Analysts say falling marriage rates, rising family costs, infertility challenges and cultural shifts are contributing to America’s declining birth rate.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
America’s fertility decline is drawing new warnings from federal officials, policy analysts and family advocates as recent data show the nation’s birth rate has fallen again, intensifying concerns about the long-term effects on families, the economy and national security.
A Daily Caller News Foundation report cited analysts who said the United States is confronting a deepening fertility problem after years of demographic decline. The country’s fertility rate has been falling for decades and reached a new record low in 2025.
According to National Center for Health Statistics data published in April, the U.S. general fertility rate declined to 53.1 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 in 2025, down from 53.8 in 2024.
Experts who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation pointed to several possible ways to address the decline, including reducing regulatory barriers, expanding access to fertility care, improving early diagnosis for reproductive health conditions and lowering the financial burden of raising children.
Emma Waters, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, told the outlet that cultural and technological changes are among the factors she believes are shaping family formation.
“While there are many factors contributing to the declining birth rate, three reasons stand out to me: First, there is the influence of smart phones and social media,” Waters said. “Since the introduction of the iPhone, [every] country has seen a marked decline in births that doesn’t look like it is reversing any time soon, including the U.S. … we are seeing more men and women replace meaningful time with others with scrolling, screen addictions, or a sense that there is too much to be done.”
Waters also cited abortion, birth control and reproductive technology as factors she believes should be considered in the broader discussion.
“Second, we cannot discount the role of abortion, birth control, and reproductive technologies,” Waters said. “While we can have a meaningful conversation about the morality of each separately, the statistics don’t lie: The last year that the birth rate was above replacement was 1972, and since the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade erroneously created a constitutional right to abortion in 1973, the birth rate has never recovered.”
Waters said falling marriage rates are another major contributor to the decline. The U.S. marriage rate fell to a 140-year low in 2019 and has not fully recovered, The New York Times reported. Fewer than half of American households were married couples in 2025, a sharp drop from 50 years earlier, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.
Waters said improving reproductive health treatment could help more couples who want children but face infertility or delayed diagnosis.
“The first is to promote restorative reproductive medicine, or root cause care for infertility and reproductive health conditions, something that is part of the Trump administration’s ‘Excepted Fertility Benefits’ Department of Labor rule, but will require far greater effort and support to build out sufficiently,” Waters said. “Rates of infertility are on the rise [among] Americans in the last two decades, and the delay in diagnosis and treatment for conditions such as endometriosis and male-factor infertility has made it much harder for Americans to receive the care they need to conceive children.”
The issue has also drawn attention from senior Trump administration officials. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz said during a May 11 White House event that part of the U.S. population is “underbabied.” Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently warned that the declining birth rate represents an “existential crisis” and poses a “threat” to the economy and national security.
Maternal health remains another part of the debate. A July 2025 Commonwealth Fund report found that the pregnancy-related mortality ratio in the United States rose 22.8% from 2000 to 2009 before stabilizing at about 660 deaths annually. The report also found that deaths nearly doubled between 2019 and 2021, reaching 1,222, largely because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chelsea Follett, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that many Americans are weighing children against other priorities and costs.
“Many people now prefer smaller families because of the opportunity costs: children compete with careers, leisure, consumption, and lifestyle flexibility, leading many people to choose fewer kids,” Follett said. “Shifting the cost-benefit calculus toward larger families requires increasing the value people place on having children or reducing the costs of raising them.”
Follett cautioned against direct cash-based approaches to the birth rate decline, arguing that subsidies have produced limited results elsewhere.
“Baby bonuses and other direct government payments are the wrong response to falling birth rates,” Follett said. “Evidence from abroad shows that such family subsidies yield only modest gains at enormous fiscal cost. Research suggests that raising U.S. fertility by just 0.2 births per woman could require around $250 billion in annual subsidies, roughly equal to the U.S. Army’s annual budget. And without deregulation of family-related goods and services, subsidies risk being absorbed into higher prices. A better approach is deregulatory reform to lower the cost of the goods and services that families rely on.”
The financial pressure of raising children remains substantial for many households. Families continue to face major affordability challenges, while a LendingTree analysis found that the average 18-year cost of raising a child rose to $303,418 in 2024 after tax exemptions and credits.
The Trump administration has announced several family-related initiatives in recent months. On May 10, the Labor Department unveiled a proposed rule that would establish “a new category of limited excepted benefits to further expand the ability of employers to offer meaningful fertility benefits to their employees.”
President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act also created new tax-advantaged savings and investment accounts for American children, known as Trump Accounts, according to a White House fact sheet.
HHS also launched Moms.gov on May 10 as an online resource intended to provide guidance for new and expecting mothers and support the health of families.
“Through the newly launched Moms.gov, HHS provides resources for couples planning to start or grow their families, including preconception health information and educational materials on fertility awareness-based methods (FABMs),” an HHS spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a statement Thursday. “Additionally, as stated in the MAHA Strategy, HHS will launch a MAHA education campaign to improve health and fertility in women and men looking to start a family. This will influence adolescent health through early adoption of lifestyles that help avoid the development of root cause issues that impact adult fertility.”
The spokesperson said HHS is also addressing infertility through future grant priorities.
“The Office of Population Affairs released a Title X Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for 2027 that includes a focus on addressing infertility for men and women,” the spokesperson said. “The NOFO acknowledges the nation’s growing infertility crisis and provides an outline for services that may assist with addressing this crisis.”
The continuing decline has placed fertility, marriage, family affordability, reproductive health care and federal family policy at the center of a growing national debate over whether the United States can reverse the trend before it produces deeper social and economic consequences.
Original article
Comments