Abby McCloskey, National Affairs, Fall 2025
“America's fertility rate has plummeted. In response, politicians are floating a plethora of policies designed to encourage Americans to have more babies. These "pro-natalist" efforts, however, are taking place within a larger broken culture of fertility in America, which includes inconsistent understandings of life, callous policy treatment of mothers, and preventable difficulties in birth. Addressing our crisis of fertility must go beyond policy and nourish a new culture of family and fertility from the bottom up.
The replacement-level fertility rate for a population is 2.1 children per woman over the course of her life; in 2023, America's was sitting at 1.6. The problem isn't limited to the United States, either: Fertility rates are falling all across the developed world. The United Nations recently announced that we will reach peak population on Earth in 60 years, at which point the population will begin to contract. Only a decade ago, we thought this reversal might be over a century away.
In the United States and abroad, politicians, entrepreneurs, and other leaders are speaking out, with many promoting all sorts of policies to boost fertility rates. As self-proclaimed pro-natalist Elon Musk said recently, we "should view the birthrate as the single biggest problem [we] need to solve. If you don't make new humans, there's no humanity, and all the policies in the world don't matter." President Donald Trump put forth a potential solution: "[W]e will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom. How does that sound? That sounds pretty good. I want a baby boom."
Yet while fertility is where politicians focus, it represents just the tip of the iceberg. Abortion ends over one in four pregnancies worldwide and remains an intensely divisive political issue here at home. In vitro fertilization (IVF) has brought children to many families who couldn't previously have them, but it has also created an ethical thicket, with millions of embryos sitting frozen for an indefinite time and the emergence of technology to choose a child's genetic makeup. Maternal health outcomes in America are worse than almost anywhere else in the developed world. The birth experience is over-medicalized and risky, especially for black women. Moreover, most mothers give birth to and raise children while working. Not only have labor-policy reforms been slow to support working mothers, but men's share of household labor hasn't rebalanced.
This is all taking place in a culture that has increasingly pushed against the historic human experience of vulnerability, mutual dependence, and the bonds of family. Nowhere are these humbling elements of the human condition made clearer than in the birth of a child.
No wonder our fertility culture lacks consensus. Fixing that is essential, and will require more than toggling with public policy or telling people to have more children. Before looking at solutions, though, we need to examine recent history to understand how we ended up where we are. . . “