Want to Fix the Birth Dearth? Make Marriage Matter

A new report from the CDC about birth data for 2023 is out. For everyone concerned about the long-term decline in America’s birth rate, the report doesn’t show strong signs that much has changed.

Why should we care about declining birth rates, and what’s driving the trend? As a recent Heritage Foundation report warns, U.S. fertility is now below replacement. Fewer births and our historic low fertility rate will affect the future economy. It will affect programs like Social Security. Don’t forget the military. What about caregiving as the elderly age? A declining population will affect our nation’s future in more ways than we can count.

If you ask 10 people why the number of births keeps going down, you’ll probably get 10 different answers, from housing and childcare costs to economic anxiety to student loan debt. While there’s not one sole reason (and therefore not one single policy solution,) at the heart of the issue is marriage … fewer marriages, specifically.

Fewer Americans are getting married, and those who do are getting married later which in turn delays having kids (and how many they eventually have). My colleagues recently published a Special Report analyzing trends in marriage, childbearing, and other important factors of American family life. In it, they note:

Today, married couples make up less than half (47 percent) of U.S. households, 40 percent of children are born outside marriage, and the birth rate has reached its lowest recorded level. The age of first marriage has increased by about seven years for both sexes. More adults ages 18 to 44 have cohabited (59 percent) than have been married (50 percent). Marriage itself has been legally redefined nationwide with the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodgesdecision in a way that rejects the fundamental link between marriage and childbearing. In fact, for a growing and influential segment of the country, even defining “man” and “woman” seems to be an impossible task.

Healthy marriages help establish stable families and a thriving civil society. (And no, cohabitation does not provide the same stability and benefits for adults and children as marriage.) Separating marriage + having children has changed the structure of family formation for the worse.

For all the attention that solving the “birth dearth” gets, pronatalism is not enough. It is not enough to look for policies and technology (some with serious ethical concerns) that encourages or assists people to reproduce. Addressing healthy marriages has to be front and center of policy proposals.

There’s no one-size policy to help people enter a healthy marriage and keep it that way. One way to help is using (and building on) existing funding and programing at the state and federal level. But government programs can’t fix decades of cultural forces that have minimized or dismissed the importance of coupling sex, marriage, and childbearing together. The decline in marriage rates didn’t happen overnight just as the decline in births didn’t happen overnight.

Put frankly, it took a long time to make the mess we’re in and it’ll take time to clean it up, too. We can debate the merits of things like student loan “forgiveness,” housing benefits, childcare subsidies, and tax credits. But the most meaningful, effective way to address declining births is to reorient society to value family formation within stable, healthy marriages. Want to address the birth dearth? Let’s show our fellow Americans that marriage matters.

The post Want to Fix the Birth Dearth? Make Marriage Matter appeared first on The Daily Signal.