Everything You Thought You Knew About the Fertility Crisis Is Wrong

I sat down with a demographer to fact-check the panic.

We’ve all been watching the fertility rate conversation get louder and dumber for months. Elon Musk has been warning about civilizational collapse. Pronatalists have been pushing for us to give medals to mothers for birthing lots of babies (where in history have we seen that before?). The manosphere thinks women’s progress has gone too far. President Trump’s latest economic report blamed bulky car seats as discouraging Americans from having more babies.

I’ve been so annoyed by it all, and when something annoys me, I get curious about it. So I called up Jennifer D. Sciubba, one of the world’s leading experts in political demography, President and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau, and author of the brand new Toxic Demography. We sat down for coffee and a proper girls chat about all the ways everyone is getting this dangerously wrong.

Here’s five things you should know:

1. The terminology, explained like you’re five

The total fertility rate is the average number of children born per woman over her lifetime. Right now in the US, it’s 1.6.

The replacement rate, the fertility rate you need to keep a population stable, is 2.1 (one child to replace each parent, plus a little extra for good measure). So yes, we are below replacement. That’s true.

But population is not just decided by births alone; there are three ingredients: births, deaths, and migration. A country with low fertility but robust immigration (hi, we used to be that country) can grow just fine. The US has spent the past year kneecapping immigration and we’ve hit our lowest ever fertility rate, which means we’re accelerating toward a demographic future we never prepared for.

2. Both sides are getting it wrong

The right’s panic about “not enough babies” is, as Jennifer put it, political laziness. We built Social Security and every other structure of modern civic life on the assumption of an ever-growing population. That assumption was critically wrong, which means we have to overhaul systems. That’s hard work. Blaming the birth rate is easier.

But the left isn’t off the hook. As Jennifer flagged, the left has in recent years been increasingly afraid to say the word “family.” Whose family, how do we define family…valid questions, but while obsessing over semantics, they stopped talking about family altogether. You can’t win a conversation you’ve opted out of entirely.

3. It’s the patriarchy, stupid

I love talking with Jennifer because she is so rational and refuses to be baited by scare tactics. The one area she is willing to raise genuine alarm is South Korea because of what their 0.7 rate likely signals: women collectively deciding they would rather not reproduce the society in which they live.

Her research tells the story plainly: South Korean women got educated, entered the workforce, and kept climbing. The expectations waiting for them at home never did. The government threw billions at the birth rate through subsidies, bonuses, campaigns, without touching any of the underlying cultural conditions. The rate kept falling.

Turns out, when you tell women to do it all without real structural support, they eventually stop playing along. In South Korea, that looks like the ‘four nos’: no dating, no sex, no marriage, no childbirth.

We are not South Korea. But we are not far from it, either. Women’s reproductive rights are being rolled back. The Heritage Foundation wants to eliminate no-fault divorce. The SAVE Act threatens to make it harder for married women to vote.

The fertility rate is, in part, a report card on how a society treats women. Given everything, can we really be shocked we’re not getting an A?

4. Social policies won’t fix the birth rate. We should do them anyway.

Paid leave and affordable childcare probably won’t inspire a massive baby boom. Finland has both, and its fertility rate is 1.3, lower than ours. But, if the only metric you care about is the fertility rate, you will always fail.

Instead of asking how many people are being born, Jennifer argues we should be asking how the people who already exist are living. Are people healthy? Are older workers being pushed out of the labor force by age discrimination at the exact moment we’re facing worker shortages? Are they happy?

Childcare and paid leave are worth doing because they make people’s lives better by every other metric, period. That should be enough.

5. The domination playbook isn’t going to work.

Here’s the good news: forced reproduction just doesn’t work. We have evidence. Countries that have tried to mandate their way to higher birth rates have watched people opt out of marriage, stop dating, go full four-nos. You cannot coerce people into wanting to build families.

And the right is not a unified force here. Jennifer pointed to a real fracture between the technocrats (think Elon, artificial wombs, donate sperm to a hundred women) and the traditionalists (think Heritage Foundation, Norman Rockwell families, make divorce harder). They do not have the same goals and they are not going to agree on policy.

While they’re busy squabbling, there’s room to move. And we have to. We have to fight for guardrails, we have to build coalitions with unlikely bedfellows, we have to shift culture, and we must work at the community level where Jennifer says she’d put all her energy if she could implement anything right now.

🍼

The panic seems loud because loud is what gets rewarded by the algorithms and our politicians and our group chats. But the numbers, if we’re honest about all of them, tell a more complicated story.

Women still want to have kids, and they are still having them. What they don’t want is to do it alone, broke, burned out, and blamed for everything.

---

While you’re here…

This summer, Moms First is taking our documentary on the road, and I want you to be part of it.

The American Motherhood Tour kicks off June 15 in New York City, then heads to Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and communities across the country. Moms in 47 states have already signed up to host screenings.

The goal: create spaces where moms can see their own experiences reflected back at them and start to understand: this isn’t just my problem. It’s all of ours.

When moms come together, stop blaming ourselves and each other, and start demanding something better, that’s when everything begins to shift.

If you want to bring that conversation to your community, sign up to host a screening. It starts with you gathering your people.

And! Just a few days remain to get your name in the credits…

Next week, we’ll close the credits for our documentary on American motherhood and with it, the opportunity to become an Associate Producer.

Nearly 2,500 of you have already signed on by sharing your stories, supporting this project, and helping shape something that will live far beyond this moment.

If you’ve been thinking about it, this is your moment.

Becoming an Associate Producer takes just a few minutes. You’ll be adding your name to a story that is reframing motherhood in this country and making sure your experience is part of the record.

You can become an Associate Producer by:

• Sharing your story

• Making a donation

• Signing up to host a screening

We close the credits on April 30. Make sure your name is included.