Birth-Rate Citizenship: An All-American Approach to Demographic Decline

Each year brings versions of the same headline: “U.S. birth rates drop to new record low.” Barring the truly unexpected, 2007 will forever stand as “peak baby” in the U.S.; fertility rates have dropped by nearly a quarter since then (from 69.5 births per 1,000 women to 53.1 in 2025).

It’s not just us, of course — outside of sub-Saharan Africa, the globe seems to have read P. D. James’s The Children of Men as an instruction manual. Headlines show a world slipping ever closer to stagnation and sterility. It is possible, if not likely, that the world’s population will begin to shrink right around the time our nation celebrates its tricentennial.

The cultural, political, and economic consequences of a permanently low-fertility future are grim: Schools forced to close as small towns and rural areas shrivel. Fewer entrepreneurs coming up with fewer ideas worth investing in as portfolio managers seek low-volatility holdings for their risk-averse client base. Politics becoming ever more nostalgic, ever more zero-sum. Nursing homes full of residents hoping for increasingly rare visits from the dwindling number of branches on the family tree.

Given this bleak future, you might expect Americans to be more open to throwing the kitchen sink at the problem of low and falling fertility. Yet barring the odd — and I do mean truly odd — Silicon Valley “pro-natalist” movement or the few brave souls pitching ideas to address the material conditions underlying family formation, too many in our political debates greet our looming demographic dead end with a shrug.

Everyone knows that policies to boost birth rates never work, goes the refrain. Our culture has changed too much. Parenthood has lost its status. The only solution is religious revival — or artificial wombs.

This attitude is oddly defeatist. Yes, ideas have consequences, and yes, every other week the organs of popular media find creative new ways of describing getting married and having kids as somehow problematic. But incentives matter too, and we can change those on the margins — it just requires sufficient political will.

One flavor of feigned helplessness comes from places like ABC’s The View and other peddlers of pop progressivism. Childlessness, in this telling, is a rational response to the predations of late-stage capitalism (or patriarchy, or racism, or cis-heteronormativity, or fill-in-the-oppressor). You have the gall to sit there and tell people it’s okay to have kids? On a planet that is literally burning? In this economy?

We could have interesting and perhaps productive conversations about how the bar for contemporary parenthood continues to ratchet upward. Postwar kids were raised on Tang and peanut butter sandwiches and sent out to play; the price of admission today seemingly includes fresh berries, deluxe strollers, and “enrichment activities.” Some modern parents reject this price — free-range parents seem to have more kids and have an easier time raising them than those who treat every preschool playdate as an audition for the Harvard admissions interview.

But the easiest rejoinder to the “people simply can’t afford to have kids” crowd is to tell them to open their eyes and look around. There’s never been a society with the stability and level of affluence that we enjoy in the United States today. In material terms, being born in America in the 21st century means you got a lucky lottery ticket on your journey out from behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance.

It’s not, in other words, that raising kids has gotten more expensive. It’s become harder precisely because of our growing wealth and earning power (similarly, our economic gains have crowded out some of the social capital and community ties that used to give parents more social support). When real wages rise, and educational and professional opportunities broaden, what you’re able to consume expands; as a result, what you have to give up in order to have a kid continues to rise. A Dust Bowl farmer or a high school teacher in mid-century Bangor didn’t give up much in their standard of living if they added another chair to the dinner table. Today, any number of forms of modern self-expression — a personally rewarding career, travel, brunches — compete with the sacrifices necessary to start a family.

This means that family life, rather than being a cultural default, is a considered choice. As I wrote for this magazine in January 2024, college-educated women are much more likely to marry than their non-college-educated peers, and marriage is increasingly correlated with childbearing. UCLA economist Martha Bailey finds that fertility among women in their early 20s who didn’t get a college degree has fallen by half since 2007. Far from mass immiseration, this is a sign that young women are responding to changing incentives: they have more to lose by getting pregnant outside of a committed relationship.

The long-game approach is to tackle the hard work of helping young men and young women to become first marriageable and then married. Get the women off dating apps, get the men off weed, crypto, and porn. But that’s a big, civilizational project; until then, we’re stuck playing the cards we have in hand. Too many on the right seem as if they’d rather just fold.

Many conservatives correctly observe that low birth rates aren’t caused by the out-of-pocket cost of childcare or anxieties du jour like climate change, but this can slip into a kind of fatalism. Why tinker with the gears and levers of policymaking when the only things that ultimately matter are religious beliefs and cultural behaviors that are, appropriately, beyond the state’s direct influence?

The fatalist attitude partly reflects political reality: a coalition that disproportionately caters to older voters is necessarily going to find it hard to prioritize ideas aimed at younger, less dependable voters. But limply gesturing at the black box of “cultural change” in lieu of a responsive policy agenda is throwing in the towel before the opening bell — like Ned Flanders’s parents in an early episode of The Simpsons, they’ve tried nothing and they’re all out of ideas.

There’s nothing wrong with big-think articles aimed at remaking America’s culture around marriage and family, but they are not a substitute for proposals that can materially affect people’s marginal incentives. Posting online about the end of Western civilization might be fun, but there are plenty of practical ways to make becoming a parent in this country easier before we “doompill.”

The most efficacious and egalitarian way of subsidizing family life is by increasing the size of the child tax credit, but there are less expensive tools at our disposal. Perhaps the most straightforward is targeted, upfront cash assistance to parents when a baby is born. Income becomes more volatile and expenses go up around childbirth; a financial cushion could encourage couples to take the plunge.

Other countries already use this approach to insulate their falling birth rates. One of the cleanest examples comes from mid-2000s Australia. Parents got the rough equivalent of $3,000 in today’s U.S. dollars at a child’s birth, and the number of Australian babies born notched up by a modest but statistically significant number. When the policy ended, birth rates ticked back down again.

Australia isn’t a perfect comparison, but let’s stipulate a response even half as big as that country’s example. A $3,000 baby bonus here would be fairly affordable in Washington terms — it would cost taxpayers less than $12 billion annually. We could anticipate a program that size to lead to a roughly 1–2 percent increase in the number of babies born, or something on the order of 40,000 to 70,000 more than without it.

There is some debate over whether these kinds of subsidies actually boost fertility or simply pull forward births that would have happened later. But in our era of increasingly delayed parenthood, financial supports for new parents would be most useful to families in their 20s who haven’t yet built up a nest egg and would be a worthy investment.

This kind of policy doesn’t contradict the recognition that culture drives fertility decisions. If anything, it complements it. The people most likely to respond to financial incentives for childbearing are often the religious ones. Some believers feel compelled to have large families no matter what, and God bless them for it. But more weigh the material and personal trade-offs of adding another mouth to feed — targeted financial support could help them get off the fence.

Then there’s the biggest line item on most families’ budget: housing. Much ink has been spilled about the “affordability agenda” and the sense that young people feel it’s impossible to buy a home. A growing body of evidence shows that rising home values make incumbent homeowners feel richer and more likely to have kids, while renters, who feel more financially precarious, become more likely to delay parenthood. When the housing stock remains stagnant, households bid up the cost — great for incumbent Boomers and Gen Xers, bad for Millennials and Gen Z, who are hoping to get a foot, literally, in the door. A supply-side housing agenda — more housing, in more styles and in more places — is a pro-baby housing agenda.

Other, more creative ideas are worth a try: designated parking spots for pregnant moms and parents of young children; community-wide commitments to discounts for families; preferred access in public transportation and airports; public safety practices that encourage free-range parenting and phone-free childhoods; more on-site childcare and flexible work-from-home policies; public works that focus on building safe and clean gathering spaces for the young. None of these gestures will directly lead to higher birth rates, but they might make having another child less daunting.

What policies won’t work? Progressives pine for the generous childcare subsidies that Scandinavian-style welfare states shower on parents. But these subsidize work, not family, so it’s not surprising that their impact on fertility is rather muted (though not negative). They’re also expensive. As a matter of simple economics, it’s far less distortive to give parents cash directly. There’s also the question of salience. What’s more likely to give you confidence about having kids: the promise of a large check upon returning from the hospital with a new bundle of joy, or a government brochure with assurances that the percentage of household income spent on childcare expenses will be capped at an agreed-upon percentage relative to the federal poverty line?

In recent years, some have advocated greater subsidies for assisted reproduction on pro-natalist grounds. With apologies to the self-described “fertilization president,” mandated insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization (IVF) has not led to higher birth rates in any country, including ours. As the economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso point out in After the Spike, their defense of progressive pro-natalism, increasing subsidies for IVF and other efforts to extend women’s reproductive window could end up dampening birth rates. Sending the signal that women easily can (or should) wait to conceive will nudge more women to wait until the point that carrying a healthy child to term becomes harder and more expensive. IVF subsidies would have no impact, at best, on overall fertility.

Tax credits and savings accounts won’t work particularly well either. The new Trump Accounts, for instance, seed long-term savings accounts with $1,000 per child. These might help someone buy a house three decades from now, but they don’t provide any assistance to today’s parents, which means they won’t do much to nudge American fertility upward. Other policies that might be good on their own merits, like universal school choice, will have a similarly muted impact on birth rates.

The conventional wisdom among many conservatives, that it is very expensive and difficult for policymakers to increase the birth rate, is largely correct. But it’s wrong to interpret it as an ironclad law. Realism should not entail nihilism.

Ultimately, America is in a better position, demographically, than most of our fellow developed nations. While our overall fertility rate continues to trudge downward, our fertility rate within marriage continues broadly to hold steady. Fix marriage, and fertility will almost mechanically fix itself. In the meantime, there are many ideas we haven’t yet tried. As America heads into its 250th anniversary, we need more resolve, not resignation. To tackle the problem of declining fertility, we can take courage from the fact that we, like John Paul Jones, have not yet begun to fight.