In a country staring at Europe’s fastest-falling birth rate, a growing number of Finns are saying the quiet part out loud: they never want children, they are happy about it, and they are tired of being treated as the reason the welfare state might collapse.
One in five Finnish women and more than one in four men now in their late 40s and 50s will finish life without children, among the highest rates in the OECD.
A fresh 2025 government report warns that first births have plummeted even faster than forecast this decade. Politicians reach for the usual alarms: ageing population, shrinking workforce, who will pay the pensions?
Soile Rajamäki, chairperson of the Finnish Childfree Association (Vapaaehtoiset Lapsettomat), has a blunt response.
“The pay-as-you-go pension system is a political choice, not a law of physics,” she says.
“It worked when almost everyone had 3-4 children. It doesn’t work when many have zero by choice. So change the system, don’t guilt-trip the childfree.”
Rajamäki insists no one decides to become a parent to produce future taxpayers. “I’ve never met a single mother or father who said, ‘We did this for the Finnish economy’,” she laughs. “That’s a fantasy politicians tell themselves.”
The childfree movement is not new, but it has found sharper voice as the government of Petteri Orpo slashes social security, pushes tens of thousands of children into poverty, and quietly floats restricting access to sterilisation in public healthcare, a move the association calls “the thin end of a very ugly wedge”.
For many members, the decision was made decades ago. “I grew up in a small religious town where a woman’s life script was written before she left school,” Rajamäki says. “I knew at 14 that children weren’t for me. Finding this association in my thirties felt like coming home.”
Reasons range from climate anxiety and fear of an unstable future to the simple desire for sleep, money, travel and silence. “Most of us just want a calm, self-directed life,” Rajamäki shrugs. “That’s now seen as a threat to the nation.”
As Finland debates how to “fix” its demographics, the childfree are demanding a different question: why does a modern, wealthy society still run a 20th-century Ponzi scheme that depends on endless population growth? In Rajamäki’s words: “Build a welfare state that works for the population we actually have, not the one you wish you had.”
Original Story from YLE
