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A world with fewer children? Addressing the despair behind declining fertility

In a Q&A with Penn Today, Michael Platt talks about the socioeconomic and emotional factors leading to plummeting fertility rates.
Artist rendering of fertility decline. Depopulation, demographic crisis. Baby bottles in the form of graph and down arrow.
In a recent paper, PIK Professor Michael Platt and the Perelman School of Medicine’s Peter Sterling posit that the underlying mechanism of the looming concern of human fertility declines is the epidemic of despair.
(Image: iStock / TanyaJoy)

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