The record lows America reached last year in its fertility rate are largely due to women delaying parenthood amid anxiety about the future, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Just over 3.6 million births were reported in 2025, 24,000 fewer than the year before.
The Wall Street Journal dug deeper into the numbers for its analysis, finding the fertility rate at a record-low of 53.1 births per 1,000 women. More alarmingly, the total fertility rate dropped to 1.57 births per woman, below the replacement rate of 2.1 that is necessary for a native population to stop itself from shrinking.
The trend appears largely driven by women delaying parenthood until later in life, with 2025 the first time births to women in their late 30s exceeded births to women in their early 20s.
“People are waiting longer to enter parenthood and probably want to make sure that things are set in their lives before they do so,” argued Wendy Manning, co-director of Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family & Marriage Research. “There might be a lot of uncertainty, and that might not be good for a society in general.” The teen birthrate fell 7% last year, extending a yearslong decline related to public-health campaigns and growing use of longer-acting contraceptives.
Manning attributed their doubts about starting families to financial and relationship struggles as well as concerns about the state of the nation and the world.
“We spent decades and lots of money trying to discourage early childbearing, saying, ‘This will ruin your life. This will ruin your kid’s life. Don’t do it,’’ University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Carolina Population Center director Karen Benjamin Guzzo said.
As the USA heads towards demographic winter and socio-economic disaster, polling from Gallup and Marist shows that public opinion on abortion has been trending in a more pro-“choice” direction for several years.