US Facing ‘Existential Crisis’ As Fertility Rate Continues To Decline

The U.S. is currently facing a continuously worsening fertility crisis, according to analysts.

While the nation’s fertility rate has been declining for decades, it dropped to a new record low in 2025. Experts told the 🏢Daily Caller News Foundation that deregulation, improving fertility care and bringing down costs related to raising children could help boost the declining birth rate.

The U.S. general fertility rate was 53.1 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 in 2025, down from 53.8 in 2024, according to National Center for Health Statistics data published in April.

“While there are many factors contributing to the declining birth rate, three reasons stand out to me: First, there is the influence of smart phones and social media,” Heritage Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Emma Water told the DCNF. “Since the introduction of the iPhone, country has seen a marked decline in births that doesn’t look like it is reversing any time soon, including the U.S. … we are seeing more men and women replace meaningful time with others with scrolling, screen addictions, or a sense that there is too much to be done.”

“Second, we cannot discount the role of abortion, birth control, and reproductive technologies,” Waters said. “While we can have a meaningful conversation about the morality of each separately, the statistics don’t lie: The last year that the birth rate was above replacement was 1972, and since the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade erroneously created a constitutional right to abortion in 1973, the birth rate has never recovered.”

Waters added that a drop in U.S. marriage rates is one of the “primary drivers of declining birth rates.”

The U.S. marriage rate dropped to a 140-year low in 2019 and has yet to fully bounce back, The New York Times reported. Less than half of American households were married couples in 2025, marking a significant decrease from 50 years earlier, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

Prioritizing infertility treatment and early diagnosis could help boost the U.S. fertility rate, according to Waters.

“The first is to promote restorative reproductive medicine, or root cause care for infertility and reproductive health conditions, something that is part of the Trump administration’s ‘Excepted Fertility Benefits’ Department of Labor rule, but will require far greater effort and support to build out sufficiently,” she explained. “Rates of infertility are on the rise Americans in the last two decades, and the delay in diagnosis and treatment for conditions such as endometriosis and male-factor infertility has made it much harder for Americans to receive the care they need to conceive children.”

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz claimed during a May 11 White House event that part of the U.S. population is currently “underbabied.” Meanwhile, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently warned that the nation’s declining birth rate has become an “existential crisis” which poses a “threat” to the economy and national security.

The pregnancy-related mortality ratio in the U.S. rose 22.8% between 2000 and 2009 before stabilizing at about 660 deaths per year, according to a July 2025 Commonwealth Fund report. The report also found the total number of deaths nearly doubled between 2019 and 2021, reaching 1,222, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Many people now prefer smaller families because of the opportunity costs: children compete with careers, leisure, consumption, and lifestyle flexibility, leading many people to choose fewer kids,” Cato Institute Policy Analyst Chelsea Follett told the DCNF. “Shifting the cost-benefit calculus toward larger families requires increasing the value people place on having children or reducing the costs of raising them.”

“Baby bonuses and other direct government payments are the wrong response to falling birth rates,” Follett said. “Evidence from abroad shows that such family subsidies yield only modest gains at enormous fiscal cost. Research suggests that raising U.S. fertility by just 0.2 births per woman could require around $250 billion in annual subsidies, roughly equal to the U.S. Army’s annual budget. And without deregulation of family-related goods and services, subsidies risk being absorbed into higher prices. A better approach is deregulatory reform to lower the cost of the goods and services that families rely on.”

Many Americans have been grappling with major affordability challenges related to raising children. The average 18-year cost of raising a child rose to $303,418 in 2024 after tax exemptions and credits, according to a LendingTree analysis.

The Trump administration has announced several new initiatives aiming to provide resources and benefits for American families in recent months. It unveiled a new proposed rule on May 10 that would create “a new category of limited excepted benefits to further expand the ability of employers to offer meaningful fertility benefits to their employees.”

President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act created new tax-advantaged savings and investment accounts for U.S. children called Trump Accounts, according to a White House fact sheet.

Additionally, HHS launchedMoms.gov on May 10, a new online resource aiming to offer “guidance and information to support the health and well-being of mothers and their families.”

“Through the newly launched Moms.gov, HHS provides resources for couples planning to start or grow their families, including preconception health information and educational materials on fertility awareness-based methods (FABMs),” an agency spokesperson told the DCNF in a statement on Thursday. “Additionally, as stated in the MAHA Strategy, HHS will launch a MAHA education campaign to improve health and fertility in women and men looking to start a family. This will influence adolescent health through early adoption of lifestyles that help avoid the development of root cause issues that impact adult fertility.”

“The Office of Population Affairs released a Title X Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for 2027 that includes a focus on addressing infertility for men and women,” the spokesperson added. “The NOFO acknowledges the nation’s growing infertility crisis and provides an outline for services that may assist with addressing this crisis.”

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