[Photo Credit: PeopleImages.com - Yuri A/Shutterstock]
For the better part of five decades, we told Americans — implicitly and explicitly — that children were a burden. We built a culture that prizes career over commitment, convenience over continuity, and freedom from ties over the joys of rootedness. We told women that motherhood was a trap, that marriage could wait (or be skipped entirely), and that the future would take care of itself. Now, with birthrates scraping historic lows, we act shocked. We clutch our pearls, roll out baby bonuses, and pretend this was all some mysterious accident of economics.
It wasn’t. It was a choice — repeated, reinforced, and rewarded at every level of modern society.
The CDC recently reported that the U.S. birthrate ticked up by just 1 percent in 2024 — a glimmer of good news, perhaps, but hardly a reversal of the decades-long fertility free fall. America is still well below replacement level. And the longer we stay there, the harder it will be to recover. A nation that forgets how to replenish itself eventually forgets how to sustain itself at all.
In response, former President Trump is reportedly floating a $5,000 “baby bonus” as part of a ...
