If you haven’t heard the argument that civilization is about to collapse because women aren’t having enough babies, you haven’t been consuming much media.

“The Birth-Rate Crisis Isn’t as Bad as You’ve Heard—It’s Worse,” announced The Atlantic (6/30/25). Business Insider (8/21/25) ran a piece titled “America’s Great People Shortage,” which opened, “America is about to tumble off the edge of a massive demographic cliff.” And NPR‘s Brian Mann warned on PBS (4/10/26) that, as a result of the birth rate decline, “many people say” that the US soon “will be unrecognizable.”

It’s repeatedly in the news in part because it’s a priority of the “pronatalist” right, which has prominent backers in the Trump administration. Vice President JD Vance has called the US birth rate decline a “civilizational crisis.” He said people with children should have “more power” at the polls, and “more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic” than those without.

Elon Musk, who regularly posts on the subject and has fathered at least 14 children, has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” “There will be no West if this continues,” he said. And President Donald Trump has called for a new “baby boom.”

It’s instructive to recall, as Vogue (5/3/25) does, that fertility was likewise central to the Nazis, who also offered medals to (Aryan) women who bore many children.

The story generally goes like this: Fewer babies being born in the US leads to fewer working-age adults relative to retired adults, which means—as The Atlantic piece put it—”higher taxes, higher debt, or later retirement—or all three.”

But there’s a lot more to the story, and ignoring it masks the white nationalism, regressive gender ideals, and economic inequality driving the narrative.

The numbers might look striking on the surface: As news reports pointed out (e.g., CNN, 4/9/26), the number of births and the fertility rate (births per 1,000 women) in the US have dropped to record lows. Both decreased by 1% from 2024 to 2025; the fertility rate has fallen by about 20% over the past 20 years.

In terms of births per woman, that’s about 1.6—well below the “replacement” rate of 2.1, which would be required to maintain a population without migration.

But that last detail is key. If you believe we need a certain number of working-age adults to support an aging population of retirees, there are—or at least were, until Trump’s brutal immigration regime—millions of people willing and eager to come to this country and help make up that deficit. Even with the declining birth rate, the US population grew by more in 2023-24 than it did in 2003-04.

Even so, immigration was conspicuously missing from too much of the birth rate coverage. For instance, in a long piece on Trump contemplating a “baby bonus,” CBS (4/25/25) reported:

A declining birth rate can spell long-term economic problems, including a shrinking labor force that’s financially strapped to pay for medical services and retirement benefits for an aging population.

It managed to go in depth on why the birth rate might be declining, what a baby bonus might look like, how much it would cost, and whether it could work. But it never mentioned immigration policy.

On CNN (4/18/26), anchor Michael Smerconish explored the falling birth rate with economist Melissa Kearney, who told him:

We’re now looking at, you know, being a society that’s aging, with fewer young people going to school, entering the workforce. This poses demographic headwinds for our economic growth and dynamism going forward.

They discussed the “threat posed in terms of the sustainability of Social Security” and ways to address the problem, but neither ever raised the impact of immigration.

When news outlets ignore that obvious facet of the issue, they hide the xenophobic assumptions underlying the claims of “crisis.”

‘To Save Civilization, Reject Feminism’

And then there’s the misogyny. Right-wing media are quick to blame women for this impending “crisis.”

A New York Post column (9/9/25) by Rikki Schlott, for instance, drummed up the “fear of a baby bust,” blaming it in particular on Gen Z (which is having fewer kids than previous generations at the same age) lacking “positive, empowering messaging that teaches you can prioritize marriage, family, and children while also valuing independence, career, and financial stability”:

“I don’t need a spouse” (or, for that matter, children) feminism has told left-leaning young women that pretty much everything else is more important than family.That’s a very sad development.

Columnist Victor Joecks, syndicated from the Las Vegas Review-Journal (8/2/25; reposted in Daily Signal, 8/10/25), took things even further in a piece headlined “To Save Civilization, Reject Feminism and Honor Mother.” He opened by declaring, “The triumph of modern feminism has put society on the path to demographic collapse.”

Joecks further opined:

Society applauds women for becoming executives, not moms with kids. Reports on the mythical [sic] gender pay gap describe motherhood with the word “penalty.”… Modern feminism has left many women lonely and depressed. It has put the globe into a demographic downward spiral that’s going to be hard to reverse.

‘National Motherhood Medal’

Women-blaming in right-wing media is no surprise, particularly given the surge of pronatalism on the right. But centrist media coverage of that movement also sometimes boosts it.

The New York Times (4/21/25) ran an article on the pronatalist groups pushing the Trump administration on increasing birth rates, noting that “advocates expressed confidence that fertility issues will become a prominent piece of the agenda.” Among their ideas: a “National Motherhood Medal” awarded to women with six or more children, and tax credits to married—but not unmarried—couples with children that increase with successive children.

The gradually shifting worker-retiree ratio does start to become a bigger problem if productivity gains are siphoned off to only accrue to the rich. Which, as it turns out, they increasingly do.

It’s instructive to recall, as Vogue (5/3/25) does, that fertility was likewise central to the Nazis, who also offered medals to (Aryan) women who bore many children.

While the misogyny embedded in the pronatalist movement generally comes through loud and clear in the Times article, the paper insisted on normalizing it, calling the coalition “broad and diverse,” including both “Christian conservatives” who see a “cultural crisis” in need of more marriage and gender inequality, as well as those who “are interested in exploring a variety of methods, including new reproductive technologies, to reach their goal of more babies.”

‘Collapse of our civilization’

The New York Times repeated the economic collapse narrative in its description of the pronatalist movement’s

warning of a future in which a smaller work force cannot support an aging population and the social safety net. If the birth rate is not turned around, they fear, the country’s economy could collapse and, ultimately, human civilization could be at risk.

By making no effort to analyze that narrative, the Times lent it legitimacy.

Similarly, in a USA Today piece (3/10/26) on whether Trump’s effort to be known as the “fertilization president” was sparking a baby boom (“that question is complicated,” the paper concluded), reporter Madeline Mitchell quoted a pronatalist podcaster saying that the declining birth rate “is going to lead to the collapse of our civilization.”

That piece was part of a package that interviewed many women of varying ages to understand why they were or were not having children; those pieces included perspectives about the financial and existential struggles facing women who want to have children and feel they can’t afford to, or don’t feel the world is stable enough to bring children into.

It’s an important perspective, and interviewing women on this subject is something all outlets should be doing. But without addressing the question of whether a falling birth rate will, in fact, bring about imminent civilizational collapse, as the widely disseminated right-wing narrative claims, the framing pits women’s feelings and choices against the survival of civilization—hardly a fair contest.

Since birth rate is not a significant problem for the US in the foreseeable future unless you prevent immigration, the idea repeated in these pieces that “civilization” will collapse from a falling birth rate actually means “white civilization.” Pronatalists, you see, tend to share a lot in common with Christian white nationalists.

‘The Problem Is Teens’

Another New York Times article (2/27/26) headlined “The Birthrate Is Plunging. Why Some Say That’s a Good Thing,” pointed out that the drop in the US is mostly among teens and women in their early 20s, and reminded readers that

30 years ago, the growing number of teenage and single mothers was seen as a societal crisis, with poor economic and health outcomes for mother and baby. The most vociferous critics called these women “welfare queens” and said they were draining public........

© Common Dreams