It’s a little hard to take seriously the warnings of those who proclaim an “existential crisis” due to declining fertility rates when they won’t even address the primary cause of those declining rates and are not aware of the primary cause in declining fertility. Even when the crisis is real.
The U.S. is facing a worsening fertility crisis, according to analysts.
While the nation’s fertility rate has been declining for decades, it dropped to a new record low in 2025. Experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that deregulation, improving fertility care and bringing down costs related to raising children could help boost the declining birth rate.
The U.S. general fertility rate was 53.1 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 in 2025, down from 53.8 in 2024, according to National Center for Health Statistics data published in April.
“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,” Heritage Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Emma Water told the DCNF. “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.”
“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 added that a drop in U.S. marriage rates is one of the “primary drivers of declining birth rates.”
The U.S. marriage rate dropped to a 140-year low in 2019 and has yet to fully bounce back, The New York Times reported. Less than half of American households were married couples in 2025, marking a significant decrease from 50 years earlier, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.
Prioritizing infertility treatment and early diagnosis could help boost the U.S. fertility rate, according to Waters.
First, prioritizing infertility treatment will only make matters worse. Average female fertility has been dropping steadily since 1900 due to the frozen gene and the inability of natural selection to continue keeping the human genome free of deleterious mutations, so using technology to help the genetically deficient to reproduce is digging the hole deeper. This is a very serious scientific problem that concerns genetic degradation and most of the solutions appear to range from ghastly and politically impossible to unthinkable and inhuman.
Second, the problem with fertility rates is about female choices, not genetic degradation. The problem is that women like Emma Water are college-educated and Senior Policy Analysts at the Heritage Foundation instead of getting married at 20 and having 4-6 children.
This is not a mystery and this is not in doubt. The correlation between post-8th-grade female education and declining fertility is extremely high, and while correlation is not necessarily causation, a high degree of correlation does tend to point toward correct causality. And this causation is sufficiently well-known that overpopulation advocates specifically push for female education in order to reduce birth rates.