Birthrates in the United States have reached an all-time low. Many fear that the decline could lead to stalling in economic development and labor shortages, with Elon Musk describing it as "the biggest danger civilization faces," on his platform X, formerly Twitter. So, should we all be having more kids?
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the general fertility rate in the U.S. decreased by 3 percent between 2022 and 2024—a milestone they described as a "historic low." But while these statistics might be startling, social demographer Leslie Root said there is no need for concern.
"We are not in the middle of a birthrate catastrophe," Root, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, told CU Boulder Today.
"If you look only at this slice of time, where the older ones already had kids and the younger ones aren't ready to start yet, it looks like nobody is having kids. That's what is happening with the annual measure of fertility right now and that's where we're seeing a lot of anxiety."
In other words, as people continue to have kids later, Root said that we are in a period of low fertility as this next generation waits to start their families. "If the total fertility rate were 1.6 every single year for a long time, yes, the population would shrink," Root said.
"But we don't know whether that will happen. We have evidence that people are waiting to have children, but we don't know whether that will mean fewer children."
However, in light of these snapshot statistics, Root said we are seeing a rise in a political ideology known as pronatalism. "Pronatalism is not just the idea that people should have kids," Root said. "It is the idea that we should engineer birthrates to hit certain targets for the good of society."
Root highlighted the rise of "trad wives" on social media as evidence of this, raising concerns about what these ideologies mean for women: "It's about shaming women who don't have kids and trying to get back to an era where having kids is obligatory for women to participate in society, and it's all coming at a time when reproductive autonomy is already under threat."
Instead of focusing on birthrates, Root said we should focus on enacting policies to make it easier for people to look after the children they have already: "Universal healthcare or universal parental leave. Improving infant mortality rates. And we should continue to make sure that people have access to family planning so that people can have kids when they want to have kids and avoid having kids when they don't want to."
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