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By Jordan King
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President Donald Trump’s administration is one of many governments around the world trying to reverse the decline in birth rates, which will continue over the next 75 years, new data shows.
The U.S. Census Bureau released new population projections this month forecasting that the American fertility rate (the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime) will drop to 1.55 by 2100 from the current 1.63. This is well below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman required to maintain a stable population without immigration.
There are multiple reasons for the birth-rate decline, but financial strain and cultural shifts are generally cited as the main drivers. Newsweek has broken them down in more detail here.
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Many politicians, think tanks, economists and demographers are concerned about the decline, for many reasons Newsweek has gone into detail about here, but mainly because it could lead to an aging society in which there are not enough working-age people to support the elderly.
Measures the Trump administration has looked at taking reportedly include considering giving women a "baby bonus" of $5,000 and tying certain states' funding to their birth and marriage rates. Lawmakers have also tried to address some financial worries, working to make childbirth free for privately insured families.
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Are Policies To Boost Birth Rates Working?
There is constant debate about how to reverse the birth rate, often focusing on calls for ensuring financial security and pushes for more family-oriented policies, such as longer parental leave and subsidized child care.
Multiple demographers Newsweek has spoken with agree that these types of interventions are important, but several have called for the “lens to be widened.”
"Policies like parental leave, child care subsidies, baby bonuses, etc., are much easier to implement and have the potential to affect fertility more rapidly, if they were effective," Phillip B. Levine, an economist from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, told Newsweek. “Changing the social conditions that encourage family formation is more difficult and takes longer to accomplish.”
Other demographers argue that the solution should not exclusively be focused on reversing the birth rate but on planning for an aging population.
If the Census Bureau projections are correct, the fertility rate will have dropped to 1.55 at the same time that the life expectancy for men will have risen from 77.7 to 86.6 and for women from 82.5 to 89.4.
Beth Jarosz, a senior program director of U.S. programs at the Population Reference Bureau, argues for pension and health care systems "designed to accommodate a new population structure.”
“The thing I worry about is lack of planning,” Jarosz told Newsweek. “We know how to help a society age gracefully—by providing things like high-quality health care, family-friendly workplace policies, accessible housing and flexible transportation [including high-quality transit and walkable communities]. The question is: Will leaders act in time?”
Other Solutions
Sociologist and demographer Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina, who argues that the dangers of an aging society are “overblown,” told Newsweek: “While the economic challenges of low fertility are substantial, a thoughtful and consistent policy response can mitigate most of the adverse consequences.
“Policymakers have scope to react to declining fertility with carefully designed economic policies that utilize complementarities and synergies, including policies that allow families to square family-related responsibilities with work-related responsibilities; policies that ensure socially optimal levels of immigration [with safeguards to protect against undue brain drain].”
Guzzo is one of several demographers who advocate for immigration as a way to maintain the workforce.
Another is William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who told Newsweek: “Immigration would help this [the economic consequences of declining fertility] out because immigrants and their children increase the size of the younger population.
“But if aging nations like the U.S. decide to put the brakes on immigration, they will be less able to help to service their older populations.”
Spain is an example of a country that has used immigration to mitigate the effects of the declining birth rate.
Last year, its birth rate went up for the first time in a decade, with 1,378 more births in 2024 than in 2023, which several analysts attributed to immigration, after Spain embraced it, with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez arguing that "Spain needs to choose between being an open and prosperous country or a closed-off, poor country. It's as simple as that."
But there are multiple factors that are unique to Spain, not the least that the majority of Spain's immigrants come from Latin America and that Spain is a service-driven country that is easily open to South American migrants who speak the same language.
Guzzo told Newsweek: “Although there are real implications of low birth rates for population aging and composition [and then, relatedly, pension systems, health care systems and the labor market], trying to raise birth rates isn’t the best or most immediate lever to address them.
“Social and economic policy is a much more immediate set of levers.”
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