Why are so many Americans worried about falling birth rates?

Half of Americans think we should be at least somewhat worried about the impact of falling birth rates on society, according to the 2025 19th News/SurveyMonkey Poll fielded in September. 

Mary Aured, a 65-year-old based in Florida, indicated in the poll that she was “very worried” about the country’s falling birth rate and told The 19th: “I’m desperately afraid that there will not be a generation that can support the generation above it.”

Aured, a member of the Baby Boomer generation who identified as Republican or Republican-leaning, said she thinks people still want to have kids but simply can’t afford it. She pointed to her 28-year-old daughter and 30-year-old son. 

“My son wants to get married, but he’s questioning having children because of the economic cost of it,” Aured said. “And my daughter just moved in with us because she lost her job.”

Joe Stock, 65, also said he was “very worried” about the falling birth rate and “strongly agreed” that society should return to traditional gender roles. For Stock, an Independent voter in Connecticut who supports President Donald Trump, it is more of a cultural issue: Young people’s life trajectories and mindsets are “are night and day” compared with his youth. 

“The idea of family now is basically nonexistent or in some circles, it exists but with a twisted, abnormal and counter-growth kind of an approach,” said Stock. For him, the traditional nuclear family — consisting of a man, woman and children — is the “very foundation and the bedrock of society.” 

The 19th News/SurveyMonkey Poll was conducted online from September 8-15, 2025, among a national sample of 20,807 U.S. adults 18 and older. It has an error estimate of ±1.0 percent.

The 19th spoke with survey respondents, academics and experts about why so many people are concerned about falling birth rates, historical echoes and how the Trump administration’s policies further the message.

First: Are birth rates falling in the United States?

Yes. In 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the nation’s fertility rate hit a record low of 1.6. That’s about what it was in the 1970s, after rates rose to 3.7 during the baby boom. Experts generally agree that a total fertility rate, or average number of births over the birthing population’s lifetime, should hover around 2.1 for a population to replace itself solely through reproduction.

The changes are part of a long-running international trend. 

Experts say a number of factors have impacted the birth rate, which has dropped significantly from the first half of the 20th century. Women’s increased access to birth control — the pill was approved in 1960, and abortion availability rose after Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973 — as well as rising participation in the workforce and pursuit of higher education meant people were choosing to have kids later. The costs of child care, insurance coverage and housing all impact decisions on whether to have kids, and at what age.

Still, according to the World Bank, the United States has one of the higher fertility rates among wealthy nations. Low fertility rates in countries such as Japan and South Korea have caused international panic about aging populations. Economists worry about the impact falling birth rates will have on the future job market, or whether there will be enough caretakers for the older generation. Tax revenue could decrease, as well as gross domestic product.

Who is most worried about the country’s birth rate? 

Nearly every demographic group expresses anxiety about falling birth rates. Breaking the 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll down across racial and ethnic lines shows little variance — about half of all groups are worried. 

There is a strong gender divide. Men are more concerned than women, 58 percent versus 48 percent. Fifty-eight percent of White men are concerned, compared with 45 percent of White women, who are the least concerned of all race and gender breakdowns.

Republicans tend to be more concerned than Democrats or Independents, but significant portions of people across parties say they are worried about birth rates.

What is motivating the fear of falling birth rates?

The partisan differences, paired with images of American identity popularized by Trump administration, hint at deeper concerns expressed through the fear of falling birth rates.

Joshua Wilson, a political science professor at the University of Denver, said national identity is a “real obsession” with the rise of conservatism across the world. 

“Fear of birth rates is a way of feeding into this anxiety of national identity, who we are and how we are being threatened,” Wilson said. “Just look at the words of MAGA itself: Make America Great Again. It’s a very conservative view because it’s saying that in the past, there was a kind of ideal America and we’ve been knocked off track. We need to reestablish that old identity — even if it’s a myth.” 

The anxiety is closely tied to anti-immigration policies as well. Immigration could be seen as a solution to the falling birth rate — but opponents connect migration with a loss of culture, loss of control in democratic institutions and loss of status. 

For the right, Wilson said, “the question becomes, how do we win back the culture through majorities? How do we win elections and guarantee future elections? We make majorities through procreation — it is a kind of really basic arithmetic.” 

What is pronatalism?

Pronatalism is the promotion of reproduction in a population, and today more commonly refers to the belief that a steady birth rate is essential to a stable society. Historically, it’s often a result of the fear of falling birth rates and a loss of national identity. 

As women fought for suffrage and expanded social rights in the United States, pronatalism was a reactive force. 

“There’s this linkage between women’s educational and aspirational futures and the declining birth rate,” Laura Lovett, author of “Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1930,” told The Guardian earlier this year. She said President Theodore Roosevelt blamed young White women going to college for “race suicide.”

How else have pronatalist ideas been linked to nationalism and extremism?

Pronatalism is often entwined with eugenics, and authoritarian regimes have often capitalized on this. In the leadup to World War II, the Nazi party discouraged single “Aryan” women from having abortions and tasked German women with birthing enough “pure” children to take over the continent. Officials issued medals of motherhood to honor women based on the number of children they had. 

These attitudes can rear their head in any nationalist movement. The Black Panthers and Nation of Islam were “staunchly opposed to abortion or any other form of reproductive control, even if voluntarily chosen,” wrote historian Jennifer A. Nelson in an article about reproductive attitudes among radical organizers. 

“These nationalists insisted that by increasing their numbers, people of color would gain politi-

cal power,” she wrote. “They called upon women to bear children as their contribution

to the Black Power movement.”

Wombs are essential to ethnic nationalist movements, and pronatalist messaging can emphasize traditional gender roles as a way to contribute to a larger project. Historically, a lot of pronatalist messaging was anti-feminist. Seyward Darby, journalist and author of “Sisters In Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism,” said pronatalism was wielded in the service of subjugating women by keeping them constrained to the home. 

At the same time that White women won suffrage in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was recruiting them into the white supremacist movement. The KKK was founded on the idea that White women needed protection from Black men, Darby said, and that was very tied to the idea that “their purpose, politically, socially, was to have babies.” Klan messaging focused on the importance of White mothers as keepers of history and tradition for the White race, she said. 

Concerns over White birth rates have been used to justify extremist, racist violence in recent years too. That includes a 2019 attack in New Zealand in which 51 people were killed by a White Australian man who expressed concern over a shrinking White population and a 2022 shooting in Buffalo, New York, in which the shooter killed 14 and cited the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory that foments fear about the extinction of the White race due to rising populations of people of color. 

How partisan is the discussion about declining birth rates?

Democrats and Republican platforms differ greatly in their proposals to address falling birth rates. In general, progressives tend to talk about family planning in more economic terms as an affordability issue, while conservatives see it as a need for a certain cultural identity, typically with religious undertones.

Sixty-five percent of Trump voters are worried about falling birth rates, compared with 45 percent of Kamala Harris voters, and the numbers are similar for Republicans and Democrats. 

Wilson pointed to Project 2025 — a 920-page conservative presidential policy blueprint authored by the Heritage Foundation — as a key in understanding the modern American pronatalism movement. Its first and foremost recommendation is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” The second is to “dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people” — an approach that rejects policies like paid leave or free day care. 

“This movement captures the classic conservative tension between the family ideal and the intervening dangerous state,” said Wilson, whose research focus includes abortion politics and modern American conservatism. “But when you cut out all the social supports, then what’s the subtext there? Who do you want to be producing?” 

Still, a significant portion of progressive Americans, including LGBTQ+ people (43 percent) and Gen Z women (51 percent), are concerned about the nation’s fertility rate. The left tends to address the problem through the lens of affordability and strengthening the social safety net. 

Is the Trump administration pushing pronatalist policies? 

Yes. Pronatalist rhetoric creeps into the policy and talking points from members of the Trump administration. President Trump called himself the “fertilization president” on the campaign trail, promising free in vitro fertilization for all, and Vice President JD Vance belittled “childless cat ladies.” The secretary of transportation, who is a father of nine, instructed the department to prioritize projects that “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”

Tech billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk, the father of at least 14 children, decried the country’s fertility rate, posting, “a collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” There is a specific strain of pronatalism among tech elites that advocates for the use of assistive reproductive technologies to engineer the smartest kids possible. 

In a recent report,“Baby Bonuses and Motherhood Medals,” the National Women’s Law Center expressed caution about policies like $1,000 baby bonds and new insurance regulations on IVF that are coming from the administration. (The IVF proposal falls short of Trump campaign-trail promise to make insurance companies cover the procedure.) 

Amy K. Matsui, the vice president for child care & income security at the center, said there’s strong evidence that these policies are meant to benefit certain people, particularly the White and more affluent.

“We’re seeing the confluence of a purported concern about birth rates being used to advance an agenda, which is really about exercising control over women’s bodies, over gender roles, over women’s role in public life,” Matsui said. 

Matsui said she sees the Trump administration’s pronatalist policies as part of “a shrinking government that literally makes it harder for people to make ends meet.” She added there are “flaws and dangers” to encouraging a “traditional family structure where women are not in the workforce but are staying home and primarily responsible for caregiving.” 

Matsui pointed to the slashing of the federal workforce, which is disproportionately women and people of color; the refusal to extend nutrition assistance during the government shutdown; and closing offices that support maternal health and women’s health.

At the same time that the administration is encouraging more births, Matsui said it is also dismantling structures that support families and make it harder for certain women to have choices around family planning. 

“There’s a really strong kind of racial thread going through this as well because these policies are paired with opposition to immigration, an underlying concern about the wrong kind of people having children — which includes non-White people, non-heterosexual people, people who are not in traditional marriage structures,” Matsui said. 

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How do religion and traditional gender roles play a role in pushing pronatalist messaging? 

Anxiety over birth rates is more present among religions that emphasize traditional gender roles, the importance of families and a lack of effective contraception. Mormons (69 percent), evangelical Christians (65 percent), Orthodox Christians (63 percent), Catholics (59 percent) and Muslims (59 percent) are most likely to worry about the impact of low fertility.

Wilson said it’s impossible to discuss the modern conservative movement without acknowledging the prominence of white Evangelicals and now conservative Catholics in the Republican Party. The party is reflecting those values, he said, referencing the high value that the Christian right places on traditional and growing families and pointing specifically to the overturning of federal abortion rights. 

“Once that happened, it created this void,” Wilson said. “The big defining issue of decades fundamentally changed, and it disrupted boundaries and created this space that needed to be filled. So that’s why we get that early dust-up around IVF and why we’re talking about natalism, gender roles and reproduction.” 

According to those who are concerned, what are potential solutions?

It’s something people in many countries are considering. Christina Scott, a professor of psychological sciences at Whittier College who taught in Japan as a Fulbright Scholar for five months, said she asked young women in Japan about their feelings around having children. The country’s birth rate is lower than that in the United States, and for many, financial circumstances caused hesitation. That’s despite the fact that Japan offers incentives including a state-mandated dating app, free child care, cash payments per childbirth, parenting classes and monthly subsidies to parents with children younger than 15. 

“There’s so many things that would help level the playing field, but so much of the responsibility of children falls primarily to mothers,” Scott said. “Many women are trying to make the determination between child care, education and careers. And different parties will call this selfish, but we don’t call it selfish when men have these determinations.” 

Many Americans pointed to child care as a key issue. 

Rafael, a 45-year-old father of two who asked to be identified by only his first name due to his job, is concerned about falling birth rates. He said he and his wife originally weren’t going to have kids because of the cost, but with some careful budgeting realized they could afford it. His family lives nearby and frequently helps with child care, but primary care for his eldest still costs $15,000 a year. 

That cost plus little parental leave from work were major concerns; Rafael took three weeks of vacation and his wife had six weeks of leave when their child was born. He thinks at least six months of fully paid parental leave would ease the transition between work and parenting. He thinks the United States should invest in families stateside, instead of sending money to Israel or spending money on “LGBT or whatever.” 

Rafael, along with other survey responders, praised pro-family policies in European countries. “The Scandinavian countries have it really figured out,” said Catherine Campbell, an 85-year-old retiree in Santa Monica, California. “They have wonderful care for kids.”

Campbell said on the survey she was worried about falling birth rates, but in an interview clarified that the population size does not concern her. She said it was expensive for governments to subsidize child care, but it is worth it.