Opinion | Women are having fewer babies. That's bad news for retirees.

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The release of the annual Social Security trustees' report is usually the occasion for some dolorous lament that we have inched another year closer to disaster. This year, however, I have good news! The industrious actuaries at the Social Security Administration, having ground through all the data, now think our nation's looming entitlement meltdown looks slightly less catastrophic than it did last year.

They now forecast that the combined Social Security Trust Funds won't be exhausted until 2035, a year later than they expected in 2023. They also see some improvement in the program's long-term finances, primarily because of more favorable assumptions about productivity growth and disability rates — though that happy news is, they write, "partially offset by a decrease in the assumed long-term total fertility rate," which has now gone from 2 children per woman to 1.9.

There's only one wee fly in this optimistic ointment: This positive news depends on the fertility assumptions being correct, and they're probably not. They're probably still much too high.

The report's authors have helpfully provided a guide to their underlying demographic assumptions, including a chart illustrating the evolution of fertility for women in various age groups. It shows that birthrates have fallen sharply for women in their 20s, plateaued for women in their early 30s, and risen significantly for women in their late 30s and early 40s.

However, because women in their 20s are in general much more fertile than women in their 40s, the net effect has been a decline in the overall number of children per woman. That number was over 2.0 in 2005, slightly higher than the number needed to replace the current population. Since then, it has fallen to a little over 1.6, with no real signs of a rebound.

Yet the Social Security Administration assumes a rebound, starting this year. In their graph, the birthrate in the 20-24 age group, which has been falling steadily for 20 years, suddenly plateaus, while the rate among women aged 25-29, which have been falling for the last decade, hits bottom and starts to increase again. Meanwhile, births among women in their 30s move sharply upward, until they are actually outpacing the birthrates of their grandmothers during the baby boom.

Maybe the Social Security Administration knows something I don't, and this is the year that American women have decided to step up and really do their part to help fix Social Security's finances. But it seems more likely that they couldn't bear to tell us the whole truth all at once: We aren't replacing ourselves anymore, and without enough workers to support us, we can't all spend decades in retirement.

That base reality is often obscured by the terms of the debate — by the arguments over the solvency of the trust funds, the size of cost-of-living adjustments, the merits of Social Security vs. traditional employer pensions vs. (comparatively) newfangled 401(k)s. But if you drill down to fundamentals, all retirement plans represent the same thing: a legal claim on the output of some future worker. Fewer workers per retiree means less output to claim — and more bitter political fights between workers and retirees.

If we assume the long-term birthrate stays about where it is now, Social Security's deficit would increase by roughly 20 percent, to 4.2 percent of taxable payrolls over the 75-year forecast period. That problem gets worse the longer it goes on — by the end of the forecast period, in 2098, the difference is about 2.5 percent of total payrolls. And of course, it assumes that birthrates don't fall further.

Now, that problem can be finessed in one of two ways. If productivity grows fast enough, both workers and retirees can increase their living standards, even though the number of workers is shrinking. And maybe breakthrough technologies such as AI will deliver that happy future. But many of the services the elderly consume, such as nursing home care, are so far proving particularly resistant to automation. Also, current breakthroughs in the medical field could conceivably increase life spans even further — a boon to humanity, but a big problem for retirement systems.

Alternatively, we could import workers through immigration. Undoubtedly, that will be part of the solution. But right now, that solution is triggering a fierce political backlash. Moreover, birthrates are also falling in the countries from which we draw immigrants, often precipitously. Latin America, for example, fell below replacement rate in 2016; the Economist reports that now "the region is home to some of the fastest-falling fertility rates in the world."

Many migrants will still come for the unparalleled opportunities the United States offers, but others will decide to stay home on the farm, now that its output doesn't have to be shared among a half-dozen siblings. Still others will be deterred by the same question worrying us: What will happen to my parents with no one at home to take care of them?

Unfortunately, there's no easy answer to that question. That's the hard reality of an aging society: No matter how you slice the data, declining birthrates are bad news for retirees.