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Americans had fewer babies last year than in any year since the 1970s, even though we have more women of childbearing age than at any time in our history. The result is the lowest birth rate in American history, a collapse of more than 25% since 2007.
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After years of denying or ignoring this Baby Bust (and after decades of trying to scare us about overpopulation), the major media is trying to come to terms with this problem: Americans aren’t getting married as much as they want or as early as they want, and they haven’t been having as many children as they want.
The consequence will be an aging population, a painful transition, and a sadder future.
This is tricky for the media. Feminism has cast the decline in marriage and births as a victory for equality. The American press has an almost religious devotion to career and work, and family is obviously the chief rival with career in people’s lives. Also, America’s elites are beholden to an ideology of individual autonomy, into which marriage and parenthood don’t fit neatly.
But the facts are undeniable: Our Total Fertility Rate (projected lifetime births per woman) has fallen from 2.1 in 2006 down below 1.6 in 2025. We now have fewer children in America than we did a decade ago, and the decline will continue.
Unable to ignore the story, the press adopts storylines to soothe the elite sensibilities. At the same time, many conservatives jump to conclusions about the causes.
If we are to reverse this birth dearth, we need to set aside our assumptions and wishes, and study the actual shape of the Baby Bust.
MYTH 1: This is just about births moving later
“The record-low U.S. birthrate could be only temporary as today’s young women postpone pregnancy,” surmised the New York Times Claire Cain Miller. This is one of the most common efforts to cope with or diminish collapsing birthrates: Maybe women aren’t really having fewer babies; maybe they’re just waiting longer to get married and start a family.
The argument allows commentators to say the birthrate isn’t really falling, and that apparent drop — a statistical artifact — really reflects a good thing.
It’s statistically plausible, because a culture-wide delay in births would temporarily cause birth rates to fall, only to rebound later — and the population will end up with the same number of babies in the end.
In an extreme example: Imagine a small country where everyone had two babies in their mid-20s. Then all of a sudden, the culture changes, and everyone decides to have those same two babies in their mid-30s. For ten years, the number and rate of births will collapse, but in the long run, just as many babies will be born.
Some demographers and journalists claim that something like that is happening in the U.S. In fact, the Social Security Administration assumes the birthrate will rise 20% in coming decades because the agency “continue[s] to assume that recent low rates of period fertility are, in part, indicative of a gradual shift to older ages of childbearing for younger birth cohorts.”
You can see why this story would be soothing. And it’s possible that it’s true — that 15 years from now, as the youngest millennial women turn 45, they will be no more likely than their predecessors to be childless, and they will have just as many children as Gen X women did.
But given current data, it seems unlikely.
First, birthrates are falling not only among 20-somethings but also among 30-somethings.
The birthrate for women in their early 30s peaked in 2016, with 102.6 births per 1,000 women aged 30-34, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics. So while the birthrate for these women ticked up last year to 96.2, that’s still nearly 10% below peak.
Women in their late 30s are having more babies than in recent decades, but that number does not appear to be rising. The late-30s birthrate increased only about 1.5% last year to 55.3 births per 1,000 women ages 35-39, but that’s actually lower than the rate was in 2022.
In other words, women in their early 30s are having many fewer babies than a decade ago, and baby-making among women in their late 30s appears to have peaked.
The birthrate for women in their early 40s still may be creeping slowly up, from 11.4 per 1,000 in 2016 to 12.6 in 2022, to 12.8 last year. (The birthrate of women 45 and over is up slightly but remains a negligible 1.1% for the past four years.)
Add it all up, and women aged 30-44 had about 55 births per 1,000 women last year, compared to about 57 ten years ago — and the data suggests this slight downward trend will continue.
The big picture: Women under 30 are having far fewer babies than any time in history, and women over 30 are not even coming close to making up for it — and the odds are they never will.
Demographer Lyman Stone puts it this way: “Fertility is falling very fast, and we are not seeing large recuperation at older ages as cohorts with delays hit those ages. Every single mathematical tool we have for projecting cohort fertility is flashing ‘DOWN’ signs for eventual cohort fertility.”
In other words, “completed fertility” — the number of babies the average woman has had when she enters menopause — is on track to be lower for older millennials than it was for Gen Xers, and then to be even lower for younger millennials, and so on.
MYTH 2: This is about fewer white babies
The liberal media spent years dismissing concerns about the Baby Bust with the same tactic liberals use to dismiss anything they don’t want to deal with: Crying racism.
The Washington Post in 2019 ran a smear by left-wing journalist Marissa Brostoff who stated that J.D. Vance, then a Senator from Ohio, lamented the drop in white births. He had really lamented the drop in all births. But Brostoff simply knew what Vance meant, and she chastised the Post for running a correction.
Liberal reporter Lydia DePillis, who now covers birthrate and pro-natalism for the New York Times, wrote in 2021 that concern over falling birthrates was just “master-race puffery.”
This line was more common before the past couple years, when the lies behind it became obvious.
The Baby Bust is not mostly a white-people problem. It’s affecting everyone. White women actually have above-average birth rate in the U.S., higher than the rates among black women, Asian women, and mixed-race women.
While Hispanic women have a higher birthrate than white women, the Hispanic rate is the fastest-dropping, having fallen by about 33% since 2007 when the Baby Bust began.
MYTH 3: This is about girlbosses
Conservatives also sometimes jump to convenient explanations for the Baby Bust. Most notably, many commentators on the Right have blamed “girlbosses” for the collapse in marriage and family formation.
This is an understandable assumption. After all, Millennials were all fed a steady diet of careerism. In particular, the Boomers in the 2000s peddled a sort of feminist careerism that denigrated marriage and motherhood in favor of professional achievement.
And workism on the cultural and individual level does seem to drive down birthrates.
But here’s the problem with blaming girlbosses for the Baby Bust: College-educated women are now getting married more and having more babies than non-college women. Yes, the Baby Bust is mostly a working-class thing.
Conservative pro-family writer Patrick Brown wrote a piece exculpating America’s young elite women: “The girlboss is getting married later than ever, but she’s getting married. Low-income women used to be more likely to be married than higher-income ones, but that relationship flipped around 2010. Women in their early 40s with a bachelor’s degree are now 10 percentage points more likely to have ever married than those without—and that gap is growing.”
The biggest driving factor of the Baby Bust is the decline in marriage, and so the working-class retreat from marriage deserves much of the blame. Sure enough, the birthrate decline is faster among the working class.
MYTH 4: The pendulum will swing back
The most fatal mistake about the birthrate is the assumption that this is part of a pendulum swing. Again, the Social Security Administration has baked this assumption into its forecasts of the program’s long-term solvency.
Some, like the New York Times, assume that the birthrate will roar back because the Millennials and Gen Z’ers will have a ton of babies when they finally have their lives in order, after age 35.
Others assume it will bounce back because lower birth rates will make us richer, and once richer, we will have more kids.
BABIES AND FAMILY SHOULD NOT BE EXOTIC
The last few decades have suggested the opposite: Low birthrates beget even lower birthrates. That’s because a culture with fewer kids is a culture less friendly to kids.
The Baby Bust is real. It’s not just a white thing or an elite thing. It’s not merely a delay in family formation. And it won’t go away on its own.
