Utah has the largest average family size in the country. This comes as no surprise to anyone living here. Families of six or seven children are the relative norm.

It may be disorienting, then, to hear about the broader country’s birthrate crisis.

People are not having enough children to replace the previous generation. In 2023, America’s fertility rate fell to a historic low.

This may seem incredibly personal. But, as always, the personal is political.

Falling birthrates are a political problem. Without a younger generation, the programs that aging citizens rely on suffer and the country loses its ability to innovate.

Right now, those calling for political solutions to this issue are doing so for the wrong reasons. This is not how it has to be.

Progressives can and should embrace the family. Having children is a noble undertaking. It is good for the individual and it is good for the country. 

Utah’s onto something. We need more kids.  

What’s Going Wrong 

The most pressing issue of an aging population is the loss of social safety nets.

Everyone will eventually reach the age when they can no longer work. At this time, they will rely on programs like Social Security and Medicare.

However, if there aren’t enough young people, there are not enough working-age citizens paying taxes to support these programs.

This problem is everywhere. Around the world, developed nations are reaching a state of population decline.

South Korea, for example, has the lowest birthrate in the world, at 0.72 births per woman. The replacement rate is 2.1.

South Korea’s population is trending toward being cut in half within 50 years. The societal implications of this are mind-boggling.

It becomes impossible to have a military without a population to draw from. For the nation bordering North Korea, the dangers of this are obvious. As a severe worker shortage looms, the economy heads for collapse.

And, for the young population that does exist, issues of loneliness, societal fragmentation and division are only made worse by the severe shortage of people.

Americans need to be paying attention to this because we are moving in the same direction. What has happened in South Korea can, and without intervention, will happen here.

Unfortunately, in the current bizarre political climate, pro-natalism is often championed by seriously questionable characters.

J.D. Vance is the most visible pro-natalist politician in the U.S. scene today. He’s known for ridiculously offensive comments about “childless cat ladies.”

Vance said, “They are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”

He, like many conservatives, uses the pro-natalist cause to prop up being anti-abortion and to blame feminism for societal ills. Taken to the extreme, the conversation around needing children can become sinister.

It can be weaponized to strip women of their autonomy or as an attempt to re-institute coercive gender norms.

However, it does not need to be this way. The pro-natalist cause does not need to be at odds with feminism.

Women today are having fewer babies than they would like. A world that truly desires women to have free choice will also create the conditions for motherhood.

We must not allow those with sinister ulterior motives to dominate the conversation around the country’s need for children. It is a conversation for young, educated, progressive individuals to have, too. 

Development economist Dean Spears said, “If we wait, the less inclusive, less compassionate, less calm elements within our society … may someday call depopulation a crisis and exploit it to suit their agendas.” 

Not a Doomed Mission 

For many young people, the conversation around future family planning is marked by pessimism and a sense of doom about the future.

However, a broader historical perspective shows that a sense of doom toward child-rearing is a part of being human. The world has always had its crises.

For us, it is climate change. For those deciding to have children in the ’60s, it was a mounting conflict with Russia that seemed about to cause a nuclear war.

Through all of humanity’s great crises, those before us kept having children.

It is a radical act of hope that is still fruitful today.

Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Columbia, said in an interview for the New York Times, “I unequivocally reject, scientifically and personally, the notion that children are somehow doomed to an unhappy life.”

The Policies 

To encourage people to have more children, we must create conditions that people want to bring children into.

This means cultural shifts toward prioritizing marriage and family. As un-hip as it sounds, families make for good societies. The success sequence of “get a job, get married, have kids” is a good one.

On the governmental level, both parties should work tirelessly to expand child tax credits. Progressive, family-supporting policies such as universal pre-K and paid family leave must be prioritized in campaigns.

Ross Douthat said there is a “tacit anti-family spirit in blue culture.”

In this, he’s correct. This is something Democratic culture must work on from the inside, for the benefit of all of us.  

In considering our future, young people everywhere should take a serious look at the merits of having children today. We must resist the urge to spiral into an ideology of doom.

Having children means hope. It is also our only hope for a stable society tomorrow. 

 s.reagan@ustudentmedia.com

@samreaganslc