James's premise is deceptively simple: what if humanity became universally infertile, with no scientific explanation and no cure? The novel isn't really about the biology — it's about what a civilization facing certain, dateable extinction chooses to do with its remaining decades, and how quickly a population without a future starts trading freedom for the appearance of order.
England's Warden rules through a mix of genuine public exhaustion and quiet coercion — mandatory fertility testing, forced labor for the elderly and unfit, harsh treatment of immigrants scapegoated for social decline. Nobody needs much convincing; a population without children has little appetite left for resistance, and the state's authority rests more on collective despair than on active enforcement.
The book's central mechanism — that authoritarian consolidation often doesn't require much force when a population is already exhausted, frightened, or hopeless — describes a real and recurring pattern in how emergencies and existential anxieties get used to justify curtailed rights, independent of whether the underlying crisis is demographic, economic, or otherwise.
Global infertility is a clean, singular, dateable catastrophe with an obvious cause everyone agrees on. Real societal anxieties — demographic decline, economic precarity, climate change — tend to be gradual, contested, and argued over rather than universally acknowledged, which makes the political response messier and slower than the Warden's tidy authoritarian consolidation.
Debates over demographic decline, immigration policy framed around national anxiety, and expanded state authority justified by long-term existential concerns all echo pieces of the book's mechanism. See Surveillance Notes for dated, sourced examples.