American women are having fewer children today than at any other time in recorded history, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Thursday. 

Amazingly the ten-page report completely fails to mention the driving cause of the birth dearth: the parallel record low of households headed by married couples.

The math is simple. Women who get married earlier in life, start giving birth earlier and end up with larger families. Half of women who get married in their early 20s end up having at least three children, compared to just 33% of women who get married after 30. More than 60% of women who get married in their 30s have two children or less.

And of course, married women are much much more likely to have children than women who stay single (single women on average have 1.15 children over their lifetime, married women have 2.12).

Essentially, all of the decline in fertility since 2001, can be attributed to the decline of marriage. 

In their write-up of our nation’s record low fertility, the Wall Street Journal claimed that births are falling, in part, because “women are establishing fulfilling careers.”

But how “fulfilling” are those careers really?

Women, especially young liberal women, have been getting progressively unhappier as they have entered the workforce in larger numbers. If all those new careers are so fulfilling, why are women so much unhappier now?

The Wall Street Journal also quotes “experts” who claim, “an influx of people immigrating to the U.S. could offset the impact of lower birthrates.”

Yes, more immigrants could replace those not born due to the decline in marriage, but at what cost? As the Congressional Budget Office recently reported, the influx of immigrants during President Joe Biden’s border crisis has only lowered wages and reduced investment.

“A significant share of additional foreign nationals will initially work in sectors of the economy that have relatively low productivity,” the CBO writes. “Additional foreign nationals are expected to work in sectors of the economy that pay relatively low wages, thus putting downward pressure on average wages… the projected increase in workers reduces the amount of capital (factories and machinery) per worker, which also puts downward pressure on average real wages.”

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Lower wages, especially lower wages for men, mean even lower future marriage rates. Trying to solve our nation’s fertility crisis through immigration will only send us into a fertility death spiral as more immigration lowers men’s wages, thus lowering marriage rates, thus lowering fertility.

If we want to solve our nation’s fertility crisis, we need to solve our nation’s marriage crisis.