What is behind a plunging U.S. fertility rate?

We are simply not having enough babies. America’s fertility rate was 1.64 children per woman last year, a record low. The replacement rate is 2.1, so there aren’t enough children being born to sustain ourselves demographically. Already there were more deaths than births in 25 states last year, and the trend is expected to hold.

We may compare our numbers to Japan, which for decades has experienced a sustained demographic loss (now playing out in unfathomably sad stories). Is the Land of the Rising Sun now the Land of the Setting Sun? The rest of East Asia and Europe look much the same. From the strain of a smaller, younger generation supporting a bigger, older generation; to kindergartens being converted into nursing homes, ghost cities, and many people dying alone, falling fertility is sobering. America seems to be going in the same direction.

A new survey shows that more Americans don’t plan on ever having children. Why? Fifty-six percent say that the reason is that they “just don’t want to.” Compare that to finances being the reason (17 percent), or the “state of the world” (nine percent), or climate change (five percent). “Anti-natalism is on the march,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.

Yuval Levin’s assessment of the matter is excellent. He thinks this social pathology may well be a “disordered passivity.” He writes that were our passions unruly as they were not so long ago (resulting in ills like higher rates of teen pregnancies, divorces), institutions and habits that put a restraint on them would work well. But “what if we fail to act on our longings to begin with? What if there is nothing to restrain, and so no raw material for the sculptor to work with? The right to pursue happiness won’t do us much good if we don’t exercise it.”

St. Augustine says that we are to set our loves in right order. Unruly passions, or loves, can and should be ordered into their proper ends. But when there is only apathy, there are no loves to order. There is something human in having loves, disordered as they may be at first. The right ordering of them is part of what makes us fully human, our flourishing. But to be lukewarm in love is worse—it makes us less human.

The vice of acedia is often translated as sloth, but a meaning from its Greek roots is “without care.” More than laziness, it is a listlessness, repugnance, despair. It leads to nihilism and hopelessness. Dante in Purgatorio places those with wanton passions (avarice, gluttony, lust) higher in the mountain than those with acedia. If teen pregnancies or divorces are less of a problem for us now, it may be that we have lost the zest to life to begin with—starting with having children. As Yuval Levin observes, before the series of “thou shalt not” in Scripture, God commanded us first to “be fruitful and multiply.”

So what to do, now that our society seems to be moving from having children out of wedlock to not having (enough) children? Interestingly, who is most likely to have kids these days anyway? From a new report from the Institute for Family Studies, we learn it is religious Americans, among a couple of other markers (the other two are Republicans and well-to-do Americans). In fact, the religious are three times more likely to say they plan on having a baby this year or next than those who are secular.

Christians are well placed to help lead our country out of this vice. Thomas Aquinas says that acedia is “opposed to the joy of charity,” and “the proper effect of charity is joy in God.” If gratitude is a way to joy and if, as G. K. Chesterton says, “each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most,” Christians should be an antidote to America’s acedia by welcoming children, every one and all of them, with “joyful receptivity.” 

Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is a reward. May Christians receive children as treasured gifts from the hands of a gracious God—a sign of contradiction in a culture far down the path of treating children as entitlements, or else throwaways. May we raise them cheerfully, training them in the ways of the Lord—and opening up our homes in hospitality to all around us while at it too. May our gratitude and joy be a leaven, that others may see it and be glad. It is a witness, after all, to the reason of the hope that is within us—He Who was made flesh and came to visit us in great humility as none other than a Babe.