This week, The Financial Times featured an interview with the Finnish demographer Anna Rotkirch, discussing one of the more striking subplots in the widening drama of demographic decline: The sudden collapse of what had heretofore been seen as a pronatalist success story in the social democracies of northern Europe. That hope seems to be dissolving. As Darel Paul wrote in an essay for Compact magazine last week, Europe has suffered a “stunning fertility collapse” in the last decade, much of it concentrated in countries where the feminist egalitarian model was strongest. Finland is one of them: As The Financial Times notes, “despite all the support offered to parents,” the country’s birthrate “has fallen nearly a third since 2010,” and its birthrate is now barely above the lows of Italy. And I still think that: I’m very happy, for instance, that the House just passed a child tax credit expansion, because in an age of declining birthrates, every little bit helps.

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Persons: Anna Rotkirch, Darel Paul, “, I’ve Organizations: Financial Times, Nordic Locations: Finnish, Europe, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Italy, South Korea, Scandinavia, America