The Reason for the Declining Birth Rate in the U.S. (03.17.22)

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Plain Bible Teaching Podcast

This week we’re going to be talking about the reason for the declining birth rate in the United States. We may immediately assume that the reason why people choose not to have children is because they cannot afford to raise them. Yet a new study has concluded that more and more people are choosing not to have children because they do not want to have children. The reason for this is rooted in an attitude that Christians need to guard against.

STORY – The Birth Dearth Is About Culture, Not Cost

“Babies aren’t popular, right now.

“In fact, on average, Americans have never had fewer children as we did in 2020. Of course, that was also the year the pandemic began, something that historically, like war and recession, tends to empty maternity wards.

“The decline in our nation’s birth rate, however, didn’t begin with COVID-19, and there’s little reason to believe it has turned around in the last year and a half. The current decline goes back a while now, and didn’t reverse when the economy boomed in the second half of the 2010s. In fact, the dwindling U.S. birth rate seems strangely indifferent to what’s happening in the stock market or the headlines. It’s almost as if, no matter our financial or political situation, Americans are simply choosing to have fewer and fewer children year by year. And, it’s not because they can’t afford them. It’s because they don’t want them.

“That’s the conclusion of a new study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, which found that economic factors such as rising cost of living or student debt, factors which historically played outsized roles in fertility rates, are not when it comes to declining birth rates today. To isolate what is causing today’s decline, the authors estimated the impact of policy and economic shifts—things such as Medicaid coverage, abortion access, childcare cost, and sex education. ‘Perhaps the key explanation for the post-2007 sustained decline in US birth rates,’ the authors conclude, ‘is not…some changing policy or cost factor, but rather shifting priorities across cohorts of young adults.’” (Breakpoint)

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