In April 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the general fertility rate in the United States had dropped to a “historic low.” After a couple years of rising slightly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, 2023 saw a continuation of the secular decline in the birth rate that started after the 2007–8 recession. The total fertility rate dropped to 1.62 lifetime births per woman in 2023, well belowthe replacement rate of 2.1. Evidently, the post-pandemic “mini baby boom” has ended, and the United States looks on track to join the rest of the developed world, whose fertility rates are generally lower and continuing to fall.
The news has been greeted with concern. Headlines like “Americans are having too few kids,” (the Washington Post) “America Needs More Children” (the New York Times), “Suddenly There Aren’t Enough Babies” (the Wall Street Journal), and “The fertility crisis is here” (CNN) convey the anxiety of the mainstream press about these demographic developments. Such alarm dovetails with the persistent pronatalism of the political right, and the less restrained doomsaying of mega-billionaire Elon Musk, who has prophesied that falling birth rates presage civilizational collapse and “mass extinction.” On the political left, distress about falling birth rates is less pervasive, but nevertheless there are those who maintain a pronatalist perspective.
