Washington D.C., May 2, 2024 / 17:55 pm (CNA).
The record-low fertility rates in the United States and the decline in fertility globally are driven by both social and economic factors, according to Catholic panelists speaking at an event hosted by the Institute for Human Ecology (IHE).
According to provisional data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week, the 2023 American fertility rate fell to 54.4 births per 1,000 women, which is the lowest in recorded history. The total fertility rate, which estimates how many children the average woman will have over her lifetime, fell to just over 1.6 — well below the replacement rate of 2.1.
The panel, titled “The Population Bust,” took place at the Catholic University of America. The institute is affiliated with the university’s Department of Politics. The panel was moderated by Catholic New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.
How fertility began to trend downward
In 1800, the fertility rate was more than four times the current rate, standing strong at more than seven births for every woman over her lifetime.
The rate steadily decreased to just over three births for every woman in 1925, until taking a large dip to 2.06 during the Great Depression. Fertility rose again at the end of the Depression and the end of World War II with the baby boom, to more than 3.5 births for every woman by 1960 — then plummeted immediately thereafter.
Apart from a few small short-term bumps, the country’s fertility rate has never recovered from the post-1960 downward trajectory.
Catherine Pakaluk, an IHE scholar, mother of eight, and author of the recently published book “Hannah’s Children,” said the gradual decline since 1800 was primarily a result of industrialization. When the country was more agrarian, children were an economic necessity to help with work and to provide care for their parents as they aged. But industrialization and the social safety nets ended that incentive.
Before industrialization, Pakaluk noted, the mindset was, “You’re going to do this really hard thing because it’s the sort of thing you need to do.”
Yet fertility had mostly remained above the 2.1 replacement rate until the 1960s when there were significant shifts in the culture. In 1960, just before birth rates began to plummet again, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first birth control pill and the women’s liberation movement began to take hold of the country.
When the “contraceptive revolution” occurred, along with a rise in feminism, Pakaluk said many women still wanted to have children but began to prioritize professional goals instead.
“They also want to have jobs and careers,” Pakaluk added. “Literally, that’s the problem. They want to have two things that are in conflict. … Women’s large-scale entry into the paid workforce is the thing that’s in tension with having the children they want to have.”
Timothy Carney, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, father of eight, and author of the recently published book “Family Unfriendly,” said the United States has become “a contraceptive society.” He lamented the social view that children are simply “your individual deliberate choice,” which he said emboldens the mindset that this “freed up everybody else from having to help out.”
“Our society is failing to make people want to have kids,” Carney said. “Our society is falling short in all these ways. … It is our culture that is family-unfriendly.”
Carney said that having children used to simply be a part of life, but now people postpone and agonize over the decision. He criticized “helicopter parenting” as one of the reasons people are afraid to have more children.
“Millennials were more helicoptered as kids, and so their view of what parenting is was much more daunting than [Generation] X, where it was ‘come home when the street lights turn on’ when we were little,” Carney said.
“It’s our culture’s values that are off,” Carney added. “And it’s all tied to the overparenting [and] the strange new mating and dating norms, which [are based on] a belief in hyper-individualism.”
Complexities in fixing these trends
For her recent book, Pakaluk interviewed women who have defied these trends and built large families with their husbands. The reasons that those women decided to have large families, she noted, were rooted in religious faith.
According to Pakaluk, these women believed that “children are blessings from God, expressions of God’s goodness and the purpose of my marriage.”
“Churches and religious people are actually holding the one thing that can make the biggest difference because it’s either true or it’s not true that children are blessings [and] that they’re always valuable,” Pakaluk said. “… If it’s true, it’s not propaganda to say it. … If it’s true and it’s not propaganda, people can begin to believe this.”
Pakaluk said the central assertion of Christianity is that “God became Man as a human infant and that reality is supposed to color the way we see the value of human infancy.” Although the women she spoke to have goals and responsibilities apart from their roles as mothers, she said the faith component ensures that they prioritize building a family first.
“To get more children, you have to find some way … to argue that this particular good — the ‘children’ good — is of greater value or more importance,” Pakaluk added.
Carney suggested that some of the cultural difficulties could be mitigated through economic incentives. He criticized the failure to pass a child tax credit and rebuked the mindset that society has no role in supporting families.
“People have less community support,” he said.
Still, Carney cited the importance of a resurgence in faith as a fundamental component of raising fertility rates.
“The secular story — the godless story — ends up being too sad to want to continue the human race,” Carney said.
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So easy. The issue is selfishness, love of money and the need to use it to buy objects to impress others, and the belief that sleeping around is not only desirable but to be applauded. I watch in amazement as women prioritize jobs over children. The few who manage to conceive and bring a child to term then often hire a person to raise their child for them so they can return to their main object of interest—work.. Frequently, these people have a lower education than the parents, may not speak the language well , and are unlikely to be a person the parent might select to be a friend in other circumstances, for example. Yet they are entrusting their child to them.Exceedingly foolish. A saying I once heard goes,” Nobody ever lay in bed dying and said they wished they had spent more time at work.”
I’m all for flourishing families and for mothers who prioritize their children’s welfare but I don’t think we need to denigrate nannies.
Being familiar with another language is commonplace and encouraged in Europe and elsewhere. Hearing it spoken at home as a child is the best way to become fluent.
If a mother doesn’t have friends who resemble her child’s caretaker perhaps she should consider expanding her social bubble.
LJ the middle class no longer exists. Most working people are struggling just to live not to buy baubles or to lay around watching TV. Working more than one part time job is common, often for both spouses. The fraction of the population that still appears to be well off include retired Boomers and yuppies plus those who got into professions on daddy’s nickel. There have not been honest unemployment or inflation statistics for decades under either party or this would be obvious. There is another problem of an entirely different sort unfortunately. Back a dozen years ago there was considerable attention to the fact that was a long-term decline in the fertility of males. Instead of research dollars going towards getting answers the subject suddenly was dropped. Suppression by the antilife elements in society is the likely culprit.
The West has lost its soul…
THE MENU: Yes, there’s the related and tectonic shift from agricultural locales to an industrialized world. Together with the centralized dominance of the state and a century of total war, the marginalization and disintegration of families (“the first and fundamental structure for ‘human ecology’,” JPII, Centesimus Annus, CA, n. 39) and of all other non-state institutions. And now the exponentially rising costs of basic shelter combined with the insecurity of employment, and the dispersal of stable and supporting neighborhoods and extended families. And, the contraceptive medicine-cabinet mindset combined with existential questions whether the cornucopia trajectory of open-range Technocracy is self-limiting…
Taking an additional clue from ancient HISTORY:
“Late marriages and small families became the rule, and men satisfied their sexual instincts by homosexuality or by relations with slaves and prostitutes. This aversion to marriage and the deliberate restriction of the family by the practice of infanticide and abortion was undoubtedly the main cause of the decline of ancient Greece, as Polybius pointed out in the second century B.C. And the same factors were equally powerful in the society of the Empire. . . .” (Christopher Dawson, “The Patriarchal Family in History,” The Dynamics of World History, 1962).
And, about the besieged place of TRUTH-TELLING, St. John Paul II still reminds us in Veritatis Splendor of our baked-in moral absolutes. While the incongruous Cardinal Fernandez pretends to harmonize our spiraling historic moment by giving us both Dignitas Infinita and the blessing of “irregular couples” of all stripes.
“If the foundations be destroyed, What can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3).
SHIFTING GEARS from past centuries, JP II remarked, “In fact I am convinced that the various religions, now and in the future, will have a pre-eminent role in preserving peace and in building a society worthy of man” (CA, 1991, n. 60). A big stretch since 9/11 (2001) and Pachamama, but without inventing man as infinita (!), he does counsel us that “Man receives from God his essential dignity and with it the capacity to transcend every social order to as to move toward truth and goodness” (n. 38).
TOO BAD that Catholic universities abdicated from lending a hand when they, themselves, demonstrated (!) on campus by signing the Land O’ Lakes Declaration of adolescent autonomy, in the late 1960s. And, to bad, too, about Der Synodal Weg and stuff like that…
You cannot force people to have children they do not want or cannot afford. It’s not selfish to delay or avoid having children. It’s simply a choice people can make based on whatever set of circumstances they are confronted with in life. It is indeed very selfish to demand other people have children just because of your personal beliefs. Are you going to pay for those children you demand other people have? Are you going to offer up NEW (not secondhand) items such as clothing, strollers, furniture, toys, etc.? Are you going to pony up the cash needed to pay the hospital bills post birth? Will you be offering to pay for the healthcare of the children you demand others give birth to? Will you open your wallets to feed each individual child? Will you, free of charge, offer all of your free time to help babysit and care for the children you demand other people have? Will you pay for housing for them? Education? If you are not willing to pay out of pocket to help then you don’t get to decide what other people do when it comes to having children. You don’t like that? Tough bananas.
Anyone fretting about the birthrate is welcome to go and have more children themselves. But it is not right to pressure anyone else to have babies they can ill afford or just plain might not want. It’s not right at all.
Our culture pays only lip service to marriage, children, and family.
And religion.
(When it is not downright hostile).
Get rid of welfare/Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid. (Eliminating brick-and-mortor 8 hour Monday to Friday K-8 education would be a bonus).
.
The birthrate will bounce back. It might take a generation, but it will bounce back.
Do away with public schools? Why? Get rid of Medicare/Medicaid? This is insanity.
Don’t ignore the spiritual aspect of all of this.
The three main drivers that combine to lead women out of the home are – the world, the flesh and the devil. The combined power of seduction of these spiritual enemies of God are winning because we as parents and grandparents, as well as generations before us, have failed to pass on the Catholic faith in word and in deed. They are few, indeed, who have sacrificed and struggled to keep God’s presence in the homes, schools and workplaces of this once Faith-filled nation. As a society, we have fallen into the clutches of this seduction to the point, now, where there is no way out. We have collectively made this mess. Now God will use it to purify us by means of the pain and suffering we have freely chose to bring upon ourselves.
Canada has a child tax credit and maternity leave. Unless I’m mistaken, Canada’s fertility rate isn’t a whole lot better than that of the U.S.
Yes, our society is family-unfriendly and getting more so every day. Young women are generally not made aware that fertility drops rather seriously after age 30. Feminism has pushed marriage and family to the back burner.
P.S. In an article on Catherine Pakaluk’s book, in First Things I think it was, she says that the birthrate won’t recover until religious orders recover.
Food for thought.
Oops. Catholic Herald, Apr.30 (not First Things).