Washington Examiner healthcare reporter Gabrielle Etzel said the U.S. birth rate has been sliding for decades as fertility continues to trend downward to record lows.

“We haven’t been at a replacement rate since the Great Recession, starting around 2007, but we haven’t been consistently above the replacement rate since the 1970s, so we’ve been on this decline, and part of the reason why the demographers think that we’ve been [on] this decline is just a rising cost of raising children,” Etzel said Monday on the Scott Jennings Show.