It is a step in the right direction that liberal columnists such as Catherine Rampell are not only acknowledging that birthrates are declining in the United States but also admitting it is a problem.
Unfortunately, Rampell then reverts to fact-free blind partisanship by blaming the Republican Party for the phenomenon.
“Americans aren’t having enough babies,” Rampell wrote. “Ironically, pro-life politicians might be making the problem worse.”
Her only support for this bold claim is that “post-Dobbs, pregnancies in red states — including wanted pregnancies — have become much more dangerous, especially when things go wrong,” and that “such stories are horrifying and traumatic for the women involved. They also likely discourage women on the fence about having kids from deliberately conceiving.”
But Rampell offers no evidence that birthrates are down in red states with strict anti-abortion laws, she only speculates that they might be.
What we do know, from Rampell’s article, is that the decline in birthrates started long before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. In fact, when we zoom in on birthrates by state, what we see is that it is states controlled by the Democratic Party where fertility has declined the most and that the most fertile states are controlled by Republicans.
In City Journal, Steven Malanga reported, “The 17 states with the highest general fertility rates are all designated by Cook Political Report as Republican, or GOP-leaning, including such Republican strongholds as North Dakota, Nebraska, Louisiana, Utah, and Texas. By contrast, the bottom six states — and nine of the ten states with the lowest fertility rates — are all either Democratic or Democratic-leaning. … Only two Democratic states have birthrates above the national average, compared with 20 Republican states with above-average fertility.”
Seems it is the Democrats, and not the Republicans, who are to blame for the birth dearth.
But why? What Democratic Party policies in particular are causing women not to reach their desired family size?
“Marriage is certainly a key element in understanding state-level fertility data and birthrates more generally,” Malanga continued. “While women may have children outside of marriage, studies consistently show that married couples are more committed, stay together longer, and have more children than do unmarried individuals. … Nine of the ten states with the lowest marriage rates, and eight of the states with the highest percentage of never-married people, are Democratic, low-birthrate states.”
As Malanga later noted, there is plenty that the federal government does to discourage marriage, most prominently the countless marriage penalties throughout the $1 trillion worth of means-tested programs the federal government helps pay for. It is among the recipients of these means-tested programs that marriage has fallen the most.
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But there are plenty of state policies that make marriage less likely, too, including zoning regulations that drive housing prices higher, thus making it harder for young couples to afford a home, and environmental regulations that make it more expensive to build everything, thus driving down good-paying construction jobs.
Red states with a commitment to building, and not creating an environment where low-skilled immigrants can drive down wages, have far higher marriage rates than blue states that prioritize the environment and open borders over higher wages for native workers.