Skeptoid #1035: How Disastrous Are Declining Birth Rates?
Skeptoid #1035 debunks claims that declining U.S. birth rates, which fell from 3.3 to 1.6 between 1963 and 2023 due to education and housing costs, signal societal collapse. The host exposes the 2022 surge in pronatalist advocacy driven by the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 and Christian nationalist agendas, which propose NEST accounts, marriage boot camps, and divorce restrictions reminiscent of Nazi Germany. By linking these policies to white nationalism, eugenics, and Silicon Valley's push for genetic engineering, the episode concludes that voluntary contraception actually reduces poverty, urging listeners to recognize the ideological motivations behind this reactionary demographic panic. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
The Disaster of Fewer Babies00:09:29
You've heard some of the United States' loudest voices proclaiming that a civilization-level disaster is in progress.
Declining birth rates, they claim, will result in the utter destruction of American society and ultimately, the destruction of the human race itself.
The solution, they claim, is more babies.
But not just any babies, very specific babies.
What kind?
Today we're going to find out.
And in our extended content for premium members, an unexpected connection uniting two often widely separated bedfellows, Christian nationalism and white nationalism.
All that and more is coming up right now on Skeptoid.
A quick reminder for everyone, you're listening to Skeptoid, revealing the true science and true history behind urban legends every week since 2006.
With over a thousand episodes, we're celebrating 20 years of keeping it focused and keeping it brief.
And we couldn't have done it without your curiosity leading the way.
And now we're even offering a little bit more.
If you become a premium member, supporting the show with a monthly micropayment of as little as $5, you get more Skeptoid.
The premium version of the show is not only ad-free, it has extended content.
These episodes are a few minutes longer.
We get rid of the ads and we'll replace them with more Skeptoid.
The extended premium show available now.
Come to Skeptoid.com and click Go Premium.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
How disastrous are declining birth rates?
Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not.
Everywhere we turn these days, some prominent figure is trumpeting the claim that the birth rate has fallen precipitously.
So far, in fact, that we risk a catastrophic drop in population, resulting in, quote, societal collapse.
There are calls for massive programs to incentivize women to have more children and to penalize women who don't.
At risk, some say, is civilization itself.
Today, we're doing a deep dive into the new pronatalism, the ideology aimed at increasing birth rates to save the world we live in.
Who claims this?
Why do they claim it?
And how do these warnings compare to actual economic projections?
We truly are hearing this from all quarters.
We hear it from business leaders such as Elon Musk, political leaders such as JD Vance, and cultural provocateurs such as Jordan Peterson.
Musk is perhaps the loudest, constantly tweeting that, quote, low birth rates will end civilization and declared it to be, quote, the number one threat to the West.
JD Vance has been calling this a, quote, civilizational crisis for the better part of a decade now, and is, of course, famous for his criticisms of childless cat ladies and favors national policies such as giving parents more votes in elections and imposing higher taxes on childless adults.
Peterson has repeatedly claimed that 90% of childless women end up regretting it, and that more women getting college educations are, quote, directly driving population collapse, and that their, quote, female temperament is responsible for politically correct authoritarianism on campuses.
Such men as these are not without influence, for better or for worse.
The basic claim that birth rates are declining is easy to verify.
It is quite true.
From 1963 to 2023, the United States has seen the birth rate fall from 3.3 births per woman of childbearing age to 1.6, an all-time low.
To maintain the population level, this number needs to be 2.1.
Thus, we do expect to see gradual population decline in the United States.
The reasons for the decline have shifted over time, but in general, the most impactful have been, number one, access to contraceptives and the legalization of abortion, dramatically reducing unwanted births.
Number two, rising education and workforce participation among women.
And number three, rising housing prices, making it less attractive to raise a family.
It's important to note that this has not been a case of families deciding to have fewer children.
In fact, women over 30 are actually having more babies than they did in 1963.
The reduced number of births have been mainly among teens and single women under 24, the demographic least able to raise and care for children.
By every possible metric, it's a huge win for both those women and for the social services that would have had to pick up the slack.
Worldwide, over this same 60-year period, the birth rate dropped from 5.3 to 2.3.
The broader reasons for this have been, number one, rising education and workforce participation among women.
Number two, declining rates of infant mortality, fewer infants die, so mothers conceive fewer new babies.
And number three, the decline of child labor, eliminating the financial incentive to have more children.
Every single one of these factors has driven prosperity in every wealthy, healthy, educated country.
This transition is an exhaustively documented pathway by which societies move from high birth, high death misery to low birth, low death prosperity.
Demographers and economists have long projected that this would happen, but their forecasts have always underestimated just how fast and how deep this change would happen around the world.
For much of the 20th century, it was not expected that world population would ever peak.
Then, it would peak in the 2080s at 10 billion people.
Then, in the 2060s, at 9 billion.
The safest bets remain that it will peak sooner than that and at a lower number.
The positive and negative impacts of a shrinking world population have consumed economists and other researchers for decades.
And by now, we have a very good idea.
The negative impacts are an aging population, straining health care and pensions, shrinking workforces, slowing economic growth, and loss of services in rural areas.
These are transitional issues that can be addressed with relative ease through policy reform.
The positive impacts, however, are self-reinforcing.
It is these gains to which economists attribute the pace of change worldwide, surpassing the demographers' forecasts.
All of this raises an important question.
If a declining birth rate is not the catastrophic disaster the pro-natalists are painting it as, but rather a significant net positive, why are so many of them advocating swift and sweeping action to raise the birth rate?
We get a clue when we employ tools such as Google Trends to see when all the noise started.
Birth rate and pronatalism had held a steady and unremarkable place in search engine traffic since the internet began.
Until 2022, when they rose notably, and 2025, when they launched like a rocket and continue to soar.
We need only ponder a moment to consider what other societal movements were rising at that point, tied, like so many other things, to the political fortunes of the religious right in the United States.
It all comes down almost entirely to a little group you may have heard of.
The Heritage Foundation, creators of Project 2025, authors of an estimated two-thirds of Donald Trump's executive orders, and the architects of the modern Christian nationalist movement.
In 2026, the Heritage Foundation published a special report titled, Saving America by Saving the Family, a foundation for the next 250 years.
Spreading Good Ideas Now00:02:20
This policy document rightly blames the declining birth rate on the increasing education and independence of American women, and calls for action to fight back against that.
The proposals include ending no-fault divorce, limiting college enrollment, and eliminating graduate student loan programs so that women have fewer reasons to delay childbearing.
It boosts an initiative called Ring by Spring, which would have high schools and colleges pressure teenage girls to get engaged before the end of the school term and thus go straight into having children rather than getting a degree.
In a world that can feel overwhelming, spreading thoughtful, evidence-based content is one of the best ways to make a positive impact.
Ask your local public radio station to air the Skeptoid Files, a 30-minute radio-friendly version of Skeptoid that pairs two related episodes promoting real science, true history, and critical thinking.
And in these challenging times for public media, we're offering these broadcasts for free to radio stations, available on the PRX Exchange or directly from Skeptoid Media.
It's an easy ask.
Just send a quick message to your station's programming director.
By helping to bring the Skeptoid files to the airwaves, you'll help promote the essential skills we all need to tell fact from fiction.
Just go to your local station's website, find the programming director's email address, or just their general email address.
You can even use the telephone.
I know that might sound crazy.
It's an old legacy device that allows real-time voice communication.
I know that's weird, but hey, it's an option.
The world can feel chaotic, but you're not powerless.
When you promote critical thinking, you can help your community tell fact from fiction.
And that's how we shape a better future.
In uncertain times, spreading good ideas can make you feel helpful, not helpless.
Let's stand up for reason, truth, and understanding together.
Get them to air the Skeptoid files from Skeptoid Media, available on the PRX Exchange, and they'll know what that is.
Extreme Pronatalist Movements00:07:17
At some level, all prominent advocacy for increasing the U.S. birth rate can be traced back to the Seven Mountains Mandate, the evangelical Christian ideology that seeks dominion over seven aspects of society.
Family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government.
We are currently seeing profound progress on this front, with evangelical influences making clear infiltrations and consolidations within each of these during just the past few years.
Family is considered the generative foundation for all Seven Mountains.
As we hear calls by pronatalist leaders like Elon Musk, we see direct parallels between Heritage Foundation proposals and the institutions on which they currently have a stranglehold.
Here are just four examples.
Number one, Heritage proposes NEST accounts, which grant $2,500 at birth to babies of U.S. citizen parents who had married before the age of 30.
The so-called Trump account of $1,000 for newborns is intended as the first step of this.
Number two, Heritage proposes the adoption tax credit of about $17,000 be extended to newborns of all married biological parents, increasing by a 25% bonus for three or more children.
Trump has proposed the first step of this, a $5,000 baby bonus given to all American mothers of newborns, and also a National Medal of Motherhood for married U.S. citizen women who give birth to six or more children, a concept lifted directly from historical precedents in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
Number three, Heritage proposes publicly funded marriage boot camps, where young couples learn skills such as conflict resolution and money management, culminating in group marriage ceremonies.
White House aides have confirmed that an expansion of the baby bonus plan will include education on menstrual cycles and ovulation timing.
Number four, Heritage proposes wide-ranging restrictions on divorce, elimination of no-fault divorce, caps on alimony, mandated 50-50 custody, and covenant marriages.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called for DOT contracts to give priority to communities with higher marriage and birth rates and lower divorce rates.
You want roads?
Stay married and make more babies.
So in fact, the noise in pop culture raising the alarm about declining birth rates and calling for pronatalism has little to do with any impending end of civilization and virtually everything to do with spreading Christian nationalism and the Seven Mountains mandate.
However, it's not entirely about that.
There is one more powerful factor found in the more extreme end of the pronatalist movement.
While the whole idea is largely about Christian nationalism, part of it's also driven by white nationalism.
In fact, at the more extreme fringe, it's far more about racism than it is about religion.
On certain issues, the Christian nationalists and white nationalists actively disagree with each other.
For example, the Heritage Foundation is generally anti-IVF in vitro fertilization, based on Catholic natural law arguments, while the white nationalist eugenicists are enthusiastically pro-IVF and pro-genetic engineering.
They may disagree on the methods, but they all agree more white Christian babies are needed.
This white nationalist fringe is well represented within the Silicon Valley tech right, where some venture capitalists seek to fund Gattaca-style tech where embryos can be screened for higher IQs and, quote, desirable characteristics.
And Theodore Roosevelt's eugenics ideas are freely quoted.
Roosevelt openly described declining birth rates among white American women as race suicide, a term he got from the extremely racist eugenicist Edward A. Ross.
The tech-right pronatalists seek technology solutions for the, quote, problem, as they would describe it, of fewer white babies in the United States.
And not necessarily well-informed solutions either.
One thing Elon Musk has advocated, obviously he's the very poster child for the tech right, is for solutions to make C-section deliveries more common, since, in his opinion, C-sections produce babies with bigger brains and higher intelligence.
And again, despite such displays of staggering ignorance, people like Musk are not without influence.
The pronatalism community is a world dominated by the so-called Great Replacement conspiracy theory, a fear shared by many white nationalists who believe the white race is in decline and is gradually being replaced by black and brown people in what they term ethnic substitution.
The Great Replacement was a major theme when NPR reporter Lisa Hagen attended NatalCon 2025, the largest and only the second annual pro-natalism conference.
Attendees were 95% men and 95% white.
The racial framing of the birth rate issue lacks any sort of academic or mainstream support.
It finds support only among a narrow demographic who fear loss of control over some of their fellow humans.
So, are birth rates declining in the United States?
Yes, they are, just as they long have been in every developed nation as it prospers.
International development organizations working in developing nations, like some of those in sub-Saharan Africa, have long known that voluntary access to contraception is the most important first step in breaking a nation's poverty cycle.
It allows women to plan their pregnancies, providing a path for them to get educations, to enter the workforce, and later to have children with proper resources.
Such children are healthier, better cared for, and are educated themselves.
The reduction of unplanned pregnancies is the best thing any nation can do for itself.
Yet the new American pronatalists seek to do exactly the opposite, to reverse the progress made since the 1950s and to pressure young girls who cannot afford it to have babies, giving them token rewards if they do and penalizing them if they don't.
All in the misguided pursuit of making more white Christian babies, as if that is an end unto itself.
Skepticism as Best Medicine00:03:41
It's truly bizarre.
So, yes, everyone should be aware of the declining birth rates.
You should educate yourself on why it's happening.
You should learn about the fallout from that, both the good and the bad.
And be aware of the solutions to offset the bad and let the good build on itself.
And perhaps most important of all, be cognizant of the Christian nationalist and white nationalist pro-natalism communities and be prepared to steer well clear of the unintended harm they hope to impose.
We continue with some unexpected intersections between the Seven Mountains mandate and racism.
Or perhaps not all that unexpected.
In the ad-free and extended premium feed.
To access it, become a supporter at skeptoid.com slash go premium.
A great big Skeptoid shout out to our premium supporters, including Caramon, Artis Kohlar, oops, skip that last one, just Doug Mitchell, and of course, my brother from another mother, Mike Stowe from Brampton, Ontario.
Are you a student of anything, even of life?
Don't forget our student question episodes.
Record any question, and I'll play it and answer it for you right here in a special episode.
Come to skeptoid.com and click on student questions.
And if you're a teacher, have you seen our teachers toolkit?
It's a way to share all the best Skeptoid episodes with your classroom in a secure, organized, and controlled way.
Come and check out our three-minute video explainer to see how it works at skeptoid.com slash teachers.
Skeptoid is a production of Skeptoid Media.
Director of Operations and Tinfoil Hat Counter is Kathy Reitmeyer.
Marketing guru and Illuminati liaison is Jake Young.
Production management and all things audio by Will McCandless.
Music is by Lee Sanders.
Researched and written by me, Brian Dunning.
Listen to Skeptoid for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or iHeart.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello, everyone.
This is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.