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Democratic states lead the U.S. birth dearth.
by Steven Malanga, in the City Journal
The relentless decline in global fertility accelerated during Covid-19, pushing humanity closer to failing to achieve a replacement-level birthrate—the point below which a new generation is smaller than the previous one. Though the U.S. for decades had defied a trend that saw several prosperous industrial nations fall short of that benchmark, the so-called birth dearth recently has reached the United States. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that, in 2020, the number of children born per adult woman in the U.S. hit an average low of 1.64. Rather than trending up after Covid, the total fertility rate fell to an all-time low of 1.62 last year, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per women.
There’s plenty of speculation about the cause of collapsing birthrates at home and abroad. Population experts attributed the first big declines, seen during the Industrial Revolution, to scientific advances that lowered infant mortality and increased birth-control options, and to prosperity-boosting technological gains that made children as workers less valuable to parents. But as birthrates kept falling below replacement levels in the decades and centuries that followed, observers have focused on factors like the decline in marriage, increases in divorce, and even rising housing prices as possible explanations for the globe’s fertility slowdown.
Of course, many factors influence national birthrates. One thing that stands out in the United States, however, is how fertility differs among the states—ranging from a low of 1.27 in Vermont to nearly replacement-level in South Dakota. Notably, the states with the highest birthrates are overwhelmingly Republican, and those with the lowest are disproportionately Democratic. What, if anything, can this tell us?
While it can be perilous to make quick assumptions about correlations, there is an unmistakable correspondence between states’ birthrates and their political affiliation. 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. (Nevada, which Cook deems marginally Republican, is the one exception, with the tenth-lowest birthrate.) Others near the bottom include Rhode Island, Oregon, Massachusetts, Washington, and California. Only two Democratic states have birthrates above the national average, compared with 20 Republican states with above-average fertility.
Some states have switched places over time. After the U.S. national rate declined to 1.73 births per woman in 1976, it began climbing again, reaching replacement level in 1990—a rare rise among countries. U.S. birthrates then stayed near or slightly above that level for some 20 years before a slow but steady decline following the Great Recession of 2008, which accelerated during Covid. Some states, however, have fallen further and faster than others. California has experienced the steepest decline, from a birthrate of 2.47 in 1990, then the nation’s third-highest rate, to just 1.47, the ninth worst today. Utah’s rate has also tumbled since 1990, but unlike California’s, it remains well above average, while rates in Indiana, North Dakota, and Kentucky have fallen the least.
Marriage is certainly a key element in understanding state-level fertility data and birthrates more generally. 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. American marriage rates, which had been dropping slowly for years, began a sharper decline in 2017, and plunged further in the first year of Covid. Today, the number of marriages per 1,000 people in the U.S. is 38 percent lower than in the early 1990s, as barely more than half of all adults are married. Like fertility rates, however, the story differs per state, and a politically color-coded map of state marriage rates resembles that of state fertility rates. 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.
Housing prices are another possible cause of cross-state fertility gaps. Several studies have linked industrialized countries’ low fertility rates to rising housing costs, as inflated prices cause couples to delay marriage and limit their number of children. One study even connected rising interest rates, which boost homeowners’ mortgage payments, to declining fertility.
Housing costs vary greatly by state. Economists associate levels of government regulation, especially on zoning, to high housing prices. For example, a recent paper examined the effects of the so-called zoning tax (the added cost of zoning regulations) in 24 metropolitan areas. The researchers found that those areas with the highest zoning taxes were overwhelmingly cities in Democratic states—including San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. Those with the smallest zoning premium, by contrast, were red-state cities like Cincinnati, Dallas, Atlanta, and Charlotte. No wonder, then, that all ten states with the lowest median housing prices are Republican and largely boast above-average fertility rates, while seven of the ten states with the highest housing prices are low-fertility and Democratic.
States’ responses to the recent pandemic also overlap with their fertility rates. Historically, societies have seen major declines in fertility during periods of economic and social stress, such as the two world wars and the Great Depression. The Covid pandemic certainly qualifies as such a traumatic time, and given that partisan differences in states’ handling of that crisis correlate with birthrates, it’s possible that their varying policies had some effect on fertility. Republican states recovered quickest economically from the Covid shutdowns, adding hundreds of thousands of new jobs some two years after pandemic lockdowns began, even as Democratic states were still short more than 1 million jobs, according to one analysis. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research charted Covid-era economic and social outcomes, including how quickly schools reopened, and found that 17 of the top 20 states in terms of recovery were Republican, while nine of the ten states with the worst outcomes were Democratic. (The exception, again, was low-fertility Nevada.)
Given global fertility declines, the question is whether differences in state outcomes can illuminate how to stabilize births. Many low-birthrate countries, such as Japan and Western European nations, have tried government-driven, so-called pro-natalist policies—like mandating maternal leave, offering tax breaks for having kids, and subsidizing child care—with little success. In the U.S., some policy experts are campaigning to expand the federal child tax credit to support families, while some states and cities have also mandated that businesses grant leave to new parents. Immigration advocates, meantime, claim that new residents can solve our population woes, though studies in Europe of countries with significant foreign-born populations, like Austria, have found the “immigration bounce” is small because new arrivals quickly adopt their new country’s fertility practices. In America, many new arrivals are poor, low-educated migrants who require significant government subsidies—creating other sorts of problems.
Perhaps the most important thing that government can accomplish when it comes to fertility is to do no harm. Recent American social policy may well have discouraged marriage, especially among low-income recipients of federal and state government aid. Similarly, local governments played a decisive role in pushing up American housing costs—and creating the disincentives to having children that those costs present.
Many fertility scholars note that birthrates began plunging as countries grew richer. They assume that prosperity is linked to people having more options in life, which makes having children less desirable. But prosperity also brings with it bigger and more ambitious government, with more social spending, more regulation, more complexity in taxes—and more unintended social consequences. That’s another obvious difference between Republican and Democratic states in America: the ones with lower fertility rates have more government. Perhaps that is part of the problem.
Author is the Senior Editor of City Journal.
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Categories: Society & Culture
Perhaps if marriage and family wasn’t viewed as unnecessary & antiquated? Perhaps if murdering other persons in utero wasn’t seen as a “choice” or as some type of “right”? Perhaps if mind-altering drug use wasn’t encouraged, enabled, and seen as in vogue? Perhaps if government function & duty was once more founded upon principled and benevolent values that revolved around ensuring individual, intrinsic freedoms & virtuosities as opposed to control & all-encompassing power? Perhaps if God our Creator wasn’t removed from our public & private lives as some type of relic who required not only banishment, but mocking?
Perhaps then our ever-growing desperate and downfallen culture would once again view the birth of every baby created out of mutual love as nothing less than a tiny miracle and a true treasure and an extension of the deep love which God bestowed upon all mankind.
And an addendum for any angry & embittered voices who tend to flinch at the mere mention of God, the proof of His existence is everywhere – From the birds sweetly singing in the trees to the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima. From the sound of your baby’s first cry to The Shroud of Turin. From the Eucharistic Miracles compiled over ages to the Big Bang Theory as alluded to in Genesis. From spontaneous healings at Lourdes which science cannot begin to explain to Near Death Experiences by the billions-fold since Biblical accounts to the Biblical truths & facts only fairly recently being affirmed by archeologists & theologians the world over.
And with all of the extant evidence that abounds, it always remains your very own highly choice to disbelieve and to thoroughly reject. But as with all choices in life, there remain consequences for our decisions, such as what we currently experience in this society, in this culture, in this country & in this world now in terms of that formerly described desperate & downfallen reality we live amidst.
The decline in birth rates was a planned initiative that really took off in the 1970s after the Club of Rome issued The Limits to Growth”, which contributed to China’s one child policy. Read the Kissinger Report from the 1970s. Link https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pcaab500.pdf
The Kissinger Report called for reducing fertility rates via agriculture and education, starting in America. The United Nations tracks global population and works with Planned Parenthood. The United Nations actually states that abortion is part of reproductive health. They mean the health of the planet relative to population. UN documents explicitly stated that wealthier counties have less children, which is why migration needs to occur from poor countries to wealthier counties. Ultimately , poor people will have more economic potential via education and have less children. Search the internet for the United Nations document about Replacement Migration being the solution to aging and declining populations from 2001. I just finished reading ecotactics: The Sierra Club Handbook for Environmental Activists published in 1970. The book called for “Population Stabilization: In order to stabilize the population, the federal government must subsidize and support all birth control methods:…” The blood recommended financially penalizing people with more than two children.
Now as to why there would be a greater reduction in birth rates post COVID-19. Studies relative to the lipid nano particle that encapsulates the mRNA spike protein sequence was found to manifest in the reproductive organs of men and women, causing infertility. This was known prior to the creation of the COVID-19 shots. I believe that a court has recently ruled that these aka vaccines are not vaccines and are actually classified as biological weapons.
We can’t forget the increase in baby deaths as discussed by this Australian mortician.
https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1lDxLPLkVlRxm
It’s a total mystery.
Children are certainly not safe in Vermont, for multiple reasons, even if you make it out alive, they want total control of your child…to become a good little worker bee for their little “collective”…..join the hive.
Note the “Club of Rome”, when the experts saw resources exhausted and the need to limit population.
God save us from our experts and their conceit of knowing and control.
The stakeholders of including the federal government and those on Vermont are working in lockstep. This is an Open Conspiracy as described by H.G. Wells in his book Open Conspiracy written in 1935, renewed in 1956, with new material and cover added in 2006. It is introduced as the guidebook on world control and management. The book calls for the end of sovereign Nations and the creation of a “unified progressive world community” (pg. 137). This book is believed to be the blueprint for how to achieve the United Nations agenda.
A good look at the decline of this country let alone the world who with any sense would want to bring a child into it.
My thoughts exactly.
Because when pandora opened the box, she released all the horrors of the world. She also released hope.
Having children is the highest expression of hope.
Don’t lose hope. And don’t send your kids to a public school.
Vermont is the most heavily C19 injected state in the USA. All the Blue States ranked higher %’s of C19 injections over the Red states (who were less gullible & less brainwashed) and this is directly correlated to decrease in birth rates.
Author Naomi Wolf covered the catastrophic issue of increased miscarriages & stillbirths in women C19 “vaccinated” during their pregnancy after the EUA & mandates of an experimental gene therapy (we now know we’re Neither Safe, Nor Effective).
Senator Sanders prefers to view the rise in disabled Vermonter’s as being secondary to “Long Covid”, when all the data shows that the rise in disabled over the entire globe, in countries where ever the C19 jabs were pushed, death & disabilities are directly related to C19 injections (not from SARS-CoV-2 infections).
FACT Senator Sanders (much love & respect to you always): truth be known; the increased deaths and disabled here in Vermont are victims of C19 vaccine injuries (not ‘Long Covid’). The spike proteins in these injections are cytotoxins and attack human epithelium (the cells that make up the arterial walls). mRNA gene therapy enables the spike protein to be delivered to any part of the body we have arteries/arterioles (brain, heart, nerves, liver, kidneys, ovaries & testes, etc.).
The C19 injections are being called WMD by Dr. Francis Boyle (Harvard educated law professor who drafted the 1989 Biological Weapons and Antiterrorism Act in 1989)… He stated; “mRNA are biological weapons and weapons of mass destruction that violate Biological Weapons 18 USC$175; Weapons and Firearms $ 790.166 Fla.”
The 9th District Court in Los Angeles California has concluded after careful review of the “Science” – (surprise: Anthony Fauci is NOT the “science” … just the wolf in sheep’s clothing selling the “science”) – that Pfizer misrepresented C19 injections as a “vaccine”, when in fact it was an “experimental mRNA gene therapy”… hazardous to all our health.
Since WHEN do we inject pregnant women with an ‘experimental’ medical treatment ??? (which violated the Nuremberg Code for even non-pregnant women, men & children). Since when does MEDICARE reimburse Physicians up to $150 for every patient they C19 injected ? They never did this for other ‘vaccines’?
? Still trusting what you Physician tells you to do if you realize the more patients he can convince into taking a C19 vaccine, the more $$$ in his pocket ? Transparency matters here when it comes to our health and the choices we make.
Couldn’t huge monetary incentives for Physician’s ($150 patient if 90% of their patients are C19 vaccine compliant) be seen as a conflict of interest when advising their patients whether or not to take an experimental injection ? Did this motivate them to avoid honoring their Hippocratic Oath?
Since it has always been known, by anyone in the healthcare field & pharmaceuticals, we NEVER experiment on pregnant women; this may explain why some of our more conscientiousness OB/GYN doctors decided to drop out of the game & retire early during the pandemic. They were not going to comply.
Another way of looking at it (if you knew all I knew learning what was going on behind the scenes), the retired OB/GYN MD’s chose not “Follow Orders of the 4th Reich” ~ who via the FDA, are now also looking to C19 vaccinate & ‘Bird Flu’ mRNA vaccinate- (aka STERILIZE using gene therapy) – under the guise of ‘Health Care’ of our livestock, chickens, goats, etc. which will also have fertility issues.
Kissinger warned us, “If you want to control the people, control the food.”
Not since the tragedy of the thalidomide babies have we used experimental medical treatments on pregnant mothers. Given the fact our Government views us as the “carbon” they want to reduce (including all farm animals & food sources), I’m afraid this was no mistake.
*** Be careful *** NOT to blame the Liberals & their views on abortion for decrease in birth rates …The Government WANTS us blaming each other instead of viewing the real culprits causing the low birth rates (the CDC who took orders ~ with very few people in the chain of command knowing ~ from the DoD).
The rise in still births & miscarriages had NOTHING to do with abortion rates in Vermont and are directly correlated to C19 injections.
The C19 injections are also known to cause infertility in all the children that got them; they too, are expected to have difficulty having children of their own (not just pregnant mothers who were C19 injected).
Do not use “Google” to find actual truth regarding “science”. It is run by the same people who own MSM, the NYT, the Washington Post, BBC, MSNBC, CNN & FoxNews (every news outlet across our falling nation) … And, Google & Wikipedia is controlled by the same people who run the MIC / DoD.
Try search engine Yandex.com (Yandex is run out of Russia … yes RUSSIA – where Edward Snowden chooses to live as a Free man) … use this browser instead to get around all the lies we’re being told.
The primary function of human beings is to procreate. Nothing is more important. All artificial activities created by mankind that get in The way of having children are a threat to the future. Our selfishness could be our undoing.
Amen, Art!
The death knell for children was sounded when God’s gift of sex became separated from the procreative and unitive purposes of sex within the parameters of marriage through the advent of the popularity of contraception around the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
Three extraordinarily insightful and excellent resources and commentaries regarding this simple, but often overlooked fact can be found here:
https://youtu.be/xoH3QCyI3BQ?si=_1Jwgwp1RG8BwPLk
“Our Bodies Tell God’s Story,” by Christopher West. This is West’s sort of explanation or commentary on “The Theology of the Body.”
“Love Thy Body,” by Nancy Pearcey.
The audiobook versions of the latter two are also great.
One insightful, but horrifying discovery we made when we were researching whether there is a need for pregnancy resource centers in Vermont was this:
In 2020, there were 6,461 deaths in Vermont.
In 2020, there were 5,127 births in Vermont.
In 2020, there were 1,227 abortions committed in Vermont.
The difference between the number of deaths and the number of births was almost exactly the number of babies who were aborted.
Another way to think of it is this:
This is equivalent to killing the total number of students at Vermont’s largest high school, Champlain Valley Union, EVERY YEAR.
And we wonder what is happening to our children?
We are murdering our future and justifying it under the deceitful guise of “reproductive liberty.”
People have the liberty to reproduce in Vermont every day and always have.
It’s not reproduction that seems to be the problem, but rather deproduction.