First Came Overpopulation Panic, Then Came The Birth Collapse

A recent YouGov poll found that 47% of Americans view overpopulation in the United States as a “very or somewhat serious problem,” while only 41% say the same about low birth rates.

The consequences of such inverted priorities are already catastrophic. America’s total fertility rate has collapsed to roughly 1.6 children per woman — far below the 2.1 replacement level needed to sustain a population without immigration.

But don’t share those statistics with Sunny Hostin over at “The View.”

The View’s Sunny Hostin: “I think it’s really reckless to be suggesting that people should have children in this country.” pic.twitter.com/iNRzG6AfcG

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) March 30, 2026

Source: @theblaze/MRC/ABC’s The View/X.com

“It’s really reckless to be suggesting that people should have children,” said Hostin. “…when you now know, in this country, there is this affordability crisis and for a two-person household — a married household — you need over $400,000 for childcare.”

Now, you may think planning an armored car heist à la Michael Mann’s 1995 classic “Heat,” is reckless, but according to Hostin, I need $1.6 million to take care of my eight children. Anything less and they would be impoverished, uneducated, homeless, and starving.

A taken-aback Ana Navarro then blurted out, “over the lifetime of a child, or what? A year?”

“No, a year,” Hostin said.

Hostin’s fearmongering would be laughable if it weren’t so effective. In April, the CDC announced that America reached a record low in births in 2025, down 1% since 2024 and 23% since 2007. With an estimated population of 342 million, the United States witnessed 3,606,400 births last year. In 1966, however, America saw a similar number, 3,661,000 births, drawn from a population of less than 200 million.

Hostin was born in October 1968, six months after Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich published his landmark book, “The Population Bomb.” When every single one of Ehrlich’s predictions — from mass starvation in the 1970s to global mineral shortages in the 1980s — turned out wrong, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in 1990.

Only 10% of Americans held a favorable opinion of Ehrlich at the time of his death, according to YouGov — not too shabby given that only 20% of respondents knew who he was. And yet a full 100% of us have been living in his world — or at least his narrative — ever since he sounded the false alarm that human beings are a form of pollution.

The MacArthur Foundation tipped its cap to Ehrlich’s checkerspot butterfly expertise, but anyone can study the “behavior of an invertebrate population”. His true genius lay in marketing to other spineless populations. 

“A pioneer in alerting the public to the problems of overpopulation,” the award citation says. 

Paul Ehrlich may have been perennially wrong as a scientist, but he had a generational talent for scaring the wits out of dimwitted media personalities, craven politicians, cunning public health authorities, unimaginative screenwriters, and over-imaginative teachers. Exactly the type of marks a good con artist would need to capture if he were going to advance a narrative at war with reality. 

It worked.

On the same episode of “The View,” Sara Haines said, “The world has over 8 billion people. We no longer need to force people to procreate and pump out babies. We have arrived.”

Socially, the fallout is devastating. Smaller families mean fewer siblings, weaker extended kinship networks, and the erosion of the “social capital” that once bound communities together. Low fertility reduces community participation, trust, and mutual support — the very glue of civil society. 

Militarily, the danger is existential. Fewer young Americans mean a smaller pool of potential recruits at the exact moment great-power competition intensifies. The Pentagon already struggles with recruitment shortfalls; an aging, childless society cannot field the force required to deter adversaries like China. 

Economically, the math is brutal. A shrinking native-born workforce cannot support the entitlement programs built for a growing population. Social Security and Medicare face insolvency as the ratio of workers to retirees plummets. Every country that has experienced persistent sub-replacement fertility has seen its GDP growth slow, innovation shrivel, and burden younger generations with crushing tax loads to fund the vacations of the old.

The problem with effective propaganda campaigns is that they are hard to reverse. South Korea serves as a warning. In 1960, the average South Korean woman had six children. After decades of state-backed “family planning” and “voluntary” sterilization services lovingly provided by USAID, fertility fell below replacement and eventually below 1. The Clinton State Department lauded South Korean population control as one of America’s standout achievements.

No 20th-century public intellectual better apprehended how misanthropic an elite could be. Gilded Age robber barons were at least honest about their rapacious need for more; the postwar meritocrats of the 1960s thought themselves too enlightened for greed but enjoyed all that money just the same. Then, along came a Stanford butterfly researcher, insisting that your neighbors’ kids are hurting the environment, and if only you kept more resources for yourself, nature would heal.

A growing cohort of Americans, particularly young Americans, is waking up to the fact that Paul Ehrlich was wrong all along. And Sunny Hostin’s fearmongering, not the science, has always been the point. Gallup found that 43% of Americans aged 18-29 now say the ideal family will have more than 3 children — a 13% jump from the same cohort in 2011.

I remember the halcyon days of 2011 well. I welcomed my second daughter that year. Back then, the majority of my peers told pollsters that “Two is too many!” As Millennials settle into middle age, that number has plummeted by more than 20%.

We are older and wise enough to know to turn the channel when “The View” comes on. Besides, chances are Michael Mann’s “Heat” is playing on some random cable channel at the very same time.

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Terry Schilling is president of the American Principles Project.