Meanwhile, Pakistan’s average number of children per woman has dropped sharply from 3.61 in 2023 to 3.19 in 2024, reflecting shifting fertility patterns. By comparison, India’s rate declined more modestly from 2.14 to 2.12.
Why women in South Asia are aging faster than in Europe, US
Those are not marginal adjustments. That is acceleration. For decades, Pakistan was treated as a demographic outlier. India fell below replacement. Bangladesh stabilised. Iran collapsed to European levels. Turkey dropped. The Gulf states hollowed out. Pakistan remained “young.” That youth dividend now looks fragile.
Economic Pressures
The fertility transition is no longer creeping. It is sprinting. The familiar explanation is economic pressure. Urban housing costs more. Education lasts longer. Children are expensive. Women delay marriage. This is all true but incomplete. The deeper shift is cultural. Modernity changes how individuals see time.
Rural Norms
In agrarian societies, children are labour, security, and continuity. In urban societies, children are choice. Once children become a choice rather than a necessity, fertility becomes elastic. It bends downward.
Social Media
The internet accelerates this. Television weakened traditional authority in the last generation. Social media dissolves it in this one. When a young woman in Lahore or Karachi lives in the same symbolic world as a woman in London or Dubai, her horizon changes. She does not compare herself to her grandmother. She compares herself to her global peer group.
Rationalising Fertility in a Religious Setting
Spacing children becomes normal. Having fewer children becomes rational. Delaying marriage becomes acceptable. Self-actualisation competes with reproduction. This is not about ideology. It is about incentives. Religion does not immunise societies against this shift. Iran’s fertility rate fell below replacement decades ago. Turkey’s has dropped steadily. Even parts of the Gulf now rely heavily on migrant labour because native fertility is weak. These are not secular European societies. They are Muslim-majority states with strong religious frameworks. The pattern persists.
Theology and Feminism
The common denominator is not theology. It is urbanisation, education, and female labour participation. Modern economies reward mobility, not embeddedness. They reward credentials, not kinship networks. The extended family dissolves into the nuclear household. The nuclear household struggles under financial and psychological strain. Child-rearing, once collective, becomes private and expensive. Under those conditions, fertility falls. There is also a quieter truth. The language of “empowerment” and the language of “family duty” now compete in the same mind. When identity shifts from communal continuity to individual fulfilment, fertility adjusts accordingly. It is not necessarily selfishness. It is a reordering of priorities.
The dramatic drops are hard to reverse
Pakistan’s drop from 3.61 to 3.19 in a single year suggests that the transition is no longer theoretical. If the trend continues, Pakistan will approach replacement faster than expected. Once a country approaches replacement, reversal becomes difficult. Europe has learned this. East Asia has learned it more painfully.
Is low fertility, forever?
This raises a harder question. Is low fertility a problem, or merely a phase? Wealthy societies struggle with ageing populations, shrinking workforces, and strained pension systems. Young societies struggle with unemployment and instability. There is no perfect equilibrium. What is clear is this: no civilisation has proven immune to modern demographic forces. Not Europe. Not East Asia. Not Muslim-majority states. Not South Asia. The demographic exception was always temporary. The deeper debate is not whether fertility will fall. It is whether societies can redesign family structures to survive modernity. The nuclear model is fragile. The extended model is difficult to sustain in urban life. Without collective support systems, fertility will continue to drift downward. Modernity atomises. Children require solidarity. That tension will define the next generation more than ideology ever will.
Interesting. They need lower fertility rate.
Their low GDP growth rate couple with high population growth rate means that their gdp pci has hardly increased in years.
India had this issue in the Indira Gandhi years.