To equal parts fanfare and horror, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a new report documenting a fairly significant fall in American fertility rates over the past decade. But despite the media framing, a dystopian shortage of Americans, in the manner of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” is not upon us quite yet. Furthermore, if we do face an economically dangerous inversion of our age demographics, for once, it won’t be millennials’ faults.

The statistics that made the most headlines were the fall of total fertility rates and the increase in average age of first-time mothers. The standalone figure could worry Americans that our demographic structure will head into an inversion similar to that of Japan’s time bomb, where there are too few young people and workers to support aging adults. But context matters.