued. “Population decline may also reduce pressures on the environment.”
A higher proportion of elderly people will challenge “the sustainability of social safety nets and pensions,” they argue. That’s a problem that could be even more pronounced in the Middle East where and senior care homes are not common.
Economic performance in some of the countries going into “sub-replacement fertility” is lacklustre, Eberstadt told DW. “This means that a generation from now many societies in the greater Middle East area — not all, but many — will be graying and perhaps even on the verge of shrinking, with large elderly contingents afflicted by chronic disease,” Eberstadt said. “But without the sort of pocketbook that Western countries have for paying for healthcare and pension benefits.”
In terms of whether falling fertility levels are good or bad in the long run, in general, Eberstadt remains cautiously optimistic. “I started studying this a long time ago, back in the era when everybody was worrying about a population explosion,” he explains. “But I think a lot of the hysteria about that was fundamentally misplaced — because it wasn’t that people were breeding like rabbits, they’d just stopped dying like flies. The population explosion was actually a health explosion.”
That expansion in healthcare continues, along with improvements in education and knowledge, Eberstadt says. “And all of those are going to be buoying the prospects for human prosperity into a depopulating future. In a shrinking, aging world, there are all sorts of adjustments that are going to have to be made but we’re a pretty adaptable species,” he concluded.
Edited by: Jess Smee
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