(The Economic Collapse Blog)—The birth rate in the United States just keeps setting one dismal record after another. In fact, according to the CDC it just dropped to the lowest level ever recorded. We are literally not even replacing ourselves, and that has all sorts of implications for our future. For instance, if we don’t produce enough offspring, there simply will not be enough workers to support Social Security and Medicare and those programs will inevitably collapse. A society with lots of old people and relatively few young people will result in poverty for everyone. So the truth is that the birth rate crisis is going to ultimately affect all of us.
In order for the population of our nation to remain perfectly stable, women need to be giving birth to an average of 2.1 children because not all children make it to adulthood.
Sadly, the birth rate in the United States is now way below replacement level.
The CDC just announced that the birth rate in the U.S. fell below 1.6 children per woman in 2024…
The United States’ total fertility rate fell to a record low in 2024, dipping below 1.6 children per woman, according to new federal data released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This marks a significant demographic milestone for a country that once stood apart among developed nations for maintaining a replacement-level birth rate of around 2.1 children per woman.
Our society is not growing.
Our society is dying.
If you go back to the early 1960s, our birth rate was hovering around 3.5 children per woman, but it has been on a downward trend ever since…
In the early 1960s, the U.S. total fertility rate was around 3.5, but plummeted to 1.7 by 1976 after the Baby Boom ended. It gradually rose to 2.1 in 2007 before falling again, aside from a 2014 uptick. The rate in 2023 was 1.621 but inched down in 2024 to 1.599, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
So what has caused such a dramatic shift?
According to CBS News, on average U.S. women are waiting longer to have children, and many are choosing never to have children at all…
The U.S. was once among only a few developed countries with a rate that ensured each generation had enough children to replace itself — about 2.1 kids per woman. But it has been sliding in America for close to two decades as more women are waiting longer to have children or never taking that step at all.
I think that it is important to also point out that many couples simply can’t have children today.
Infertility has been steadily rising among women, and among men sperm counts have been falling precipitously since the 1970s.
If we do not do something about this, eventually most males will simply be unable to produce offspring at all.
For couples that are able to produce babies, many are putting off parenthood due to the rising cost of living.
Most Americans are just barely scraping by from month to month these days, and having a kid is really expensive.
In fact, it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise a single child to adulthood in the United States…
Raising a child from birth to age 18 in the United States can cost between $200,000 and $310,000, according to some sources. It is even pricier in some states, including Massachusetts, where families can spend up to $650,000.
Child care is a huge part of this: parents can expect to pay anywhere from $3,000 to $21,000 annually on child care.
When I was growing up, my father worked and my mother stayed home with the kids. But that is very rare in America today.
Most women are working, and that is another reason why the birth rate has been falling. It is just very difficult to have a full-time career and to be a full-time mother…
This “shift” includes the fact that most women in high-income countries now work, while it was previously “reasonable to consider having children as a widespread priority for women.”
But they do not attribute this to “whether women work at all after they are married or have had their first child” but rather “the tension between a lifetime career and the way motherhood interrupts or alters that lifetime career progression.”
But even women that don’t work are having fewer children. So how do we explain that?
The answer is actually very simple. Throughout human history, children have been considered to be a blessing to be cherished, but our culture regards them as a burden to be avoided.
We have a very “me-centered” culture, and we now prioritize ourselves over everything else. The idea of “making sacrifices” for your family and your children is anathema in this day and age.
Young people are frequently told that they will “ruin their lives” if they get married too early or have children too early. Our society encourages them to run around and have lots of fun before they “settle down”. Of course many are choosing not to “settle down” at all.
Our movies, our television shows and our music glorify the single lifestyle. As a result, a higher percentage of Americans are single than ever before. But has that made us happier? No, we have a raging loneliness epidemic in this country that I have written about on numerous occasions.
We were designed to love and be loved, and the family unit has always been the basic building block of society all throughout human history.
There is one last cause of our birth rate crisis that I wanted to mention. If we stopped aborting a million babies a year, that would completely solve our birth rate crisis right there. Of course that isn’t going to happen, and that is extremely unfortunate.
Given enough time, if we stay on the road that we are currently on it would lead to demographic collapse…
If trends continue on their present path, demographers warn, there won’t be enough people to work to support society. The extreme labor shortages would lead to stagnation, poverty, and ultimately — in the most dire scenarios — the collapse of civilization itself.
Of course I don’t believe that our society actually has enough time left for such a scenario to play out.
We are committing societal suicide in so many other ways, and the clock is ticking.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
You forgot one more important factor – Alternative lifestyles such as homosexuality and Transgenderism. Unfortunately more and more people are entering into these relationships reducing pro-creation.
It’s the OWS clot shot, it has sterilized the majority of women who took it, men too. The CDC must be celebrating their success.
Feminism had devastating economic consequences. Now everyone has to work.
The trans lie, abortion, homosexuality, radical environmentalism, rejection of the Christian faith, and all of the economic and personal reasons the author listed, have brought us to this point. When a society abandons God, it loses hope, it has no purpose, and it no longer looks to the future. Why not just get a cat, and spend all our money on ourselves? What kind of culture have we become? No interest in anyone except ourselves and the present. Not even one thought about the survival of the human species.
And on a related note, why on earth would any site with the term ”discern” in its name have an association with the foul-mouthed, violence-loving, Jew-hating guy who is destroying The Liberty Daily? Any person who actually has discernment would see that sicko and run the other direction!
It’s just my opinion and by no means a provable fact, but I think our birthrates are dropping so because all social trust has pretty much evaporated in our countries, due to such intense political polarization that we are afraid to talk to each other anymore for fear of saying the wrong thing and being branded a racist, a fascist, a Nazi, or an Islamophobe, and so we have no connection to those around us anymore, and this is exasperated by the floods of illegals coming into our countries as well, who’s cultures and values are flatly incompatible with ours, (Muslims) and this lowers social trust still more.
So we end up living in very lonely and isolated societies with no friends or anyone to be connected to, while self-censoring to avoid any conflict. This is also why our birthrate, and those of many other western countries, has dipped below replacement level. The Left has long trumpeted that diversity is our greatest strength, but in fact it’s only their greatest strength as it multiplies the ways available to them to divide us all against each other. Their strategy has had a profoundly negative effect on all of western civilization, which it is their mission to erase.
Michael the fundamental issue is the woman one marries. I was a passport bro before it was a topic on social media. Living in NY City in the ’80s my prospects for marriage were dim. The cost of living was so prohibative. I had broken up with a cute Colombian girl and wanted more of the same. So at 30 I went to Colombia. Long story short I married a Colombian girl at 37. She was a school teacher from a humble family and 30. We had 5 kids. Lots of struggles. But it was better than my female options in the US. Gotta marry a kid friendly woman and reproduce!
End no fault divorce. End alimony. Make the family courts fair to fathers. The men who do want marriage and family don’t want their lives ruined by divorce courts.
Many men don’t want children because they know they won’t be the one that raises them. Women file 80% of divorces and more than 50% of marriages end in divorce. Men have no say. Especially in family and divorce court. There is no pretense at fairness. Many ex wives move far away. They don’t want help in raising their children, only the alimony and child support payments. Men know their children will be raised by whoever is banging their ex wife. But they may never see their children again.
Because women lost their minds about being a woman