The Children No One Is Having

What's happening

The CDC reported on April 9 that the US fertility rate fell to 53.1 births per 1,000 women in 2025, another record low. Total births dropped to 3.6 million. The teen fertility rate fell 7 percent in a single year and is now down more than 70 percent since 2007. Nearly half of women around age 30 are childless, up from roughly a third a decade ago. The marriage rate has fallen to 6.1 per 1,000, the lowest on record outside the pandemic year. The Congressional Budget Office projects a total fertility rate of 1.53 by 2036, well below the 2.1 replacement level. Survey data consistently shows most young Americans still want children and want marriage. The architecture that once made both achievable, affordable housing, stable employment, proximate community, has been systematically disassembled.

What the Text says

The first command in Scripture is an invitation, not an obligation.

Genesis 1:28God blessed them. God said to them, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

The Hebrew is structured as blessing. "Be fruitful" is spoken in the same breath as "God blessed them." Fruitfulness is presented as the natural overflow of a creation declared good. The text assumes conditions in which bearing fruit is possible. It speaks into a world where the ground produces, where labor yields, where community receives. The Psalmist makes a parallel assumption.

Psalm 127:3-53Behold, children are a heritage of Yahweh. The fruit of the womb is his reward.4As arrows in the hand of a mighty man, so are the children of youth.5Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them. They won't be disappointed when they speak with their enemies in the gate. A Song of Ascents.

Children are described as a heritage, an inheritance, something received collectively. The image is communal: the quiver belongs to a household embedded in a city with gates and enemies. The blessing assumes a structure capable of holding it. When that structure is absent, the blessing becomes an abstraction. A generation that wants children and cannot afford them, cannot house them, cannot find a partner stable enough to raise them with, is not rejecting fruitfulness. It is living in an economy that has made fruitfulness a luxury good. The text never separates the desire for children from the conditions that make children possible.

The reflection

The comfortable explanations are too small. The right says moral decline. The left says reproductive freedom. The data says something else: most of these young adults want exactly what their grandparents had and cannot get to it. Housing costs, debt loads, dating markets optimized for disposability, the disappearance of every institution that once introduced people to each other for free. A society that prices children out of reach and then mourns the birth rate has answered its own question.