There’s been a lot of talk about birth rates this year.
President Donald Trump dubbed himself the “fertilization president” shortly after reentering the White House and declared, “We want more babies.” He reportedly considered policy proposals to incentivize American women to have more children, including a $5,000 “baby bonus” and a “National Medal of Motherhood” for any woman who has six or more children.
Most recently, at a White House press event alongside Trump, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proclaimed the decline in birth rates to be “a national security threat.”
In short, the administration has embraced rhetoric that is unabashedly pronatalist — an ideology created to raise declining population rates that has historically been co-opted by fascist and authoritarian regimes.
U.S. fertility rates did reach a new low of 1.6 children per woman in 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s below the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population in the U.S. Media outlets declared the “birth-rate crisis” to be “worse” than you thought and made a “feminist case for spending billions to boost the birthrate.” Now, half of Americans believe the country should be concerned about the consequences of decreasing birth rates.
As the Trump administration ratchets up fear around falling birth rates, it’s important to ask why this is suddenly such a hot-button political topic. What does it actually mean to have 1.6 children per woman? Should we really be worried about declining fertility rates? And what other factors are impacting people’s decisions about having kids?
HuffPost spoke with Karen Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center, about the U.S. birth rate and whether the concern over its decline is warranted. Guzzo, who’s also a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, connected the dots between pronatalist rhetoric coming from the very top of our government and how it’s shaping our views on this issue.
I keep hearing about how we should be worried that the fertility rate in the U.S. has decreased. Can you break down how the U.S. tracks birth rates and explain what these numbers actually mean?
The total fertility rate is basically an aggregate of birth rates at different ages. We take birth rates usually at five-year intervals — so 15 to 19, 20 to 24 — and we combine them and do some math and come up with this hypothetical estimate.
It assumes birth rates won’t change over time across different ages. So it assumes that today’s 15-year-olds will have the birth rates of today’s 40-year-olds when those 15-year-olds turn 40. And we know that’s not likely to be the case because people are waiting longer and longer to have births at older ages and are having fewer births at younger ages. So it’s not really a good estimate. It’s the best number we have because it’s easy to calculate and it’s easy to compare across time.
But it does introduce a problem. When people are having their first child later and later in life — as is happening in the United States — that total fertility rate tends to be sort of artificially biased downward. So it really doesn’t predict how many children a woman will have over her lifetime.
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Can you explain what it means that we need 2.1 children per woman to maintain a stable population?
That’s replacement-level fertility, which is basically how many children a woman would need to have over her lifetime to replace herself and her partner. That’s generally estimated to be about 2.1 because there will always be some loss of life at some point. The problem with replacement level is that it also assumes there won’t be changes in birth rates, there won’t be changes in death rates or life expectancy, and that there’s no immigration.
So when you juxtapose replacement-level fertility with a total fertility rate, you’re like, “Oh my god, we’re way under and that means we’re facing imminent population decline.” That’s not really accurate. The United States could stay at the same population size even with low birth rates or low total fertility rate because people live longer than they did 50 years ago, because we have lots of immigration. In reality, there’s a lot of things that go into whether our population stays stable — it’s not just births. That’s why I sometimes worry that when we talk about replacement level and there’s below-replacement fertility that we’re setting ourselves up for this larger panic about what’s going to happen when birth rates are too low.
What I’m hearing is there’s a lot of pearl-clutching around a birth rate that is not actually a great representation of where we are as a country.
What’s interesting about the United States is our birth rates were actually propped up a lot by teen births and births that were considered unintended. And those are the births that have declined the most since the Great Recession [in 2008-2009]. Our birth rates were propped up by something we would not necessarily brag about. In fact, the United States spent a lot of money and time trying to lower our teen birth rates and our unintended birth rates. We had the national campaign to prevent teen pregnancy, which has morphed over time, but has sort of stayed with the mission that people shouldn’t have births too early when they don’t have enough money or they’re not in a stable relationship. The United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars and so much programming to lower teen birth rates. And we were successful.
So, the birth rate doesn’t really tell the whole story. Should we be worried about the current fertility rate?
At the population level, I would say no. There are real implications for low birth rates. It does mean that our population is aging. You have fewer young people, and life expectancy is increasing. It does have implications for the growth of communities. It has implications for the labor force, for tax policy and things like Social Security. But this is like the world’s slowest-moving train. We can adjust. We see this coming. Other countries have dealt with this.
No country has been able to increase birth rates up to or near replacement level and sustain it. Places like Japan, Italy, Hungary — they’ve been trying to do this for a very long time, and no one’s been able to sustain this. We have plenty of time to figure out, OK, what kind of world do we need to build? What kind of policies, laws, employment, labor market structures — what do we need to build to adjust to a world where there is not going to be constant growth and constant large groups of young children?
It sounds like encouraging people to have more children is not really the correct approach to boosting birth rates.
It is actually a fool’s errand to try to figure out how to get people to have more births at the population level. But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that people at the individual level are not able to fulfill their own goals. We know most people would like to get married and have kids. Most people would like to have two or three kids and that’s not happening. … I think addressing why people aren’t able to have the children they say they’d like to have, that’s worth doing. But trying to address this larger structural issue that there are too few babies being born to support the economy in 30 years — that’s the wrong approach.
As a demographer, 50 to 60 years ago we were worried that there were too many people in the world. People were saying, “We’ve got to get women to stop having babies.” And now we’re like, “Oh my god, there are too few people and the birth rate’s too low. Now we gotta get women to have more babies.” The problem I have there is that women’s bodies are somehow the solution to some larger macro problem. And that just does not sit right with me.
“The problem I have there is that women’s bodies are somehow the solution to some larger macro problem. And that just does not sit right with me.”
It does feel like women’s bodies are so often used as political pawns, with the recent rollback of reproductive rights under the Trump administration.
By using births as the only lever to fix a problem — there’s an issue with reproductive rights, yes, but also it’s just inefficient. Immigration would solve our problems much more immediately than having babies right now. Imagine everybody suddenly has a baby today and birth rates go up, that does not solve our labor market issues, it doesn’t solve our tax issues. For two reasons: One, babies aren’t economically productive for 25 years. That doesn’t help anything in the short term. The second thing is that if people started having tons and tons of babies, it would actually pull many women from the labor force. … Babies need schools, they need health care systems, they need caretakers. It’s misguided to focus on birth as fixing this issue.
I’ve written a lot about pronatalism this past year, and there’s definitely a through line between the Trump administration’s talking points around raising the birth rates and cultural rhetoric encouraging a return to traditional gender roles. What’s interesting and stands out in particular to me is who these talking points are aimed at.
Absolutely. Just look at the new Heritage Foundation white paper that details how they want to restore the nuclear family. One of the big drivers that they want to focus on is getting more people to marry, but they only want different-sex marriage and they want it to happen sooner. They highlight free love, pornography, careerism, the [birth control] pill, abortion, same-sex relations and no-fault divorce as the drivers of delayed marriage and non-marriage. To me, that is a list of things that they are going to go after. And they already are.
This is about certain types of families. Attacks on transgender individuals are really so much more than transgender issues — it’s about gender roles more generally. Who’s a real woman? Real women stay home and take care of their children. The ideal femininity are the internet “tradwives” — young, thin, married, Christian. White women who have three, four, five, six kids and seem to be very happy about it. Somehow we also ignore the fact that they’re actually making money by crafting this image online and, in fact, are working mothers.
If we were really worried about low birth rates and too few Americans, we wouldn’t want to get rid of birthright citizenship and yet we are. If we were worried about the labor market, we wouldn’t be trying to get rid of immigrants. It’s a very specific type of family that we’re worried about.
There’s even parallels in the MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] movement. We’re talking about vaccines for kids — fewer vaccines or you need to do more research on your vaccines or you need to individualize what’s necessary for your family. That falls on women. To me, they’re trying to redefine motherhood — your kids will only be healthy and safe if you personally dedicate your life to protecting them.
The United States is well known for not having a lot of support for mothers and for families. The conflicting information we’re getting, that you should be homeschooling your kids, that you should be spacing out vaccinations, that you should be making organic food — that all falls on mothers, and I don’t think that’s an accident.
What would you say to someone who is worried about the seemingly declining birth rates?
I would say that it’s very difficult, almost impossible, to raise birth rates. However, the policies that tend to work the best or at least have stopped other countries from experiencing really large declines have been to create a more gender egalitarian society where fathers fully participate in raising their kids and where workplaces recognize the importance of having kids. But we also need paid leave and a robust, affordable child care infrastructure because those things help families out. More importantly, we know that there’s such a well-established return on investment for things like paid leave and child care. Children are healthier, mothers are healthier, mothers return to the labor force and stay in the labor force. Children do well with high-quality child care — it prepares them for preschool, it prepares them for school.
If we invested in children, in families — not through a $1,000 Trump account that your kid gets when they’re 18 — if we invested in an infrastructure that allows people to not just combine work and family but cares for families, that would mean that the people we do have are healthy, they’re productive, they’re ready to contribute to society. If we’re going to have fewer people, we should invest and support those families.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.