America’s Birthrate Crisis: The Contraceptive Roots of the Population Bust
Is the world facing an existentially threatening crisis of overpopulation? Until a few years ago, practically every major Western politician, institution, and media outlet was in lockstep. Yes, the world was overpopulated. And it was only going to get worse, with consequences including ecological disaster, warfare, famine, hunger, and poverty.
As I have pointed out a number of times over the past few years, the tide has gradually been turning. More and more governments and demographers are openly acknowledging that not only is overpopulation not an imminent threat, but the real problem we face is too few children.
However, the publication of a feature-length guest essay in The New York Times, that bastion of liberal journalism, just a few days ago is one of the most dramatic pieces of evidence of just how totally the tide has turned.
It also makes a point that too few people are aware of: the birth dearth isn’t just something affecting Japan and South Korea. It has hit the U.S…hard.
The Population Bust is Coming for the U.S.
The title of the piece is, “The Population Bust Is Coming Sooner Than Anyone Is Prepared For.” The author is Lyman Stone, PhD, a demographer who directs the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.
Dr. Stone opens with a story from the eve of American independence. In 1775, a Harvard professor named Edward Wigglesworth calculated that the colonists were doubling their numbers every twenty-five years and projected that by the close of the twentieth century there would be more than a billion Americans. Today, however, there are only about 340 million.
The question Dr. Stone poses is whether America is about to start counting down instead of up.
The numbers he marshals are sobering. The American fertility rate has fallen below 1.6 children per woman – the CDC’s provisional figure for 2025 is 1.57, the lowest ever recorded – far beneath the 2.1 needed simply to hold a population steady.
If the trend continues, Dr. Stone calculates in a recent report, the U.S. population will largely stop growing in the 2030s and will begin to shrink in the 2050s. “Peak America,” he writes, “may come before millennials meet their grandkids (if they have any).”
The High Cost of a Shrinking Population
Official forecasters assure us that decline will not arrive until the 2080s or later. Dr. Stone, however, argues that these forecasts rest on two pieces of wishful thinking. The first is the assumption of permanently high immigration. However, this assumption fails to take into consideration the fact that birthrates are collapsing across the entire planet, and the supply of young migrants is drying up.
The second is the comforting myth that young women are merely delaying childbearing. Research shows, Dr. Stone notes, that delays in childbearing are usually not made up. Increasingly, women are not postponing children. They are forgoing them altogether.
And the decline is no blip. As Dr. Stone puts it:
Birthrates have fallen almost continuously for nearly 20 years, an entire generation. They have fallen through good economies and bad, through Republican administrations and Democratic ones, through every tax credit and child-care subsidy.
Follow the trajectory out, and each American generation will soon be more than 30 percent smaller than the one before it. Dr. Stone describes what this already looks like in his home state of Kentucky: towns left to be reclaimed by “weeds and rust,” sinking real estate values, hour-long school bus rides, and the “bitterness among those left behind to watch their civilization rot.” Only one state in the union, South Dakota, still has a birthrate anywhere near replacement level.
These are not mere statistics. A healthy civilization requires people. It needs a population sufficient to grow the food, do the work, invest, build, and care for the sick and the old. It needs taxpayers to sustain the programs on which tens of millions of elderly Americans depend. Dr. Stone warns that population decline will strain entitlements, damage the economy, stifle innovation, and produce chronic labor shortages. With each generation smaller than the last, where exactly are the workers, the nurses, the builders, and the taxpayers of 2060 supposed to come from?
“No matter what you believe to be the cause of falling birthrates,” he writes, “that decline is unlikely to spontaneously reverse: There’s no marriage boom on the horizon, young people aren’t switching off their phones, housing isn’t about to become vastly more affordable, and the decline of religion might have paused, but no great religious revival is in sight.”
None of This Would Have Surprised Fr. Marx
For those of us who have labored in the pro-life and family movement for decades, there is a grim vindication in reading such an essay in the pages of The New York Times.
HLI’s founder, Fr. Paul Marx, OSB, was warning of exactly this while the rest of the world was still panicking about overpopulation. He founded the Population Research Institute, as he explained in an interview, “to combat the myth of overpopulation” and “to publicize the dramatic fall in birth rates, especially in the developed countries. As you well know, about half the countries in the world, including all the developed countries in the world, now have a non-reproductive birthrate. Entire nations are dying out.”
For saying such things, Fr. Marx and other pro-life leaders were dismissed as cranks.
Fr. Marx’s deepest conviction, repeated as he travelled to 91 countries over more than forty years, was that the collapse begins with contraception – what he called “the chief source of baby-killing.” As he said: “Once you have widespread contraception, you get … a pervasive, metastasizing moral cancer that destroys the Church, the family, the youth, and the nation.”
The “experts” of his day, remember, were busy predicting the opposite apocalypse. As I recounted in this column this spring, when the arch-doomsayer Paul Ehrlich died, the overpopulation panic he ignited has had catastrophic humanitarian consequences. It gave the world forced abortion in China, forced sterilization in India and Peru, and coercive contraception campaigns across the developing world – all funded by Western governments and international agencies in the name of “saving” humanity from too many children. Untold millions have suffered, sometimes unimaginably, because of the overpopulation hysteria.
Here is the tragic irony: the panic is now dying out, but its machinery lives on. The same Western governments that now fret about collapsing birthrates continue to subsidize abortion and contraception at home and abroad, and to hedge parenthood about with a hundred disincentives. We are, in effect, paying to make the problem worse.
Just last week, I wrote about how Planned Parenthood once again has access to hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in the United States. Even as we are facing a looming population winter, we are throwing our money at the chief anti-natal, anti-human organization in the country!
How Contraception Fueled America’s Birthrate Crisis
Why are the babies not coming? Dr. Stone points to delayed marriage, screens, housing costs, and the decline of religion. He is right. But there is also a deeper root, one that almost no one in the secular pronatalist conversation will name: the near-universal acceptance of contraception, and the mentality that comes with it.
Pope St. Paul VI taught in Humanae vitae that the unitive and procreative meanings of the marital act can never be separated. And that is because contraception is not a neutral technology. It treats fertility as a pathology to be suppressed and pregnancy as a disease to be prevented. It severs the bond between love-making and life-making that God joined together. It normalizes casual sex, which cheapens marriage; and when contraception fails, abortion stands ready as the backstop. Nearly sixty years of this, and we are surprised that the cradles are empty?
The wreckage of those sixty years is all around us: a general breakdown in sexual ethics, an entertainment culture saturated with sex and contemptuous of chastity, plummeting marriage rates, and epidemics of loneliness and pornography. That same hyper-sexualized culture makes it difficult for many people even to hear the Church’s teaching on human sexuality, let alone to recognize its beauty. Yet every year that passes vindicates it further.
Writing in The Catholic Thing earlier this year, Francis X. Maier traced the collapse to its cultural source. “Christianity strongly encouraged permanent marriages and large families,” he observes. “As Europe secularized, that moral pressure disappeared.”
“Today, most children grow up seeing small families as normal,” he added. “Their own fertility adjusts downward accordingly. What makes this reality so hard to reverse is that a modernity rooted in the sovereign self and its material appetites has taught so many of us to value these features.”
Unfortunately, a strong percentage of Catholics contracept at rates little different from their neighbors. Many Catholic marriages are, by choice, fruitless. And from too many pulpits: silence.
It was already so in Fr. Marx’s day. “Contraception is an enormous evil and the gateway to abortion,” he told an interviewer in the mid-1990s, before asking a question that is even more relevant today: “But how many American bishops condemn contraception?”
When the Church’s own pastors will not teach what Humanae vitae teaches, we can hardly be surprised that the faithful do not live it. This failure to defend couples’ power to cooperate with God in creating new life has eroded reverence for life itself, and for the sanctity of marriage.
Related: Ever heard that contraception is the best way to stop abortions?
The Remedy Isn’t Just Economic. This Is a Crisis of Hope.
The remedy must focus on marriage and family life. As Pope Leo XIV said at the Jubilee of Families last June, “today’s world needs the marriage covenant in order to know and accept God’s love and to defeat, thanks to its unifying and reconciling power, the forces that break down relationships and societies.”
At that same Mass, the Holy Father described families as the “cradle of the future of humanity.” He is right, and the demographers are now saying the same thing. The family is not one lifestyle option among many. It is the place where civilizations are born – or not born.
Dr. Stone, for his part, calls for serious family policy: real money for parents, an end to the marriage penalties buried in our tax and welfare codes, family-sized housing, and “a culture that treats children as a future worth having rather than a lifestyle expense.”
Good. Let us have all of it. Rather than spending money on Planned Parenthood or more wars, we should be supporting families as much as we can.
But in the end, no tax credit can supply what is finally missing, because the deficit is not fiscal but spiritual: hope. People who believe the future is good bring children into it. People who worship the sovereign self do not.
The Church’s Answer: Truth, Hope, and the Witness of Families
Reading Dr. Stone’s essay, I found myself thinking of Newton’s first law of motion: a body at rest stays at rest, and a body in motion continues in motion, unless some outside force acts upon it. Our civilization’s flight from marriage, family, and fertility is precisely such a body in motion. It will not stop on its own. A force must act upon it.
That force is the truth, proclaimed in season and out of season: the truth about the human person, about the sanctity of life, and about the sacredness of marriage. It means evangelization that actually evangelizes. It means preaching that defends the Church’s perennial teaching instead of apologizing for it. And it means the quiet, powerful witness of ordinary Catholic families who welcome children generously and visibly delight in them.
Dr. Stone ends his essay by observing that the question for America’s 250th birthday is “how many more birthdays we want it to have, both for its babies and as a country.”
The Church has always known the answer. The first commandment God gave the human race was not a prohibition but a blessing: “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28). As we celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday, let us pray for this blessing upon it: the blessing of children, of youth, of happy families, of a thriving, hopeful civilization.
Human Life International
As president of Human Life International, Fr. Boquet is a leading expert on the international pro-life and family movement, having journeyed to nearly 90 countries on pro-life missions over the last decade. Father Boquet works with pro-life and family leaders in 116 counties that partner with HLI to proclaim and advance the Gospel of Life. Read his full bio here.
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