Cultural Artifacts of Pronatalism Part 2 of 3

INFLUENCERS, PANICKERS,  AND CAR SALES

 Birthgap - Childless World is an award winning documentary film, created and directed by Stephen J. Shaw, demographer, data scientist and cherry picker. His film portrays declining birth rates as harbingers of imminent collapse, despite the reality that even as we reach below replacement fertility, the total population will continue to increase for generations.

Birthgap - Childless World

 Through emotional anecdotes and limited data sets, Shaw paints a dystopian landscape of “closing schools, businesses that can’t find staff to hire, and [not] enough customers…” (Shaw, 2025) Birthgap is the polar opposite of Paul Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, which warned of widespread famine due to overpopulation. (Ehrlich, 1968) To Shaw, women having fewer children, later in life is flattening our societies’ “vitality curve”. With willful ignorance, Shaw catastrophizes on the collapse of  society as we know it. Anthropogenic structures and systems are at risk in his view because too many Westernized couples wait too long to try to make babies and discover they are unable. They join the tragic tribe of “childless by circumstance”. (Shaw, 2025) They should avoid this, says he, by starting families early.

Like the Collinses, Mr. Shaw has become a celebrity, but I suspect he’s primarily motivated by a desire to protect that which he values: The economy, the social order and the ecopathic comfort of human supremacy. Birthgap is at once an anthem, blaring loudly on behalf of patriarchy and a lamentation for The Golden Age of Capitalism. 

References
Birthgap - Childless World. (2025). YouTube/Birthgap - Childless World. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2GeVG0XYTc. Feature Length, Based on Original Documentary

Ehrlich, P. R. (1968). The Population Bomb. Ballantine. New York, NY