It's pretty insane that, with a paltry TFR of 1.8, France is nevertheless ahead of any other developed nation with the exception of Israel. I hadn't realized that it had fallen so much in the US, which used to be another developed country where it was holding up decently.
https://twitter.com/BirthGauge/status/1464370631248646147
Along with France and the US, Ireland and the Nordics used to be another exception, but it looks as though it's slipping over there as well. It's also going down in France, but more slowly.
By the way, many people think that France's relatively high TFR is due to immigration, but this is not true. Other countries with lots of immigrants are losing ground much faster and, if you disaggregate, you see that immigrants only increase France's TFR by about 0.1 point.
As I told several people, this isn't because a lot of descendants of non-European immigrants are native born either, since the TFR of native-born women whose parents were non-European immigrants is almost exactly the same as that of natives of European ancestry.
France's TFR really is holding up better than in other developed countries, at least for now (it's also going down so the data are no cause for celebration to be clear), nobody really knows why but for the most part it's not because of immigration.
One possibility is that it's because France underwent the demographic transition very early compared to the rest of the developed world. Since fertility is heritable, maybe selection had more time to weed out the non-breeders, but frankly I have my doubts.
https://twitter.com/WMiddleton1837/status/1464768481124143110
Another theory is that French people just like sex more than other people 🤷♂️
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