U.S. Population Moves Ever Closer to Zero Growth: A Depopulated Future

“The most serious duty of transmitting human life, for which married persons are the free and responsible collaborators of God the Creator, has always been a source of great joys to them, even if sometimes accompanied by not a few difficulties and by distress.” ― Pope St. Paul VI, Humanae vitae, no. 1

On April 9, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its provisional birth data for 2025. The numbers are sobering.

The U.S. general fertility rate fell to just 53.1 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age – the lowest figure ever recorded in this country.

And the trend shows no signs of stopping. Since 2007, the U.S. fertility rate has dropped by 23 percent. Last year alone, roughly 700,000 fewer children were born than at the 2007 peak.

How Bad Is It?

To grasp just how serious this situation is, consider that earlier this year the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that, beginning in 2030 – just four years from now! – the annual number of deaths in the United States will exceed the annual number of births.

The CBO has lowered its long-term U.S. fertility projection to 1.53 children per woman, far below the 2.1 needed merely to replace the existing population. Practically speaking, what this means is that without immigration, the American population will actually begin to shrink in 2030.

Of course, this is not just an American story. As I have noted in many Spirit & Life columns over the years, more than 130 countries are now below replacement fertility. South Korea’s rate has fallen below one child per woman. Japan is projected to lose nearly a third of its population by 2070. Italy is in a demographic suicide dive.

None of this would have surprised HLI’s founder, Fr. Paul Marx, OSB. As far back as the year 2000, while the rest of the world was still gripped by overpopulation hysteria, Fr. Marx was bluntly warning that “about half the countries in the world, including all the developed countries, now have a non-reproductive birthrate. Entire nations are dying out.”

A quarter-century later, the United States, which for so long resisted the trend of demographic collapse, has joined that bleak list. It seems that the story of American vibrancy and growth is coming to an end, and America is joining the list of geriatric Western nations that have lost their will to live, or at least to thrive.

Washington Wants a Baby Boom

To its credit, the current administration in Washington has actually taken the CDC numbers seriously. President Trump has repeatedly called for what he describes as “a new baby boom.”

According to CBS News, his team has been soliciting pro-natalist proposals from outside advocates. Ideas under discussion include a $5,000 “baby bonus” for new mothers, expanded tax credits for families, a “National Medal of Motherhood,” and menstrual cycle tracking programs to help young women better understand their fertility.

On April 3 the Department of Health and Human Services issued a new Notice of Funding Opportunity for Title X, the federal government’s main “family planning” program, which has for half a century existed primarily to distribute contraceptives to low-income women.

As CBS News reported, the 67-page document contains exactly one reference to contraception, “describing it as overprescribed, associated with negative side effects, and part of a broader ‘overreliance on pharmaceutical and surgical treatments.’”

Emma Waters, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, welcomed the document. “I was particularly encouraged to see language that spoke to the delays in diagnosis for conditions like endometriosis, the need for women to practically understand how their cycle and fertility work, and to ensure that real root-cause was promoted through Title X,” she said.

There is a great deal in this that I welcome. For decades HLI has been sounding the alarm about the devastation wrought by the contraceptive mentality on marriage, family, and fertility. To see a federal government actually step back, however haltingly, from the uncritical promotion of hormonal contraception is a surprising development.

Unfortunately, however, the same administration that is quietly backing away from contraception is aggressively pushing in the opposite direction on in-vitro fertilization (IVF), an industry that treats children as products to be ordered and destroys human embryos on an industrial scale.

There is no “baby boom” worthy of the name that can be built on the mass production and mass destruction of human life in a petri dish. Any serious pro-family agenda must begin by respecting the children it claims to want.

Why Are We Here?

The elephant in the room is this question: why are we here? Why has a country once known for its big, boisterous families come to the point where, on average, women are now welcoming fewer than two children apiece, and where 63 percent of women aged 25 to 29 are now childless?

The standard answer is economic. Houses are too expensive. Childcare is too expensive. Wages have not kept pace. According to recent polling, 71 percent of American adults disagree with the notion that welcoming children is affordable for most people.

I don’t mean to dismiss these pressures. They are real, and any serious pro-family politics must take them seriously. However, the cost-of-living explanation simply cannot bear the weight that secular commentators place upon it.

Americans during the Great Depression were poorer by every measure than Americans are today, and yet they still welcomed children. The post-war generation built large families on a single income, in homes a third the size of today’s average house. Something has changed, and it is not principally the price of milk or even the cost of housing.

Emma Waters of the Heritage Foundation, commenting on the new CDC data, named some of the deeper drivers: “anti-life technologies, economic pressures, bad policies, and cultural movements such as girl-boss feminism” combine to push more and more women toward delaying or forgoing motherhood altogether.

In other words, the cost-of-living explanation points past itself, toward the deeper cultural and spiritual collapse that the data is measuring but cannot diagnose. And that deeper diagnosis was offered nearly six decades ago, by a quiet, scholarly Italian whose prophetic words were vociferously dismissed at the time, but which have been proven correct on every count.

Pope St. Paul VI Saw All of This Coming

On July 25, 1968, Pope St. Paul VI promulgated the now-famous (and famously controversial) encyclical Humanae vitae. In that document, the sainted pope reaffirmed the constant teaching of the Church that the marital act, by its very nature, joins together two meanings that must not be separated: the loving union of husband and wife, and openness to the gift of new life.

The reaction, as we all know, was furious. The encyclical was denounced as cruel, repressive, and out of touch with modern life. Theologians publicly dissented. Bishops equivocated or stayed silent. And within just a few short years, the contraceptive revolution was an established cultural fact across the Western world.

Tragically, however, very few people bothered to read what the pontiff had actually written. In paragraph 17 of Humanae vitae, Pope St. Paul VI laid out, with remarkable foresight, what would happen if the unitive and procreative meanings of the marital act were torn apart.

He warned, in the first place, that contraception would open “a wide and easy road” toward marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. He warned, secondly, that men accustomed to contraceptive practice would lose their reverence for women, and reduce them to mere instruments of selfish enjoyment. And then, in his most chilling warning, he foresaw the danger of the power of contraception passing into the hands of governments hostile to the moral law:

Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people…? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone (no. 17).

More than five decades later, every one of these warnings has come true. Marital fidelity has collapsed. Pornography has industrialized the reduction of women (and men) to mere objects. And governments around the world – including, most notoriously, the U.S. government, as I noted in my recent column on NSSM-200 – have spent decades coercing, sterilizing, and pressuring their own citizens (and the citizens of poorer nations) into having fewer children.

So much for the wisdom of the dissenting theologians of 1968!

When Children Become the Enemy

Twenty-seven years after Humanae vitae, Pope St. John Paul II wrote his great encyclical Evangelium vitae, in which he gave a name to what was happening: the “culture of death.”

In that document, the Holy Father showed that contraception and abortion, although distinct in their moral gravity, are nevertheless “fruits of the same tree.” Both, he wrote, are rooted in “a hedonistic mentality unwilling to accept responsibility in matters of sexuality” and in “a self-centered concept of freedom, which regards procreation as an obstacle to personal fulfilment.”

And then, in a passage that should send a chill down the spine of every reader, he wrote:

The life which could result from a sexual encounter thus becomes an enemy to be avoided at all costs, and abortion becomes the only possible decisive response to failed contraception (no. 13).

Fr. Paul Marx made the same point even earlier: “In every country, bar none, contraception has led to abortion, and once abortion, to infanticide, the prelude to full-blown euthanasia.”

In other words, what we are seeing in the CDC numbers is the predictable, end-stage fruit of a culture taught for two generations to treat its own fertility as a defect to be neutralized. The instinct that whispers “not now, not yet, not this one” to a young couple choosing contraception is the same instinct that whispers “end it” in an abortion clinic waiting room.

A Child Is Always a Gift

Against this dark backdrop, the Catholic Church offers a radically different vision. A child, the Church teaches, is not a burden. A child is not an accessory. A child is not an obstacle, or a luxury good, or a regrettable side-effect of marriage. A child is a gift – indeed, the supreme gift of marriage. As Pope St. John Paul II so beautifully put it in Familiaris consortio:

Conjugal love…does not end with the couple, because it makes them capable of the greatest possible gift, the gift by which they become cooperators with God for giving life to a new human person (no. 14).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts the same truth even more directly: “A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift…The ‘supreme gift of marriage’ is a human person” (no. 2378).

In other words, a culture that learns to receive children as gifts will tend to welcome them. A culture that learns to evaluate children as costs or inconveniences to be weighed against career, leisure, finances, or convenience will tend to refuse them.

Hope Begins in the Home

So, what is to be done? The temptation, when faced with such alarming numbers, is to look first to government policy. Tax credits. Baby bonuses. Paid family leave. Housing reform.

All of these can help, and a serious pro-family politics must absolutely pursue them. However, no government program can manufacture the desire for children. Hungary, China, and the Nordic countries have all tried generous pro-natalist incentives, and all have so far failed to reverse the trend.

That is because the desire for children is not, in the end, an economic preference. As I never tire of pointing out, it is the fruit of hope – hope that the world is good, that life is worth giving, that God Himself is the Author of our existence and the loving Father of our children. And those convictions cannot be nurtured by tax incentives. They are formed in the family long before they show up in any government survey of fertility intentions.

This is why the most important pro-natalist work in this country is not happening in Washington, D.C. It is happening in the homes of those Catholic couples who, in the face of a relentlessly hostile culture, are bravely welcoming children, raising them in the faith, and witnessing publicly to the joy of family life.

It begins with a young couple who, in their wedding vows, mean every word about being open to children. It begins with a wife who, against the relentless mockery of the surrounding culture, quietly delights in being a mother. It begins with a parish priest who teaches Humanae vitae plainly and lovingly, instead of burying it. It begins with grandparents who pray for their children and grandchildren by name, every day, that they may have the courage to welcome life. It begins, in the end, with each one of us.

Pope St. Paul VI was treated as a relic in 1968. The CDC’s April 9 report is, among many other things, his vindication. Let us pray for our young couples, that they may welcome children with joy and confidence, even in a culture that mocks them. Let us pray for our pastors, that they may proclaim the truth about marriage, family, and the gift of life plainly and lovingly. And let us pray for our nation, that it may recover the hope on which all civilization rests, before it is too late.