MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
American women are having far fewer babies, and some politicians want to change that.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I'll be known as the fertilization president, and that's OK. That's not bad. That's not bad. I've been called much worse.
KELLY: That's President Trump at a Women's History Month event earlier this year. The birth rate is now falling so fast in the U.S. and around the world that the shift is driving a new political debate over what, if anything, can be done about it. NPR's Sarah McCammon and Brian Mann found much of the debate here in the U.S. is being shaped by politicians and activists on the right.
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: When we visit her home outside New York City, Lusely Martinez (ph) is cooking dinner for her family.
LUSELY MARTINEZ: I think I'm going to need some more oil. Do we have any more oil?
MCCAMMON: Her 5-year-old daughter is coloring at the kitchen counter.
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MARTINEZ: You finished all your homework, right? It was just the one sheet?
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Yep.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: Lusely is 35 years old. Her husband, Byron, is 40, and they adore their daughter.
MARTINEZ: She's like a physical embodiment of what my - the relationship of my life, you know? And then we get to watch our little heart walk around all over the world and, like, learn and discover things. It's just so incredible just to see her learn and grow.
MANN: But here's the thing. Their daughter is their only child, and Lusely says they've pretty much decided one is enough.
MARTINEZ: I remember, at one point, I was like, I definitely want three kids. I was like, that's going to be great. That's what my mom had. That's what I want to have.
MCCAMMON: But then Lusely says she had a tough pregnancy with painful complications that ended in a C-section.
MARTINEZ: That's just one part of the equation, right?
MANN: And Lusely says having more children often seemed unaffordable. She and her husband, Byron, have good, stable careers. She works for a company in human resources. He has a union construction job, but they worry about the rising cost of everything.
MARTINEZ: And the other part is having a child is extremely expensive.
MANN: Researchers say a lot of American families are making similar calculations. The average woman today has roughly half as many children compared to the 1960s. So few that researchers at the Brookings Institution found that without a lot of immigration, the U.S. population would age and shrink rapidly. But Lusely says for them, this is a personal decision.
MARTINEZ: We're stopping, and we're thinking about, is this actually smart for ourselves? Will we be able to give this child a good life?
MCCAMMON: Experts say American society is already changing, as couples like Lusely and Byron have fewer children, or some have no children at all. A study released last month by the U.S. census found that people over 65 now outnumber children in 11 states, and that's up from just three states where that was true five years ago. Emma Waters is with the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, and she's been thinking about this.
EMMA WATERS: It means that we're going to have more adults than we have children to replace them, and that will heavily impact things like our military readiness, our overall GDP and economic growth in the United States.
MCCAMMON: Waters thinks that without more babies, the U.S. will struggle to do basic things like funding Social Security.
WATERS: If you don't have enough workers, you won't have enough people to actually support older generations and those who are aging now.
MANN: So now some of the country's most high-profile conservatives, including Trump, Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance, say they want to reverse this trend. Here's Vance speaking at the March for Life earlier this year.
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JD VANCE: So let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America.
MANN: There's a pattern here, of course. Virtually all of the attention so far to falling birth rates in the U.S. is coming from political figures on the right.
MCCAMMON: Ruth Braunstein is a sociologist at Johns Hopkins, and she studies right-wing rhetoric.
RUTH BRAUNSTEIN: There's claims that we are experiencing a fertility crisis, and they are looking at data that is real and legitimate data, that shows declining birth rates in the United States and really around the world.
MCCAMMON: But Braunstein thinks some far-right politicians are keying into this question about babies and birth rates because of other big demographic trends that are making the U.S. more secular and more religiously and racially diverse.
BRAUNSTEIN: This caused a real sense of crisis on the right - everywhere from mainstream conservatism to the far right - about the kind of decline of what their vision of America was supposed to look like. So the solution became fertility.
MANN: Some activists and politicians on the left worry this focus on fertility by conservatives is also part of a wider agenda designed to limit reproductive rights and other freedoms for women. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke about this during a public event at the 92nd Street Y in New York in May.
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HILLARY CLINTON: This very blatant effort to basically send a message, most exemplified by Vance and Musk and others, that, you know, what we really need from you women are more children. And what that really means is you should go back to doing what you were born to do, which is to produce more children.
MANN: Clinton also said the Trump administration's immigration policies - deporting many young people who might settle in the U.S. and build families - are at odds with the goal of seeing more babies born in the United States.
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CLINTON: Which is sort of odd because the people who produce the most children in our country are immigrants, and they want to deport them. So none of this adds up.
MCCAMMON: But some conservatives say the push for more babies isn't about race or immigration. Lyman Stone, who leads the Pronatalism Initiative at the conservative-leaning Institute for Family Studies, acknowledges that some on the far-right believe more babies being born in the U.S. would translate into more white people. But Stone says that's just not true because younger Americans, those of childbearing age, are also more diverse.
LYMAN STONE: If we increase fertility in the U.S., the pace at which we become a less white nation accelerates. I know that this kind of surprises people when you say this, but it's really quite simple math.
MCCAMMON: But Stone says he does want to see big changes in the way young people are living their lives. He wants U.S. policy to encourage the kinds of stable, prosperous families where children are more possible. And he says many young people feel they're not hitting all the marks they need to hit before having kids.
STONE: They're not marrying in time. They're not getting a house in time. They're not getting a stable job in time, all these things. And so what's really happening is people are involuntarily falling short of their desired fertility.
MANN: Stone thinks there are some policies that might encourage couples in the U.S. to have more babies. He supports expanding tax credits for families with kids, and he says letting parents work from home may also be helpful. But he's skeptical of one of Trump's main ideas, a plan to create $1,000 investment accounts for new babies, which children could draw from as they grow up.
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TRUMP: Trump accounts will contribute to the lifelong success of millions of newborn babies.
MCCAMMON: Stone and other experts we talked to said they don't think that's an immediate or big enough incentive to change most people's minds about parenting. And Lusely Martinez agrees.
MARTINEZ: I think that's my biggest concern is, like, what is the big focus on us having children when you're not necessarily focused on how the rest of the life of a person is, right?
MCCAMMON: A lot of countries around the world are trying far more robust pronatalist policies, everything from free child care and health care to extended parental leave.
MANN: But researchers say even those programs tend to produce only small and often temporary increases in the number of births, and those policies are far more generous and expensive than what's being proposed here in the U.S., even by politicians who say declining birth rates are a crisis. I'm Brian Mann.
MCCAMMON: And I'm Sarah McCammon, NPR News.
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