Reuters · https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-fertility-rates-drop-record-low-2025-births-fall-2026-04-09/
US fertility hit a record low in 2025, down 23% since 2007. The CBO projects 8 million fewer Americans by 2055. The arithmetic is long.
You have sown much, and bring in little… he who earns wages earns wages to put them into a bag with holes in it.
Haggai 1:6
In 2025 the American fertility rate fell to the lowest level ever recorded, down about 23% from its 2007 peak. The Congressional Budget Office now expects 8 million fewer people in the country by 2055 than it projected just a year ago. The reasons are real and not simple. Housing costs, childcare costs, job insecurity, and for many, a clear-eyed choice to live differently than their parents did.
Haggai was a prophet to people who were working hard and feeling strangely empty. His description of them is uncomfortably modern. You have sown much and brought in little. You earn wages only to put them in a bag with holes. The effort is real; the returns leak away somewhere they cannot see.
A birthrate is not a moral scoreboard. People have fewer children for a hundred honest reasons, and a smaller family is not a smaller life. But a society makes these decisions one household at a time, and then meets the sum of them all at once, decades later, in quieter houses and emptier rooms.
The choices that feel like freedom in one season have a way of arriving, much later, as solitude.
That is the part the spreadsheet never shows.