The headlines are everywhere now, but the story has been building for decades: “U.S. fertility rate dropped to lowest in a century…” (CNN); “South Korea’s Plan to Avoid Population Collapse” (Think Global Health); and “New Report on Germany’s Birth Rate Causes Alarm for Experts” (Newsweek). Others include: “Russia Birth Rate Plummets to Lowest in 25 Years” (The Hindu) and “China attempts to boost birth rate amidst mounting challenges” (Reuters).

As even this small sampling of recent stories attests, the problem of sharply fallen birth rates is a global one, with few exceptions, and it prevails irrespective of the political constitution of the nations ensnared in it. The problem is not merely birth rates below or significantly below the replacement level of roughly 2.1 children per woman, but rates that are trending to half or less of replacement level in modern economies with solid gross national product.

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Consider these figures:

Policymakers from across the political spectrum are taking a fresh look at the levers at their command to ease and encourage childbearing. Ideas run the gamut from increasing child tax credits (CTC), to making childbirth free, to permanent income tax relief, to expanded child care, flextime, and family leave options. But the steepness of the challenge should not be underestimated. Child tax credits have been a feature of federal income tax policy for nearly three decades. Pro-family groups were early champions of the credit and cheered when it was deemed the “crown jewel” of the 1994 Republican Contract with America.

Since its adoption in 1997, the credit may have returned as much as $3 trillion to American families via its size and refundability (i.e., the feature that allows families to receive a portion of the credit even if they have no federal income tax liability). An analysis by the Peterson Foundation shows that the credit is the fourth largest among some 180 tax expenditures in the U.S. code. In 2023 according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, 46 million taxpayers claimed the credit at a total “tax expenditure,” or cost, to the Treasury of $122 billion. An expansion of the credit is set to expire after 2025 and debate over extending it, or even increasing it, will be intense.

The total fertility rate in the United States in 1997 was 1.97, and obviously it has declined since then. Tracing such a complex, multifactorial statistic to any particular policy is difficult, to say the least, but suffice it to say that the CTC in its various forms has not proven to be a silver bullet in arresting or reversing the birth dearth. The urgency of doing so couldn’t be clearer, however, as the other side of the equation looms — that is, how the United States can address its record deficit spending and national debt, creating current budget stresses and future liabilities that cannot be wished away.

As of mid-day on December 4, one national debt clock registers at $36.2 trillion, more than the total valuation of the U.S. gross domestic product of $29.3 trillion in 2024. The size of this mortgage on the American future is not easy to fathom — a hefty $271,790 per taxpayer. Against this waterfall of red ink, the new Trump administration arrives with pledges to slash the size of government. With an annual deficit of $1.8 trillion in the fiscal year concluded September 30, 2024, the Elon Musk-Vivek Ramaswamy team has their work cut out for them. Changes that require legal action, especially in a closely divided Congress, may yield little savings until the fall of 2025.

There are additional complexities. The incoming administration has promised new federal tax breaks on tips, on overtime pay, and social security benefits. It intends to cap the tax rate on domestic manufacturers at 15 or 20% and to eliminate the current cap on the deductibility of state and local taxes (which may result in higher state and local taxes in some jurisdictions). The new Congress will need to address extension of the 2017 Trump tax plan. Extension of the law is likely, in the belief that reducing government and encouraging economic growth are the pathway out of deficit spending and debt accumulation.

Meanwhile, the prospect of tariffs on foreign imports has tax policy groups all over the map in response, with the National Taxpayers Union warning consumers to be “wary” of price hikes due to increased production costs for U.S. companies that rely on foreign goods in their processes.

The squeeze of rapidly rising debt and declining population is in one sense obvious, but add to the mix a national program that purports to remove millions of people from the country in a short span of time, tariffs that could reach 50% or higher on some nations, rising health care costs, and more dependency on government at higher income levels, and the outlook is uncertain. In such conditions, many political actors will return to their favorite themes rather than embrace model policies on their own merits.

Observers in the United Kingdom have pointed out how some leading advocates for the assisted suicide bill there openly cited fears about becoming a familial or social burden as a valid rationale for the measure. Studies on the direct savings in health care costs due to assisted suicide laws are relatively few, but they line up behind the existence of dollar savings. What role might these views play in future debates in the United States? Certainly that role will be larger in a nation with teetering support for the sanctity of every human life and an ever-less-robust array of health care providers.

Similar thoughts arise regarding pro-natal policies. As communist China is learning anew, tearing down the sanctuary of the family is not a process easily reversed, especially when the state’s understanding of the human person is that he and she are economic machines whose output is essentially a state property. Families are not isolated social units — they are the cradles and fonts of connected generations that for all of human history imparted moral teaching, interpersonal care, emotional security, and purpose. Babies are not interchangeable parts in a CPU engineered to turn social wheels, but transcendent beings whose value society, and government, are to serve and elevate.

This is ultimately why efforts to revive the private sector that do not focus on rebuilding the family and eternal values are doomed to fail. They are merely a different form of materialism that mistakes outputs for worth — a populism without people.

For this reason, the lessons of our disappearing progeny must spark a revolution that undoes the decades of harm influenced by the eugenic-minded and population control elites who turned governments and international bodies against their own people and their neighbors overseas. The Trump administration can do nothing more important than to disconnect the millions of tax dollars that pipeline to Planned Parenthood, IPPF, Marie Stopes, and the dozens of other entities dedicated to eliminating vulnerable populations.

President Trump’s promise to accomplish this goal in 2016, and its partial achievement in his first term via an expanded Mexico City Policy, should be renewed and fulfilled. Likewise, we must abandon the idea that birth rates will recover while a million of our unborn sons and daughters are slain each year and many times that number are considered legal ciphers federally and in many states. America thrived when it knew that its freedom, and the rights long enshrined in its founding law, are gifts from a loving God. Only in this way will a true golden age begin for our nation.

LifeNews Note: Chuck Donovan is a 50-year veteran of the national debate over the right to life and served from 1981-89 as a writer in the Reagan White House.He is the former Executive Vice President of Family Research Council.

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