If the White House is planning on unveiling a “new cultural agenda” designed to “reverse declining birthrates,” as the New York Times reports, it better explain why birthrates are falling and how they can be fixed, which the New York Times never does.
Throughout her article, Caroline Kitchener often mentions “declining birth and marriage rates” together, but she never articulates the link between the two. And it is really just simple math.
According to the Census Bureau, the average never-married 44-year-old woman had just 1.15 children in 2020. The average ever-married woman of that same age had almost double that number at 2.17. And separate evidence shows that women still in their first marriages by age 44 have more children than those who got divorced.
Additionally, research has also proven that the earlier a woman gets married, the more children she is likely to have. According to the Survey Center on American Life, half of the women who get married in their early twenties end up having at least three children, compared to just 33% of women who get married after age thirty. More than 60% of women who get married in their thirties have two children or fewer.
The cause of falling birthrates is not that American women suddenly want fewer children. According to Gallup, 45% of Americans say the ideal family size is three or more children, and women actually prefer larger families more than men do.
The problem is that young men and women are failing to get married and start the families they want. The average age at first marriage in the 1890s was 26 years old for men and 22 years old for women. By the height of the baby boom, those numbers had fallen to about 23 years old for men and 20 years old for women. Now, the average man is waiting until 30 to get married, and the average woman is waiting until 28. We don’t need to get back to the 1950s to fix the fertility crisis. If we can just get back to the 1990s, when most households were still led by a married couple and the average age at first marriage was 26 years old for men and 24 years old for women, the birth dearth would be solved!
If we want more births, we should be focused on helping young men and women get and stay married. Unfortunately, few of what Kitchener mentions in her article is designed to do that. Maybe the White House has a ton of great ideas about how to help young people get married, and they just didn’t share them with Kitchener. On the Senate campaign trail, Vice President JD Vance once floated the idea of loans for married couples that would be forgiven in tranches with each additional child they had while still married, but nothing like that is reported here.
THE MILLENNIAL FAILURE TO LAUNCH
What young men and women really need is affordable housing, affordable higher education (including trade schools), and a strong economy that can deliver good-paying jobs. Making it harder for young men to get lost in online pornography and gambling would help, too.
Hopefully, the White House has more planned for its fertility agenda than fertility medals for mothers and menstrual cycle education programs for young women.