The fertility freeze: Why the birth rate is falling
Fewer women are choosing to have kids, and the reasons should be obvious.
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We already knew that the population was on track to level off and eventually decline. But that day might be arriving sooner than we thought.
According to CDC data, the U.S. fertility rate in 2024 ticked down to an all-time low of 1.599 children per woman.
It's not only the U.S. that's in this situation; it's a worldwide trend. Declining birth rates and aging populations in the wealthy nations of Europe and Asia are a well-studied phenomenon. However, the birth rate is also declining in middle-income and developing countries like Colombia, Chile, Cuba, Egypt and Sri Lanka.
Fertility keeps falling faster than demographers' estimates, forcing them to revise their projections downward year after year. While previous projections forecast that the world population would start to shrink by the 2080s, it may now begin by 2055. Possibly even sooner.
To be sure, some of the reasons for this are unambiguously good. For the first time ever, more babies are being born to women in their forties than to teenage moms. Women are increasingly choosing to have children later in life and bearing them successfully. Meanwhile, a record low number of teenagers are getting pregnant, which is a public-health achievement to celebrate.
Nevertheless, demographers are anxious over falling birth rates. They fear that we're headed for a future of stagnation and decline, where towns and villages empty out and crumble, where economies suffer because there are too few workers supporting too many retirees.
Is this true? If so, what can we do about it?
It's the economy, stupid
For all the hand-wringing, relatively few commentators delve into the causes of the falling birth rate. They treat it as a strictly macroeconomic picture, a collage of census data and jobs and GDP numbers. They don't stop to ask why people are having fewer kids.
Here's an obvious answer: We can't afford it!
Especially in the U.S., inequality is at all-time highs. As wealth concentrates in a tiny minority at the top, there's less for the rest of us.
Young people of childbearing age are squeezed between crushing student debt, skyrocketing house prices, stagnant wages, unaffordable health care, rising prices for consumer goods, and daycare that consumes an entire paycheck, if it's available at all. More and more families need two working parents to get by, which leaves precious little time or energy for raising a family. Americans have no paid parental leave, no affordable child care, and conservative politicians are set on destroying prenatal care and shredding what's left of the safety net.
While the U.S. is leading this shameful pack, inequality is a problem all over the world. As a U.N. study of 14 countries found, 39% of respondents said that financial limitations prevented them from having as many children as they wanted (or any at all).
Culture war is bad for babies and other living things
On top of the broader economic picture, the U.S. in particular is ruled by a malevolent and powerful conservative faction that wants to take away women's autonomy. The falling birth rate is a reaction to this.
In every state where the religious right has its way, they ban or severely restrict abortion. However, this wording can be misleading in isolation. The term "abortion ban" makes it sound as if abortion is a compartmentalized procedure that can be taken away without affecting other freedoms. That's not the case.
To be more accurate: Abortion bans are really women's healthcare bans. They forbid doctors from giving pregnant women the medical treatment they need in case of ectopic pregnancy, preeclampsia and sepsis, miscarriage and hemorrhage, or any other crisis involving the reproductive system.
These bans make pregnancy a dangerous proposition. Women in red states face the threat that, if they're pregnant and have an emergency, they won't be allowed to get medical help. This isn't a theoretical risk; it's already happening. Women are dying because of these bans. In Texas, the maternal morality rate spiked by 56% after the state banned abortion.
It's no surprise that, where abortion is limited, more and more women are rethinking plans to get pregnant:
"Women are afraid to get pregnant in this environment, and I don't blame them," said Amelia Sutton, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Charlotte.
Some people are going further. Studies have found that, after the Dobbs decision overturning abortion rights, there was a spike in young people obtaining surgical sterilization.
An act of hope
Besides the economics and the health risks, there are cultural factors that influence people's decision whether to have kids. They're less tangible, but they're at least as important.
One of these factors is the ideological chasm opening between young women and young men. Even women who want children are having a hard time finding a partner they can depend on. Instead of caring, supportive men who are willing to share the load of parenting duties, a growing number of men are falling under the sway of sexist ideologies which preach that men are entitled to subservient "tradwives". Small wonder that some women decide they're better off alone.
Most of all, having children is an act of hope. It embodies the belief that the future will be better than the present. If we're being brutally honest, fewer people feel that sense of hope nowadays. In a world of accelerating climate change, rising fascism, and a breakdown of the rule of law, prospective parents are afraid they won't be able to give their children good lives.
Even at the best of times, having children is a sacrifice. First and foremost, it's a sacrifice for the woman, who has to endure the rigors and indignities of pregnancy, with potential lifelong health impacts. In addition, raising children places huge demands on the parents' money and time, both of which constrain the kind of lives they can lead.
For people who choose to assume these burdens, many find happiness and fulfillment in raising a family. But we have no right to be surprised when more and more people run the numbers and decide that the reward comes at too high a price.
To be clear, the birth rate isn't locked into an unstoppable downward spiral. Fertility rates have rebounded before. Presumably, they could do so again:
In Belarus, for example, the fertility rate in 1988 was at replacement level; it fell to an abysmal 1.22 only nine years later. But then it rebounded, all the way up to 1.73 by 2015. Australia's birth rate fell to 1.7 in 2001, only to bounce back to 2.0 in 2008. France's rate followed a similar trajectory during the same period, as did Italy's and Sweden's.
However, this will only happen if more people, especially more women, decide that they want to have kids. And they're not likely to make that choice unless there's a dramatic shift in the culture to make it fairer, more egalitarian and more family-friendly than it is now.
