How Disastrous Are Declining Birth Rates?

by Brian Dunning
April 7, 2026

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Everywhere we turn these days, some prominent figure is trumpeting the claim that the birth rate has fallen precipitously; so far, in fact, that we risk a catastrophic drop in population resulting in “societal collapse.” There are calls for massive programs to incentivize women to have more children, and to penalize women who don’t. At risk, some say, is civilization itself. Today we’re doing a deep dive into the new pronatalism, the ideology aimed at increasing birth rates to save the world we live in. Who claims this? Why do they claim it? And how do these warnings compare to actual economic projections?

We truly are hearing this from all quarters. We hear it from business leaders such as Elon Musk, political leaders such as JD Vance, and cultural provocateurs such as Jordan Peterson. Musk is perhaps the loudest, constantly tweeting that “low birth rates will end civilization” and declared it to be “the number one threat to the West.” JD Vance has been calling this a “civilizational crisis” for the better part of a decade now, and is of course famous for his criticisms of “childless cat ladies” and favors national policies such as giving parents more votes in elections, and imposing higher taxes on childless adults. Peterson has repeatedly claimed that 90% of childless women end up regretting it, and that more women getting college educations are “directly driving population collapse” and that their “female temperament” is responsible for “politically correct authoritarianism” on campuses. Such men as these are not without influence — for better or for worse.

The basic claim, that birth rates are declining, is easy to verify. It is quite true. From 1963 to 2023, the United States has seen the birth rate fall from 3.3 births per woman of child of childbearing age to 1.6, an all-time low. To maintain the population level, this number needs to be 2.1. Thus we do expect to see gradual population decline in the United States. The reasons for the decline have shifted over time, but in general the most impactful have been:

1. Access to contraceptives and the legalization of abortion, dramatically reducing unwanted births;
2. Rising education and workforce participation among women;
3. Rising housing prices, making it less attractive to raise a family.

It’s important to note that this has not been a case of families deciding to have fewer children; in fact women over 30 are actually having more babies than they did in 1963. The reduced number of births have been mainly among teens and single women under 24 — the demographic least able to raise and care for children. By every possible metric, it’s a huge win for both those young women and for the social services that would have had to pick up the slack.

Worldwide over this same 60-year period, the birth rate dropped from 5.3 to 2.3. The broader reasons for this have been:

1. Rising education and workforce participation among women;
2. Declining rates of infant mortality (fewer infants die, so mothers conceive fewer new babies);
3. The decline of child labor eliminating the financial incentive to have more children.

Every single one of these factors has driven prosperity in every wealthy, healthy, educated country. This transition is an exhaustively-documented pathway by which societies move from high-birth/high-death misery to low-birth/low-death prosperity.

Demographers and economists have long projected that this would happen, but their forecasts have always underestimated just how fast and how deep this change would happen around the world. For much of the 20th century, it was not expected that world population would ever peak, then it would peak in the 2080s at 10 billion people, then in the 2060s at 9 billion. The safest bets remain that it will peak sooner than that, and at a lower number.

The positive and negative impacts of a shrinking world population have consumed economists and other researchers for decades, and by now we have a very good idea. The negative impacts are an aging population straining healthcare and pensions; shrinking workforces slowing economic growth; and loss of services in rural areas. These are transitional issues that can be addressed with relative ease through policy reform. The positive impacts, however, are self-reinforcing: reduced poverty, empowered women, better-educated children, lower resource consumption, and reduced environmental pressure. It is these gains to which economists attribute the pace of change worldwide surpassing the demographers’ forecasts.

All of this raises an important question: If a declining birth rate is not the catastrophic disaster the pronatalists are painting it as, but rather a significant net positive; why are so many of them advocating swift and sweeping action to raise the birth rate?

We get a clue when we employ tools such as Google Trends to see when all the noise started. “Birth rate” and “pronatalism” had held a steady and unremarkable place in search engine traffic since the Internet began, until 2022 when they rose notably, and 2025 when they launched like a rocket and continue to soar. We need only ponder a moment to consider what other societal movements were rising at that point — tied, like so many other things, to the political fortunes of the religious right in the United States.

It all comes down almost entirely to a little group you may have heard of: The Heritage Foundation: creators of Project 2025, authors of an estimated two-thirds of Donald Trump’s executive orders, and the architects of the modern Christian Nationalist movement. In 2026, The Heritage Foundation published a special report titled Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years. This policy document rightly blames the declining birth rate on the increasing education and independence of American women, and calls for action to fight back against that. The proposals include ending no-fault divorce; limiting college enrollment; and eliminating graduate student loan programs so that women have fewer reasons to delay childbearing. It boosts an initiative called “Ring by Spring” which would have high schools and colleges pressure teenage girls to get engaged before the end of the school term, and thus go straight into having children rather than getting a degree.

At some level, all prominent advocacy for increasing the US birth rate can be traced back to the Seven Mountains Mandate, the evangelical Christian ideology that seeks dominion over seven aspects of society: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. We are currently seeing profound progress on this front, with evangelical influences making clear infiltrations and consolidations within each of these during just the past few years. Family is considered the generative foundation for all seven mountains. As we hear calls by pronatalist leaders like Elon Musk, we see direct parallels between Heritage Foundation proposals and the institutions on which they currently have a stranglehold. Here are just four examples:

1. Heritage proposes NEST accounts, which grant $2,500 at birth to babies of US citizen parents who had married before the age of 30. The so-called Trump Account of $1,000 for newborns is intended as the first step of this.
   
   
2. Heritage proposes the adoption tax credit of about $17,000 be extended to newborns of all married biological parents, increasing by a 25% bonus for three or more children. Trump has proposed the first step of this, a $5,000 “baby bonus” given to all American mothers of newborns; and also a “National Medal of Motherhood” for married US citizen women who give birth to six or more children — a concept lifted directly from historical precedents in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
   
   
3. Heritage proposes publicly funded “marriage bootcamps” where young couples learn skills such as conflict resolution and money management, culminating in group marriage ceremonies. White House aides have confirmed that an expansion of the “baby bonus” plan will include education on menstrual cycles and ovulation timing.
   
   
4. Heritage proposes wide ranging restrictions on divorce: elimination of no-fault divorce, caps on alimony, mandated 50/50 custody, and “covenant marriages.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called for DOT contracts to give priority to communities with higher marriage and birth rates, and lower divorce rates. Want roads? Stay married, and make more babies.

So in fact, the noise in pop culture raising the alarm about declining birth rates and calling for pronatalism has little to do with any impending “end of civilization” and virtually everything to do with spreading Christian Nationalism and the Seven Mountains Mandate.

However, it’s not entirely about that; there is one more powerful factor found in the more extreme end of the pronatalist movement. While the whole idea is largely about Christian Nationalism, part of it is also driven by White Nationalism; in fact, at the more extreme fringe, it’s far more about racism than it is about religion. On certain issues, the Christian Nationalists and White Nationalists actively disagree with each other. For example, The Heritage Foundation is generally anti-IVF (in-vitro fertilization) based on Catholic natural law arguments, while the White Nationalist eugenicists are enthusiastically pro-IVF and pro-genetic engineering. They may disagree on the methods, but they all agree more white Christian babies are needed.

This White Nationalist fringe is well represented within the Silicon Valley “tech right,” where some venture capitalists seek to fund Gattaca-style tech where embryos can be screened for higher IQs and “desirable characteristics,” and Theodore Roosevelt’s eugenics ideas are freely quoted (Roosevelt openly described declining birth rates among white American women as “race suicide,” a term he got from the extremely racist eugenicist Edward A. Ross). The tech right pronatalists seek technology solutions for the “problem” — as they would describe it — of fewer white babies in the United States. And not necessarily well-informed solutions either; one thing Elon Musk has advocated (obviously he’s the very poster child for the tech right) is for solutions to make C-section deliveries more common, since in his opinion, C-sections produce babies with bigger brains and higher intelligence. And again — despite such displays of staggering ignorance, people like Musk are not without influence.

The pronatalism community is a world dominated by the so-called “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, a fear shared by many White Nationalists who believe the white race is in decline and is being gradually replaced by black and brown people in what they term “ethnic substitution.” The Great Replacement was a major theme when NPR reporter Lisa Hagen attended Natal Con 2025, the largest (and only the second annual) pronatalism conference. Attendees were 95% men and 95% white; the racial framing of the birth rate issue lacks any sort of academic or mainstream support, it finds support only among a narrow demographic who fear loss of control over some of their fellow humans.

So are birth rates declining in the United States? Yes they are, just as they long have been in every developed nation as it prospers. International development organizations working in developing nations, like some of those in sub-Saharan Africa, have long known that voluntary access to contraception is the most important first step in breaking a nation’s poverty cycle. It allows women to plan their pregnancies, providing a path for them to get educations, to enter the workforce, and later to have children with proper resources. Such children are healthier, better cared for, and are educated themselves. The reduction of unplanned pregnancies is the best thing any nation can do for itself. Yet the new American pronatalists seek to do exactly the opposite, to reverse the progress made since the 1950s, and to pressure young girls who cannot afford it to have babies; giving them token rewards if they do, and penalizing them if they don’t — all in the misguided pursuit of making more white Christian babies, as if that is an end unto itself. It’s truly bizarre.

So yes, everyone should be aware of the declining birth rates. You should educate yourself on why it’s happening. You should learn about the fallout from that, both the good and the bad, and be aware of the solutions to offset the bad, and let the good build on itself. And perhaps most important of all, be cognizant of the Christian Nationalist and White Nationalist pronatalism communities, and be prepared to steer well clear of the unintended harm they hope to impose.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning