American women have averaged fewer and fewer babies every year this decade, and the latest numbers show the biggest drop yet. The total fertility rate in 2017 fell to 1.7655 babies per woman of childbearing age. The replacement level is 2.1. The number of babies born has been falling every year since 2007.
Without immigration, America would be dying off.
What’s the cause? Health writers at NBC News explained the drop and regional variations by pointing to “women with more education,” “the growth of sex education in the schools,” and “the passage of the Affordable Care Act,” which by expanding Medicaid “would have impacted access to family planning services.”
In other words, NBC News sees the birth dearth as a story of progress and policy.
In truth, however, it is a story of culture and decline.
Women are having fewer babies largely because America is abandoning the institution of marriage, from which babies typically arise. Only half of all adults are married, down from 72 percent in 1960. Some of that is because college-educated people tend to delay marriage until they are older. But most of the slump is because working-class people either do not stay married or else don’t marry at all. Only half of working-class, 40-year-old women are married, compared to 85 percent in 1960.
This isn’t making parenthood disappear. There are an increasing number of babies born to unmarried, working-class women. So much for the efficacy of “sex education in the schools.” Unmarried women without a college degree are disproportionately likely to have only one child.
So the problem — it certainly is a problem, even though NBC News won’t tell you so — is that the culture which nurtures children is falling apart. Community strength is collapsing among the working class, as Charles Murray documented in his book, Coming Apart. If communities are not strong, getting married and having a family are less desirable and less achievable. It takes a village, after all, to raise a child. Utah, which is famously communal in its culture, is one of only two states where the birth rate is above replacement rate.
Throw in falling wages for working-class men, interminable education among elites, and you get a country with less marriage, less sex, fewer families, and fewer babies.
Hardly progress.
