What's Fueling America's Fertility Crisis?
Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies explains why birth rates have plummeted—and what policymakers can do to reverse the trend.
Americans are not having enough babies. For decades, the nation’s fertility rate has steadily declined from a mid-20th-century peak; the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the drop. Now, America’s fertility rate—the metric that indicates the average number of children born to a woman during her lifetime—stands at 1.6, far below the replacement rate of 2.1. Lyman Stone, senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, joins us to discuss what’s going on and what can be done to secure America’s demographic future.
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Rufo: Lyman Stone is a demographer at the Institute for Family Studies, and he really is an expert on everything to do with family, fertility, demographics, and the future. Lyman, perhaps we could open up the conversation with a more general take. What’s happening in the United States as far as demographics and fertility go? Are things going well? Poorly? Or are things somewhere in between?
Stone: Well, that’s the first time I’ve been called an expert in the future. That’s a good one.
The reality is that fertility is declining all around the world, in both rich countries and poor countries alike. The U.S. is not a categorical exception to that. Over the last couple years, really since Covid, we’ve experienced a little bit of stability. Our fertility rate is hovering around 1.6.
Stability, though, is quite bad news. For people who aren’t glued into this subject, a stagnant fertility rate of 1.6 means that if a girl who is fifteen years old today were to have babies at the statistically average rate for the rest of her life, she would end up with 1.6 children.
Now, this period indicator can be biased. So, for a long time, people thought that even though we had this big crash in fertility, it was going to come up in the future. Many observers thought that the decline was just people postponing births.
But the fact that the fertility rate is just hanging flat at 1.6—the lowest level in our history—is quite bad news. It means that the decline can’t simply be attributed to postponement. The births aren’t coming back; the rate is just staying low. So even though it can feel nice that the decline seems to have paused, it’s bad news from a long-run demographic perspective—it means that overall family size is falling in a permanent way.
