Want To Fix The Birth Dearth? Make Marriage Matter
29th March 2025
Melanie Israel from The Daily Signal.
A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about birth data for 2023 is out. For everyone concerned about the long-term decline in America’s birth rate, the report doesn’t show strong signs that much has changed
A cultural change brought about the ‘birth dearth’, and a cultural change will be needed to reverse it. Good luck with that, fringe magazine.
Why should we care about declining birth rates, and what’s driving the trend? As a recent Heritage Foundation report warns, U.S. fertility is now below replacement. Fewer births and our historic low fertility rate will affect the future economy. It will affect programs like Social Security. Don’t forget the military. What about caregiving as the elderly age? A declining population will affect our nation’s future in more ways than we can count.
I would argue that, with automation increasingly replacing lower level human workers with machines, we ought to welcome the fact that our population is shrinking, since that reduces the problem of a surplus of unemployed underclass people who wind up turning to crime, such as robbery and drug-dealing, to live. Social Security is a political problem–it’s basically a big Ponzi scheme–and it will require a political solution (which I don’t expect to happen until it crashes). And the military part of the automation revolution as well, and will gradually shift over being more machines and fewer people. More births is not the solution to every problem.
If you ask 10 people why the number of births keeps going down, you’ll probably get 10 different answers, from housing and child care costs to economic anxiety to student loan debt. While there’s not one sole reason (and therefore not one single policy solution,) at the heart of the issue is marriage—fewer marriages, specifically.
The link between marriage and birth-rate is not that strong. We have plenty of births outside of wedlock in the U.S. (40.5%), and we’re not even in the top ten for number of out-of-marriage births. Marriage no longer has much to do with it. (This has more to do with the agenda of The Daily Signal people to promote marriage rather than any realistic attempt to figure out what the actual cause might be.)
There are three elephants in the room that the chattering class are ignoring:
- hormonal birth control
- feminism
- social media
How these inter-relate and are causing the current situation would take many books to explain, and indeed they have:
Dr. David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies in Human Mating
Dr. David M. Buss, Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between)
Rollo Tomassi, The Rational Male (part of a series of five books, the sixth is in preparation)
These people need to do some honest research and look at the facts objectively rather than through the distortion field of a preconceived ideology. As Mulder liked to say, the truth is out there.