Forget the slogans about “delayed parenthood” or “work-life balance.” U.S. fertility has dropped below 1.6 children per woman. It no longer signals fluctuation or delay. It signals terminal decline. If we remain on this path, we will become a nation that grows older, poorer and lonelier with each passing year. The tax base will shrink, social services will buckle, and the economy will become a ghost town built for children who never arrived.

And yet, it’s still possible to turn this around.

But not with the tools of the past. Not with half-measures that barely cover gas or daycare programs that reduce children to line items. No, what’s needed is a complete reordering of priorities — a full-scale cultural, spiritual and institutional awakening. A pronatalist revolution. A re-sanctification of the family. A reckoning with what we traded for freedom and what that freedom has cost.

We begin by rejecting the lie that children are a burden. That myth, sold in glossy ads and packaged in corporate feminism, told women their value was in productivity, not procreation. It told men they were better off untethered, that family life was a trap, not a purpose. So we sterilized ourselves with ideology and congratulated ourselves for our clever escape. But now we see what’s left behind: A generation that won’t replace itself, relationships replaced by apps, and cities full of childless professionals wondering why they feel so hollow at........

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