US fertility rate hits record low in 2025: report

(LifeSiteNews) – The record lows America reached last year in its fertility rate are largely due to women delaying parenthood amid anxiety about the future, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

LifeSiteNews covered the original release of the provisional data in February that showed a little more than 3.6 million births were reported in 2025, a sum 24,000 fewer than the year before. The final data is not expected to differ by more than a “few thousand.” 

The Wall Street Journal dug deeper into the numbers for its analysis, finding the fertility rate at a record-low of 53.1 births per 1,000 women. More alarmingly, the total fertility rate dropped to 1.57 births per woman, below the replacement rate of 2.1 that is necessary for a native population to stop itself from shrinking.

The trend appears largely driven by women delaying parenthood until later in life, with 2025 the first time births to women in their late 30s exceeded births to women in their early 20s.

“People are waiting longer to enter parenthood and probably want to make sure that things are set in their lives before they do so,” argued Wendy Manning, co-director of Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family & Marriage Research. “There might be a lot of uncertainty, and that might not be good for a society in general.” The teen birthrate fell 7% last year, extending a yearslong decline related to public-health campaigns and growing use of longer-acting contraceptives.

Manning attributed their doubts about starting families to financial and relationship struggles as well as concerns about the state of the nation and the world.

“We spent decades and lots of money trying to discourage early childbearing, saying, ‘This will ruin your life. This will ruin your kid’s life. Don’t do it,’’ University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Carolina Population Center director Karen Benjamin Guzzo said.

Live Action noted that the U.S. Congressional Budget Office projected in January that America’s death rate will be higher than its birth rate by 2030. Additionally, the news coincides with polling from Gallup and Marist indicating that public opinion on abortion has been trending in a more pro-“choice” direction for several years.

Numerous nations in Europe and Asia have faced far graver demographic challenges far longer than America has and experimented with a variety of economic measures to try to promote a higher birth rate (while the likes of the United Nations actively discourage having children). In many ways, societies struggling to reinvigorate their birth rates are reaping the consequences of veering to the other extreme for decades under the influence of the late Paul Ehrlich’s since-discredited warnings that overpopulation was a ticking time bomb.

But others argue the problem is primarily cultural. “We have a fertility crisis because we have a marriage crisis,” argued Katy Faust, founder of the parental rights group Them Before Us. “We have a marriage crisis because we have a dating crisis. We have a dating crisis because young people are forming few in-person relationships. Christians, it’s time to model every layer of faithful connection, from friendship to courtship to covenant.”