The U.S. birth rate is falling fast. Why? It's complicated

0:00Brian Mann:Let's start with a small number that has big consequences. The total fertility rate. It measures how many babies on average each woman will have over her lifetime. And for a population to remain stable, flat, no growth, no decline, women on average have to have 2.1 kids. So you need to replace yourself, you need to replace a partner, and you need a little extra for mortality. That's Philip Levine. He studies population trends at Wellesley College. And he says this number has been falling in high-income countries, including the U.S. We're at 1.6, which we're worried about at 1.6. South Korea is at 0.7.

0:39Brian Mann:There's just, relatively speaking, no children being born in South Korea. To understand what a total fertility rate of 0.7 means for South Korea, you just have to project it forward across a lifetime. If you take 100 young people today, when they get to the age of typical grandparents, those hundred people will have 12 grandchildren. 12 grandchildren for every 100 South Korean grandparents. Of course, this is unfolding more slowly in the U.S. than in South Korea, but if it continues, it could remake society in all kinds of ways. Consider this. The birth rate is falling fast in the U.S., and it's driving a new political debate about what, if anything, can be done about it.

1:28Brian Mann:From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro.

1:39Brian Mann:It's Consider This from NPR. America's falling birth rate has become a political issue, one that's made it all the way to the White House.

1:47Sarah McCammon:I'll be known as the fertilization president. That's not bad.

1:53Brian Mann:That's not bad. I've been called much worse. That's President Trump at a Women's History Month event earlier this year. He's one of a number of prominent conservatives who want to reverse the birth rate decline. The thing is, underneath that demographic data point are millions of families making intimate decisions about having kids. Some researchers think all those choices are changing the world. Melissa Carney studies population trends at the University of Notre Dame.

2:22Sarah McCammon:This demographic issue is poised to potentially remake so much of our society in a way that people just don't seem to be thinking about.

2:32Brian Mann:NPR's Sarah McCammon and Brian Mann dug into the politics and personal stories behind America's shrinking birth rate.

2:39Sarah McCammon:When we visit her home outside New York City, Lucelli Martinez is cooking dinner for her family. I think I'm going to need some more oil. Do we have any more oil? Her five-year-old daughter is coloring at the kitchen counter. You finished all your homework, right? It was just the one sheet? Oh, I made a book.

2:52Brian Mann:Lucelli is 35 years old. Her husband, Byron, is 40. And they adore their daughter. She's like a physical embodiment of what my, the relationship of my life, you know?

3:05Sarah McCammon:And then we get to watch our little heart walk around all over the world and like learn and discover things. It's just so incredible just to see her learn and grow.

3:13Brian Mann:But here's the thing. Their daughter is their only child. And Lucelli says they've pretty much decided one is enough.

3:20Sarah McCammon:I remember at one point I was like, I definitely want three kids. I was like, that's going to be great. That's what my mom had. That's what I want to have. But then Lucille says she had a tough pregnancy with painful complications that ended in a C-section. That's just one part of the equation, right?

3:33Brian Mann:And Lucille says having more children often seemed unaffordable. She and her husband, Byron, have good, stable careers. She works for a company in human resources. He has a union construction job. But they worry about the rising cost of everything.

3:48Sarah McCammon:And the other part is having a child is extremely expensive.

3:51Brian Mann:Researchers say a lot of American families are making similar calculations. The average woman today has roughly half as many children compared to the 1960s. So few that researchers at the Brookings Institution found that without a lot of immigration, the U.S. population would age and shrink rapidly. But Lucelli says for them, this is a personal decision.

4:12Sarah McCammon:We're stopping and we're thinking about, is this actually smart for ourselves? Will we be able to give this child a good life? Experts say American society is already changing as couples like Lucelli and Byron have fewer children or some have no children at all. A study released last month by the U.S. Census found that people over 65 now outnumber children in 11 states. And that's up from just three states where that was true five years ago. Emma Waters is with the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, and she's been thinking about this. It means that we're going to have more adults than we have children to replace them.

4:49Sarah McCammon:And that will heavily impact things like our military readiness, our overall GDP and economic growth in the United States. Waters thinks that without more babies, the U.S. will struggle to do basic things like funding Social Security. If you don't have enough workers, you won't have enough people to actually support older generations and those who are aging now.

5:11Brian Mann:So now some of the country's most high profile conservatives, including Trump, Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance, say they want to reverse this trend. Here's Vance speaking at the March for Life earlier this year. So let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America. There's a pattern here, of course. Virtually all of the attention so far to falling birth rates in the U.S. is coming from political figures on the right.

5:38Sarah McCammon:Ruth Bronstein is a sociologist at Johns Hopkins, and she studies right-wing rhetoric. There's claims that we are experiencing a fertility crisis. And they are looking at data that is real and legitimate data that shows declining birth rates in the United States and really around the world. But Bronstein thinks some far-right politicians are keying into this question about babies and birth rates because of other big demographic trends that are making the U.S. more secular and more religiously and racially diverse. This caused a real sense of crisis on the right, everywhere from mainstream conservatism to the far right, about the kind of decline of what their vision of America was supposed to look like.

6:19Sarah McCammon:So the solution became fertility.

6:22Brian Mann:Some activists and politicians on the left worry this focus on fertility by conservatives is also part of a wider agenda designed to limit reproductive rights and other freedoms for women. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke about this during a public event at the 92nd Street Y in New York in May.

6:41Sarah McCammon:This very blatant effort to basically send a message most exemplified by Vance and Musk and others that, you know, what we really need from you women are more children. And what that really means is you should go back to doing what you were born to do, which is to produce more children.

7:01Brian Mann:Clinton also said the Trump administration's immigration policies, deporting many young people who might settle in the U.S. and build families, are at odds with the goal of seeing more babies born in the United States.

7:13Sarah McCammon:Which is sort of odd because the people who produce the most children in our country are immigrants and they want to deport them. So none of this adds up. But some conservatives say the push for more babies isn't about race or immigration. Lyman Stone, who leads the Pronatalism Initiative at the conservative-leaning Institute for Family Studies, acknowledges that some on the far right believe more babies being born in the U.S. would translate into more white people. But Stone says that's just not true, because younger Americans, those of childbearing age, are also more diverse.

7:46Brian Mann:If you increase fertility in the U.S., the pace at which we become a less white nation accelerates. I know that this kind of surprises people when you say this, but it's really quite simple math.

7:58Sarah McCammon:But Stone says he does want to see big changes in the way young people are living their lives. He wants U.S. policy to encourage the kinds of stable, prosperous families where children are more possible. And he says many young people feel they're not hitting all the marks they need to hit before having kids. They're not marrying in time.

8:16Brian Mann:They're not getting a house in time.

8:17Sarah McCammon:They're not getting a stable job in time.

8:18Brian Mann:All these things. And so what's really happening is people are involuntarily falling short of their desired fertility. Stone thinks there are some policies that might encourage couples in the U.S. to have more babies. He supports expanding tax credits for families with kids, and he says letting parents work from home may also be helpful. But he's skeptical of one of Trump's main ideas, a plan to create$1 ,000 investment accounts for new babies, which children could draw from as they grow up.

8:48Sarah McCammon:Trump accounts will contribute to the lifelong success of millions of newborn babies. Stone and other experts we talked to said they don't think that's an immediate or big enough incentive to change most people's minds about parenting. And Lucelli Martinez agrees. I think that's my biggest concern is like, what is the big focus on us having children when you're not necessarily focused on how the rest of the life of a person is, right? A lot of countries around the world are trying far more robust pro-natalist policies, everything from free child care and health care to extended parental leave.

9:25Brian Mann:But researchers say even those programs tend to produce only small and often temporary increases in the number of births. And those policies are far more generous and expensive than what's being proposed here in the U.S., even by politicians who say declining birth rates are a crisis. That was NPR's Brian Mann and Sarah McCammon. This episode was produced by Sarah Ventry, Liz Baker, Noah Caldwell, and Connor Donovan, with audio engineering by Simon Laszlo Jansen and Ted Meebane. It was edited by Megan Pratz, Andrea DeLeon, and Sarah Handel. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan.

10:07Brian Mann:It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.