US Fertility in Free Fall

Lowest-on-record rate reflects an ailing America

Women in the United States are giving birth at record-low rates. 

The total fertility rate fell to 1.6 births per woman in 2023, a 2% decline from a year earlier, according to a federal study released last month. This represents the lowest rate recorded since the government began tracking it in the 1930s.

The rate is far below replacement level, i.e., the point at which a generation can exactly replace itself — 2.1 children per woman.

Radical climate activists claim less human reproduction is a good thing. But billionaire Elon Musk, father of twelve, argues, "If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end."

Pointing to things not improving soon, another study recently found that 44% of non-parents between 18 to 49 say it is "not too likely" or "not at all likely" they will procreate.

Why?

Biden's impossible economy and Democrats' atheistic leftist policies are obvious deterrents to the Biblical mandate to "be fruitful and multiply."

For many ordinary Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck or even hand-to-mouth, having even one child seems like a luxury. Rising costs of basic necessities like shelter, food, fuel and childcare, make the goal of traditional life seem unrealistic.

The average cost, according to many estimates, of raising a child from birth through age 17 is roughly $306,924 for a married couple. This excludes any college costs.

The financial cost of bearing and caring for a child is not the only thing that makes the thought of bringing a new life into the world daunting. Many have been psychologically conditioned to forgo having children by the doomsday propaganda of climate activists.

Almost twenty years ago, the film An Inconvenient Truth frightened the public into expecting a "planetary emergency" due to "global warming." In the documentary, Al Gore, vice-president to Bill Clinton, preached about the danger of carbon emissions and set the stage for current radical Green New Deal policies that not only drain our pockets but kill hope for the future. Gore ends the film saying:

"Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive; we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero."

Before Gore, in 1960, American author William Vogt published People! Challenge to Survival. In it, Vogt argues that "it is better to let humans die than the earth to die." Vogt — no surprise — also supported birth control and abortion on demand, before he committed suicide.

Untold numbers of young people are deciding not to have children because of the seeds Gore and Vogt and their ilk have planted. Their false ideas, which have been passed onto subsequent generations of young people, and picked up by radical Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are like a shroud upon the children they chose not to bear.

Americans of child-bearing years have been brainwashed into extinction mode, into a "zero carbon emissions/zero children" mindset. It's no wonder they ask, "Why should I bring children into a world where climatic catastrophe is imminent?"

Adding to demographic decline is Democrats' push of transgender ideology and its heinous practice of sterilizing children. Government officials such as Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine (born Richard Levine) endorse so-called "gender-affirming care" that results in life-long complications, including permanent loss of sexual function.

A United Nations report focusing on various forms of abuses in healthcare settings, stated, "Children who are born with atypical sex characteristics are often subject to irreversible sex assignment, involuntary sterilization, involuntary genital normalizing surgery … leaving them with permanent, irreversible infertility and causing severe mental suffering."

The Pill

The total fertility rate peaked during the baby boom after World War II, with a rate of more than three births per woman, before falling through the 1960s and 1970s.

The decline in births beginning in the 1960s and 70s can be seen merely as an inevitable fall after the hopeful, post-war days of the early 1950s. But the dramatic tumble from over three children per woman to 1.75 per woman from 1960 to 1975 speaks to the

the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960.

Of course, before 1960, other contraceptive methods were available to women and men, but the pill was more effective than other methods and promised women more control over their lives and fertility.

The pill also ushered in the sexual revolution with its concomitant problems. The value society placed on virginity and marriage and having children was gradually replaced by a celebration of single life, sexual exploration and promiscuity. Sexually transmitted diseases, abortions, and children born out of wedlock increased to record numbers. Few things have changed life for so many, so fast, as the severing of sex and procreation.

Mary Eberstadt, author of Adam and Eve After the Pill Revisited, a book that details the disastrous post-pill consequences, describes the pill as the "optional and intentional sterility in women" that has played out in demographic decline since the 1960s.

She asks just who gets to set the rules concerning sex — Church teaching of two thousand years' standing, or the secularist world redrawn by the pill in all its hedonistic glory.

Indeed, a Catholic voice emerged above the fray in the early years of the sexual revolution. In 1968 Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical, Humanae Vitae (On Human Life), setting out unambiguous guidance for the faithful on contraception and the pill. The pontiff wrote:

"[A husband and wife] are not free to act as they choose in the service of transmitting life, as if it were wholly up to them to decide what is the right course to follow. On the contrary, they are bound to ensure that what they do corresponds to the will of God the Creator."

Toward this end, he stated, "[E]xcluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation — whether as an end or as a means."

'Death Spiral'

Charlie Kirk, executive director of Turning Point USA, a conservative student movement, reacted to new reports of the American's declining birth rate. He posted,

America is in a cultural death spiral. People have been sold a life script that emphasizes perpetually extended adolescence and aimless hedonism.

Women have been told they can "have it all" by not worrying about marriage or a family until they are 35 or even 40 — or to just "have it all" by not having a family at all.

Our leaders, meanwhile, treat Americans as fungible economic units, and think that it's far easier to replace the current generation with foreign migrants than to put in the effort having and raising our own children.

The future belongs to the people who show up for it. An America without children is an America without a future.

What can we — what will we — do?

Dr. Barbara Toth has a doctorate in rhetoric and composition from Bowling Green State University. She has taught at universities in the US, China and Saudi Arabia. Her work in setting up a writing center at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahmen University, an all-women's university in Riyadh, has been cited in American journals. Toth has published academic and non-academic articles and poems internationally.

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