New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirms what demographers have been watching with growing alarm: American women are having fewer children than ever before. The U.S. fertility rate dropped to 53.1 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age in 2025, and the total fertility rate—the average number of children a woman will have over her lifetime—fell to a record low of 1.57, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Total births fell one full percent from the previous year, to just over 3.6 million.

These numbers did not arrive in a vacuum. They are the product of decades of technological, economic, cultural, and policy shifts.

The most striking data point isn’t the overall birth rate. It’s this: for the first time, nearly half of all 30-year-old American women are childless. In 1976, that figure was just 18 percent. Research suggests that women who are childless at 30 face roughly even odds of ever having kids. This is no longer a story about teenagers delaying motherhood until their twenties. It is increasingly a story about women entering their thirties without children and running out of time.

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How did we get here? The sharpest decline in American birth rates came between 1965 and 1976, when the average number of children per woman fell from 2.86 to 1.74. The U.S. dropped below replacement-level fertility in 1972, and birth rates fell sharply the following year in 1973, the year Roe v. Wade fabricated a constitutional right to abortion. The birth control pill had also reached mass distribution by that time. These technologies did not merely reflect changing desires about family size; they actively shaped them, severing the natural link between marriage, sex, and children that had structured human civilization since the beginning.

The second major turning point came with the Great Recession of 2007. Birth rates fell sharply in response, but unlike previous economic downturns, they never recovered. This brings us to the argument that dominates elite discourse on the birth rate: children are simply too expensive. And there are real stories behind this. Many young women, particularly those without college degrees, cite financial barriers and the difficulty of affording stay-at-home motherhood as primary reasons for forgoing children.

But we should think about this narrative carefully. The countries and communities with the highest incomes do not have the highest birth rates. In many cases, they often have the lowest. And the same cultural voices lamenting the cost of children rarely question the cost of the lifestyle being protected in their place: the urban apartment, the frequent travel, or the graduate degree financed by debt. The reality is that the “too expensive” argument is real for some women, especially those without a college degree, and a rationalization for others.

Technology's role extends well beyond contraception and abortion. Social media has handed an entire generation of young women a relentless feed of curated female success defined by career, aesthetics, and autonomy rather than covenantal marriage or sacrificial motherhood. Smartphone-mediated life has also delayed and disrupted the courtship patterns that historically led to marriage and children.

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When I was writing Lead Like Jael, which examines these cultural and technological forces shaping how we view marriage and family, one question haunted me: Are there any young women outside conservative Christian circles who actually want to prioritize marriage, children, a home they’re present in? While it is still early on, surveys are beginning to say yes.

One recent survey found that 43 percent of women prefer a tradwife lifestyle, compared to 23 percent who prefer girl-boss feminism. In another survey, Gen Z, counterintuitively, is marginally more likely than prior generations to identify children, not career, as the truest marker of a successful life.

That is a thread worth pulling. There are also policy levers worth pulling: ending welfare structures that penalize marriage, redirecting Title X funding away from contraception and abortion toward genuine women’s healthcare, and building a tax and benefits environment that treats family formation as a social good rather than a private luxury.

The problems before us are great, and they defy any easy explanation or a single solution. And yet the alternative—unending demographic decline and the forfeiture of the absolute joy of children—is too grave to accept with a shrug. As Christians, we have the God-ordained opportunity to preach the good news of biblical anthropology to a tired and hurting world. It is only in Christ, and the abundant life He offers, that we will find wisdom and relief from the world’s lies.