This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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The New York Times calls plunging birthrates “a good thing,” while New York Magazine highlights the stories of women who “regret having children.” If you looked at the mainstream media alone, you might think humans are looking forward to becoming an endangered species.
At the same time, however, there is a growing band of pronatalists who decry the coming consequences of a smaller, older population: safety-net programs will suffer, labor markets will contract, and elder care will face a shortage.
But these economic distortions aren’t the worst of it: Fewer people means fewer creators, lovers, and thinkers. In religious terms, there will be fewer image-bearers of God on this planet.
These are problems we should take seriously. But falling birthrates aren’t just a problem in themselves. They are downstream evidence of other, in some ways bigger, problems rooted in relationships, identity, and meaning. Family formation, faith, and fertility are all falling together.
While individual anecdotes — like those of teen motherhood featured in the New York Times — can paint a different picture, the bigger story around falling birthrates is a sad one. Many more people wish they’d had more children than those who regret having children in the first place.
Most women today delay marriage and motherhood not because they watched their parents wrestle with teen parenthood, but because they are struggling to find a mate, or they are simply following the cultural norm of later marriage. Delayed marriage, for many, means delayed motherhood, which can often mean foregone motherhood.
Even for those who successfully bear children later in their childbearing years, there is a price: higher-risk pregnancies, fewer children, and less intergenerational overlap with grandparents. To suggest that women can simply cut and paste their fertility windows into later years is wrong.
While some people have always happily chosen the single life, recent years have seen an increase in people living alone, and usually not as an intentional choice. Or, it is a strained choice that settles for singlehood when family life is less attractive or attainable. We should all be asking what has changed to make life’s most basic and natural human relationships less desirable. Fewer teen births are the silver lining, but this whole thing is a cloud.
The fertility crisis is a marriage crisis. But it’s more than that. It’s a crisis of identity, purpose, and optimism. In 2013, when Jonathan Last wrote “What to Expect When No One Is Expecting,” he identified socialism (the redistribution of resources through programs like Social Security) and secularism as the main drivers of reduced fertility. Secularism has a strong negative relationship with fertility, both at the societal level and the individual level.
Many people derive a sense of meaning from their religious faith, and many faiths teach about the blessing of children. As the United States has become more secular, our fertility rate has fallen. We’ve lost an important framework that generations of people have relied upon for meaning. And while political activism, secular creeds, and social justice movements have offered something of a new secular religion, they’re hardly a replacement. Weekly church attendees still have the best mental health, the strongest sense of purpose, and the happiest marriages of any group. They also have the most children.
Christine Emba was correct when she wrote in 2024 that fertility is tied to meaning. When people do not have a sense of purpose for their own lives, why would they create a new life for someone else? But this sadly seems to welcome a self-fulfilling prophecy: For many parents, their children become their purpose, or at least a big part of it. Fully 88% of parents say having kids is “one of the most important things I have done.”
In the same vein, a new study shows a strong causal relationship between national optimism and fertility. Indeed, many people are hesitant about welcoming a new child precisely because they believe the world is a hopeless, dark place. Young people today are not optimistic about the world or about themselves: In a poll commissioned by Independent Women, the number one reason young adults said they didn’t want to have kids was “I don’t think I’ll be a good parent.”
None of this is to say that every childless individual lacks confidence or a sense of purpose. Indeed, there are many reasons that people might end up with fewer children than they’d hoped, including health challenges, financial constraints, or divorce. But there’s no denying that at the societal level, as we become more secular and atomized, children become less common.
Falling fertility will bring its own set of problems. But that’s not the real reason it’s problematic. Falling fertility is the result of frail families and failing faith — in God, our future, and ourselves.
None of this can remotely be categorized as “a good thing.”
This is why we should all care about falling birthrates: not because there’s an ideal number of people for the planet, not because we need age balance across our labor force or tax base, but because our birthrate points to matters of the human heart, and many hearts are lost or lonely.
This diagnosis means — perhaps frustratingly — that falling birthrates can’t be fixed with baby bonuses, childcare subsidies, or paid family leave. It’s a far larger issue than that. Instead, we have to focus on cultivating relationships that last, hearts that serve a higher power, and minds that weigh our choices in terms beyond individual costs and benefits.
If we want tomorrow to have more humans in it, we have to have more humanity today.
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Hadley Heath Manning is a senior fellow at Independent Women.
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