A worrying report in the Wall Street Journal this morning indicates that many hospitals are shutting down their maternity wards. Because birth rates are falling, many hospitals “can’t recruit enough staff to safely” provide maternity care. This also has ripple effects for the wards that remain open: “Women who give birth in rural hospitals that deliver fewer babies are also at higher risk for serious complications.”

We are often reminded just how much better than our ancestors we have it. Materially speaking, this is generally true. But we should not ignore important signs of coming decline.

As the Journal reminds us, “maternal death rates have hit the highest level in decades.” So have deaths of despair. Our entitlement programs, Social Security chief among them, inch closer to insolvency every day as our national debt explodes.

These problems will be exacerbated as birth rates continue to fall. The population of the United States grew more slowly in 2021 than it did in any prior year. That was an artifact of the Covid-19 pandemic to some degree, but preexisting trends were already in that direction. Without new Americans to fill the schools, the workforce, and the armed forces; to care for the growing numbers of the elderly and the indigent; and to invent the technologies and create the art that will take us through this century, it is hard to see how we can continue to promise people a better life than their parents and grandparents had.

Immigration is, at best, a stopgap solution to this problem. Assimilation is not a seamless process. It requires time and great care to integrate people into a new community, even for those who come here already largely aligned with our values.

Instead, Americans need to start having kids again — lots of them. This is, admittedly, a very easy thing for me, a childless college student, to say, but I hope that when my generation reaches retirement age, we have people to pass our country down to.