The National Center for Health Statistics, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention subagency, reported this week that America’s fertility rate dropped for the sixth consecutive year. Total births declined by 4 percent in 2020, down to 1,637.5 children per 1,000 women. The statistical replacement rate for the U.S. population, by contrast, is roughly 2,100 births per 1,000 women. Overall, the 3,605,201 births last year in the United States represented the lowest number since the Jimmy Carter presidency.
This bleak demographic reality is inconsonant with Americans’ stated child-rearing preferences. According to polling data revealed by American Compass in February, 45 percent to 50 percent of Americans who do not report that their families are still growing say they have fewer children than they would ideally desire, whereas 0 percent to 10 percent of Americans without growing families say they have more children than they ideally would have had. Put simply, Americans want more babies, but for various, complicated reasons, they are not having them. A drastic incongruence between stated preferences and lived reality is the definitional case for good public policy, and there has been a resurgence of interest of late on the realignment right to rediscover the tools of economic statecraft as it pertains to family policy.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) recently released his Family Security Act plan to provide direct monthly cash benefits for young and school-aged children. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) came out in support of a further increase in the Child Tax Credit for young children. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) unveiled a new “Parent Tax Credit” that the American Principles Project’s Jon Schweppe has labeled the “most pro-family, pro-marriage, pro-life, pro-adoption, pro-work, pro-everything-that-conservatives-love economic proposal offered ... in recent memory,” and American Compass itself devised a rival “Family Income Supplemental Credit” policy. There are other competing ideas, too, such as University of Dallas professor Gladden Pappin’s 2019 proposal for a generous direct support system called “FamilyPay.”
As a matter of public discourse and increasingly as a matter of education policy, impressionable young would-be parents and their even more impressionable children are indoctrinated in rank America-hatred. The most sordid forms of this indoctrination come packaged in woke-speak such as “critical race theory” and “anti-racism,” which dovetail with The New York Times’ insidious “1619 Project” in making an affirmative case for America’s purported “systemic racism.” This is no longer a fringe theory relegated to the cesspool that is the modern American academy; in the aftermath of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s recent guilty conviction, no less a figure than President Joe Biden himself seized the moment to decry the “systemic racism that is a stain on our nation’s soul.” Indeed, in the year 2021, condemning the United States’ incorrigible “systemic racism” is perhaps the Democratic Party’s foremost call to arms.
Holding aside the fact that this is a noxious lie—America has not been “systemically racist,” with the possible exception of the anti-Asian racism of affirmative action education policies, since Jim Crow—there are tangible effects of this rhetoric for the body politic. Put simply, inculcating America-hatred logically ought to disincentivize young, healthy couples from procreating. After all, who would rationally want to bring forth new life into a country that is irredeemably “systemically racist” to its core?
Demographers often associate falling birth rates with falling confidence in a nation’s future. The United States in the year 2021 is no exception. Fortunately, some of our plummeting confidence is baseless—and self-inflicted. The most straightforward way to help accelerate birth rates again could be as simple as ceasing the collective self-flagellation of leftist America-hatred.
