“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth.” (Genesis 1:28)
President Trump is going God one better. God told Adam and Eve to start having children. The president is considering adding an incentive — paying couples $5,000 to begat.
The fertility rate in the U.S. has been declining for the last decade. In 2023 it dropped to 1.6 births per woman, the lowest in a century.
There are many reasons. The most obvious is abortion. The Pew Research Center cites figures from the CDC: “The last year for which the CDC reported a yearly national total for abortions is 2021. It found there were 625,978 abortions in the District of Columbia and the 46 states with available data that year, up from 597,355 in those states and D.C. in 2020. The corresponding figure for 2019 was 607,720.” Stopping or severely restricting abortions would go a long way toward solving the birth dearth.
Absent that possibility we are down to the reasons people can’t, or won’t, have children. Can’t is usually biological. Won’t is more likely psychological. Perhaps the most frequent reason given by won’t couples includes the expense of having children, the supposed restrictions on parents’ travel, general freedom, the disappointments and pain that can come when kids rebel against their parents, or the consequences should parents divorce.