by Katrina Trinko
The baby bust is here.
The reality is clear: Americans are having fewer kids. In 2023, America had 2 percent fewer births than in 2022, hitting a record low, according to newly released finalized data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While Americans haven’t had enough kids to keep population levels stable for decades, there has been a steep decline in recent years: The number of 2023 births was 17 percent lower than the number of births in 2007.
Yet at the recent Democratic National Convention, Planned Parenthood provided free vasectomies and abortion pills. An 18-foot inflatable IUD, a type of birth control device, was placed on display near the convention by Americans for Contraception.
In her speech, Oprah Winfrey negatively highlighted GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s 2021 quip about “childless cat ladies.” (Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, has said the remark was sarcastic and about political leaders, not individuals struggling with fertility.)
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., told the New York delegation, per the Washington Examiner, “The cat ladies of America are united, OK?”
USA Today reported, “What’s the hot merch at the DNC? ’Cat lady’ T-shirts and ’my black job’ buttons,” a reference to a remark Donald Trump made to black journalists about “black jobs.”
America’s Future Is Filled With Seniors, Not Children
So much for caring about the future of the country, which looks bleaker if births don’t increase.
A shrinking population doesn’t bode well for any nation. A smaller tax base will affect government spending and benefits or lead to increased taxes, and fewer workers will create economic challenges. “Low U.S. fertility combined with an aging population have the potential to generate significant headwinds to economic growth,” admitted the Biden administration in a brief this March.
Yet a shrinking population is what we’re on track for. By 2029, there will be more seniors, adults 65 or older, than children in the United States, according to a November estimate by the U.S. Census Bureau. By 2038, the U.S. is expected to have more deaths than births.
Furthermore, the data suggests that it’s conservatives, not liberals, who are having more children, making the Democrat convention’s focus even more concerning. “The 17 states with the highest general fertility rates are all designated by Cook Political Report as Republican, or GOP-leaning, including such Republican strongholds as North Dakota, Nebraska, Louisiana, Utah, and Texas,” writes Steven Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, in City Journal. “By contrast, the bottom six states—and nine of the 10 states with the lowest fertility rates—are all either Democratic or Democratic-leaning.”
Republicans also seem to prefer larger families. A 2023 Gallup Poll found that 50 percent of Republicans, compared to 40 percent of Democrats, wanted three or more children.
So maybe it’s time for less “childless cat ladies” rah-rah rhetoric from the Left and more pondering about how we can increase the birthrate.
To put my cards on the table: I’m a 36-year-old woman who has no children (and while I don’t have a cat, I do own an absurd mini poodle). One of my brothers is a Catholic priest, and another one is studying to be one, and given the Catholic Church’s position on priestly celibacy, neither of them will have children.
I don’t think my life or their lives are less valuable because we are childless. I don’t think Mother Teresa made the wrong call by not having biological children, and I certainly don’t think Jesus Christ was a failure for not having kids.
But a nuance that seems to be increasingly lost in our childish political squabbles is that you can see that all people, regardless of parenthood status, have inherent value and dignity and that, at the same time, it would be better for our society if we had more children.
Why Americans Aren’t Having Children
Not everyone can or should have children. But more Americans should reconsider their reasons for not having children.
In July, Pew Research Center released an extensive survey of childless Americans. When it came to younger Americans, those 18-49, only 13 percent citied infertility or other medical matters as a major reason they didn’t have children.
The top major reason, identified by 57 percent of respondents, was “they just don’t want to.” Other reasons cited as major (respondents were allowed to pick multiple major reasons) were wanting to focus on job or other interests (44 percent), concerns about the state of the world (38 percent), concerns about affording a child (36 percent), concerns about the environment and climate change (26 percent), and not finding the right partner (24 percent).
Some of these we as a society can help address, from pushing corporations to be more family-friendly to promoting sensible economic policies that make housing and food more affordable. If the corporate media would start allowing a more honest conversation about the environment and climate change, Americans would realize it’s possible to both protect our world and welcome more children, instead of succumbing in despair to the Malthusian mindset.
But as shown by the 57 percent saying “they just don’t want to” have children, this is also a cultural and spiritual crisis.
Missing the Magic Children Bring
When did we lose the sense of the joy children bring?
Sure, as anyone who is a parent or who has observed a parent knows, parenting is incredibly hard work. It involves insane levels of patience, wisdom, and, well, grit.
But what happened to talking about the good stuff of parenting?
Recently, on Reddit, which generally is a place where the dialogue skews toward recognizing the downsides of having children, there was a thread in a forum for women aged 30 and older from a user asking people to make the case for why she should have kids.
Another user responded by talking about how her mindset had shifted after she had become an aunt, after her brother and sister-in-law had an unplanned pregnancy. The user, “heylookoverthere_,” wrote that she thought during the pregnancy the couple was being “weird and irresponsible” and worried about the baby being “annoying and an inconvenience.”
“But then he came along, and my worries just … didn’t feel relevant anymore. He wasn’t just an abstract idea of a baby. He was an actual baby. He was a real human being with a head full of hair and little fingers and toes that were just learning to grab things,” she wrote, adding:
He slept with his mouth open in my arms for two hours while I worked at my laptop with one hand, letting them just take their first shower and have a nap, and I just looked at him and thought, how incredible is this? An adorable baby who is so loved, a brand new human. A year ago, he didn’t exist and now, he’s sleeping in my arms, and it’s going numb, and I’m working incredibly slowly but I wouldn’t have put him down for anything. How lucky are we to have him?
And every day and every week since then, I’ve watched him change. I was the first person he learned to smile at. I watched him grow out of clothes that were once too big for him within like 2 weeks. I watched him go from a blob to opening his eyes and recognizing people. I watched him at baby swim classes and how excited he was when he figured out how to splash his hands in the water. I watched him start to stand, I watched him hear music for the first time and start bouncing where he was sitting. I watched him start to discover things. I watched him develop a personality. He’s brave and daring like his mum, and strong and curious like his dad. He has the best chuckle. The happiest belly laugh. He finds everything so funny, so entertaining. I want to make him laugh all the time.
And they love him so much. Both our families love him so much. There is so much more love than I anticipated could be possible. My brother says he never thought he was capable of love like this, never thought it was possible to love something so much. I would move mountains for this child. I would upend my life if he needed me. It’s brought both sides of parents closer together, both families closer. It’s changed my own relationship with my partner, and we’re not even his parents.
That’s when it started to feel magical to me. … And yeah, they’re tired all the time, but for the first time, I can see why it’s worth it.
These are the kinds of “magical” stories we need to hear more about. In my own life, my reason for not having children has been not finding the right man (until I met my wonderful fiancé). Yet I also, looking at the struggles, sometimes felt ambivalence.
However, in recent years, between acquiring nieces and dear friends having babies, I’ve spent more time with kids in any time since my own childhood. I’ve found myself joyful just because my niece stood up in her crib and breathed “Hi” when she saw me, just because my friend’s toddler said my name, just because another friend’s daughter shared her first birthday cupcake with me.
In an interview with Megyn Kelly last month, Tucker Carlson spoke about the Vance comment, which Vance made during an interview with Carlson when he was still on Fox News.
“I’m pretty sure I egged him on to say something like that … I think I’m responsible for that,” Carlson said about the remark.
But he went on to discuss the heart of the matter: how our culture is missing out because we aren’t having children.
“I feel sorry for childless people, whether they have cats or not,” Carlson added. “And I mean it as someone who has four children who are the root of my happiness. I really feel compassion. And the whole point, well, the intended point—I may have distorted it in getting cable newsy and being nasty to people—but the whole point is, we should be encouraging people to experience the things that make them the happiest.
“And I think any parent will tell you, as hard as it is having kids, that is one of the main sources of happiness for people from the beginning of time. And if we’re discouraging that or making it impossible for people to have kids, that’s on us.”
Carlson’s right. Sure, we might be losing out on economic prosperity because of our child-avoidant culture, but even more so, we might be losing out on one of our best chances at a happy, fulfilling life.
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Katrina Trinko is the editor-in-chief of The Daily Signal. Send an email to Katrina.
Photo “Young Family” by Agung Pandit Wiguna.
