Americans are having fewer babies than ever before, and the birth rate keeps falling every year — down about 25% from just 20 years ago.
The liberal media ignored this trend for decades and is now, with great discomfort, informing its readers of what’s going on.
But it still cannot shoot straight on the topic.
Consider the recent Associated Press story about new 2024 numbers showing a total fertility rate below 1.6. This birth rate is 24% below 2007 levels, and if it kept going indefinitely, the population would shrink by about one quarter every generation. But it’s worse than that because the birth rate is on a downward trend that will probably continue.
However, AP tried to put this birth rate “in context” by minimizing the problem and prescribing the same solutions Democrats were prescribing in any event.
The main expert AP quotes is “Leslie Root, a University of Colorado Boulder researcher focused on fertility and population policy,” who said nobody should be worried about the record-low and falling birth rate.
“We’re seeing this as part of an ongoing process of fertility delay,” Root told AP. “We know that the U.S. population is still growing, and we still have a natural increase — more births than deaths.”
First of all, it seems relevant that Root is a left-wing radical feminist. Her biography on liberal social media site BlueSky says, “Reproductive justice for all, solidarity forever.”
But this is standard for outlets such as AP: They find ideologically extreme sources and fail to inform their readers of the ideology of the sources.
Also, Root’s comments have a misleading implication. Dismissing concerns about low birth rates by referring to “fertility delay” is a nod to an old theory about family formation, one I call the “Happy Planning Theory.” The theory was that women are still getting married and having children just as much as they used to, but they’re just doing it later (and with more maturity!). So the apparent collapse in the birth rate is a statistical artifact.
This theory used to be much more tenable when women in their 30s were having more babies every year. But check the data.
The birth rate for women over age 30 fell last year, led by a significant decrease in the birth rate of women between ages 30 and 35. You can’t call it a “fertility delay” when the birth rate is falling for both women under 30 years old and women over 30 years old. (The tiny but significant increase in the birth rate for women over 40 years old is absolutely wiped out by the decline in births among women in their 30s. There was no increase in the birth rate among women in their late 30s.)
The other expert cited by AP, North Carolina demographer Karen Guzzo, is also very liberal, as her BlueSky feed shows. Of course, she’s not identified as such.
Guzzo dismissed the idea of more cash payments to parents, saying instead that the government should support “birth-promoting measures outlined by the Trump administration, Guzzo said they don’t tackle larger needs like parental leave and affordable child care.”
With a certain set of commentators, politicians, and academics, it always comes down to the fact that we need to subsidize formal childcare. But the evidence suggests that child care costs have little effect on birth rates, and that straight cash (closer to what Trump is discussing) has more of an effect. For one thing, parents can use straight cash to pay for childcare, but they cannot use childcare subsidies to pay for, say, switching to a part-time job, moving in next door to family, or adding an in-law suite.
Most families of young children don’t use paid childcare at all.
Paid formal childcare is also not what most mothers want, but it is what Democratic politicians want.
Root and Guzzo are serious demographers, and they are correct that the birth rate is driven downward by a pretty complex mismatch between modern culture and the realities of parenting. But AP, to cover the baby bust well, needs to find sources outside the academic Left to talk to and look beyond the simplistic and inapt “daycare!” answer.