Make America fertile again

Fertility is back in the news, and the picture is bleak.

The New York Times reports that for the fourth year in a row, there were more deaths than births in China, recording their lowest birth rate since 1949—the year the People’s Republic of China was founded. China’s population decline mirrors its Asian neighbors such as Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore. And the decline is happening despite the best efforts of China’s communist government to encourage marriage and childbearing, in an about-face from its disastrous one-child policy.

This isn’t an isolated trend. Infertility has gone global. Africa seems to be the only continent yet untouched.

In Great Britain, births are declining and abortions rising so rapidly that that country could see those numbers converge within the decade. That would mean fewer babies born than aborted in the United Kingdom. Right to Life UK reports a record-setting 300,000 babies aborted in 2023, a year where they saw under 600,000 babies born.

How are things in America? Hardly any better.

In 2024, the United States recorded its lowest birth rate on record at 1.6—well below the replacement rate of 2.1 needed to maintain our population. Some estimates project that if nothing changes, by the end of this decade we too will see more deaths than births each year in this country. If so, we will enter the population death spiral that has trapped Japan for decades and just snagged China.

As Elon Musk frequently points out on X, all of this spells civilizational disaster. National infertility is not merely a demographic crisis. It is an existential one, and it’s one that will very soon have irreversible effects on the economy, on national security, and on the American way of life. DINKs (Dual Income, No Kids) and DINK-WADs (Dual Income, No Kids, With A Dog) will not escape unscathed.

All of this background explains the talking points and gusto from the second Trump administration aimed at increasing the national birth rate, particularly from Vice President JD Vance. Conservatives were cautiously optimistic about a possible turnaround. Early on in his second term, Trump even announced that he wanted to be known as the “fertilization president.” But to what effect?

So far, one of the only concrete, birth-related policy efforts of Trump’s second term is related to IVF—a controversial procedure often disconnected from marriage.

This effort is a far cry from what Trump had previously endorsed. In Project 2025, one policy blueprint, there was a promise to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life.” Policy proposals from conservative think-tanks, some of which have been championed by Vance himself, include significantly increasing the child tax credit—just imagine what changing it to $10,000 a child might do—awarding a “baby bonus” to married parents with newborns, and restructuring welfare to de-incentivize out-of-wedlock births and incentivize marriage and the success sequence. Instead, inflation, the economy, and other domestic and international issues have dominated Trump’s attention and agenda. This is a grave mistake.

The foundation of civilization is the family, and the cornerstone of the family is marriage—the union of a man and a woman. Healthy marriages and families quite literally beget healthy societies. Trying to address a society’s economy while ignoring its fundamental building blocks (families) and its future (children) is like trying to prune a grape vine in the desert.

It’s time America and the Trump administration wake up to reality and really Make America Fertile Again. Every year that goes by with no reversal to the birth rate digs us deeper and deeper into a hole that very well could become inescapable. This will no doubt require hard conversations about the centrality of marriage, the plague of fatherlessness, and the many ways modern life encourages selfishness and immaturity instead of the eternally rewarding self-sacrifices one makes to prioritize children and the family. Congress should work with the Trump White House to draft lasting legislation that will prioritize the formation of healthy families and children.

But it will also require us to confront the ideas and ideologies that brought us to this demographic precipice in the first place, including the Marxist war that has been waged against marriage and the family over the last two centuries. A common denominator between bra-burning feminists who spurn domestic life, activists who rage against the “patriarchal” nuclear family, and academics and technocrats who reject the religious import of marriage and children in their dreams about collectivist communes, is that all of them, whether consciously or unconsciously, are the ideological offspring of Karl Marx. They all share his seething hatred for marriage and the family, perceived obstacles in the way of a socialist utopia.

The Creation Mandate in Genesis is the charter of humanity, and it rebukes all competing ideologies even as it shows us the way forward: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion.”