When a country starts losing its own babies.

Picture the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s. On paper, everything looks solid: nuclear superpower, invincible army, triumphant propaganda.

Yet in provincial maternity wards, doctors start noticing something abnormal. The infant mortality rate, which had been falling for decades, stops cold… then ticks up slightly.

Babies die more often from respiratory diseases, malformations, maternal malnutrition. Official statistics are falsified, but doctors on the ground see it: mothers are exhausted, poorly fed, stressed by queues, the massive alcoholism of fathers, industrial pollution.

Turchin, from the West, looks at these numbers and understands. It is not a detail. It is the first sign that society can no longer protect its most fragile generation.

The silent signal kept rising until 1985. Then Gorbachev opens the dam. Everything collapses in 6 years.

Picture Rome in the 2nd century AD. Aqueducts bring water that looks pure. But the pipes are lead. Rich and poor alike drink this water every day. Pregnant women especially.

Gradually, infant mortality begins to climb. Babies are born smaller, weaker, with malformations. Modern historians have found extremely high lead levels in the bones of Roman children.

Add the endless wars, the Antonine plague (15 million dead), malnutrition in the lower classes, and the massive immigration of outside populations arriving to compensate for the lack of Roman labor.

It is not spectacular like a battle. It is silent. Cradles empty slowly. Roman families have fewer and fewer children who survive.

When the Barbarians arrive en masse in 376, Rome already no longer has enough healthy Roman citizens to defend the Empire. 100 years later, the last emperor of the West is deposed.

Picture Caracas in 2013. The country is still rich from oil. Maternity wards are well equipped. Infant mortality sits under 14 per thousand — not excellent, but stable.

Then the oil price collapses. Corruption explodes. Sanctions arrive. The economy crumbles.

In just a few years, the infant mortality rate doubles, then triples in some regions. Mothers give birth without electricity, medicine, or formula. Babies die from malnutrition, diarrhea, infections that were easily cured ten years earlier.

Can you picture the queues outside public hospitals? Mothers carrying their dead babies in their arms because the morgue is full?

Between 2015 and 2019, Venezuela officially loses 300,000+ children under 5 because of the crisis. One of the fastest collapses of a modern country in peacetime.