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.
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U.S. birth rates have fallen to a historic low, with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data showing just 3.6 million births in 2025, and a total fertility rate of about 1.6 children per woman — well below the 2.1 replacement level needed to sustain population stability. The fertility rate fell to a record low of 53.1 in 2025, down from 53.8 in 2024.
The long-term decline has raised concerns among demographers about population aging and future workforce shortages, as the United States continues to remain below replacement fertility levels not just in recent years, but consistently since the 1970s.
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In addition to the declining fertility rate as seen from the CDC research, another trend was noted: more women having children later.
“We’re seeing women starting to give birth later that the average age for a first-time mom continues to increase,” Etzel said. “And actually, in this new CDC data, we saw that birth rates for women in that age bracket of 30 to 34 starting to get up a little bit up there.
“So I think it’s not just a matter of that cultural shift towards women not having children at all, but rather women starting to have them later in life.”
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Several reasons have been speculated for the decline in the number of children being born, with one of the largest factors being costs.
“Part of the reason why the demographers think that we’ve been in this decline is just a rising cost of raising children,” Etzel said. “Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that it costs about $322,000 to raise a child from birth to age 18, costs are just astronomical.”
