And we're live. Welcome back to the loopcast. Today, I'm joined by both Erica and Josh, the trio's back together regularly now on Mondays and Wednesdays. Erica's so happy to have you. Welcome back. Happy to be here.

Apologies for our tardiness. We're dealing with some tech issues. Someone really does not want Erica to be on the show. I was kind of joking that we can just make Erica a regular special surprise guest like 15 minutes

in her tech starts working we'll just get it rolling but for today's episode she's a little bit

of a specialist we're talking about the birth rate and we might now be a part of the new far

right according to Politico who so now people that believe that the rights come from God and have kids are now on the far right so welcome to Politico, who, so now people that believe that the rights come from God

and have kids are now on the far right. So welcome to anyone who believes those two things.

Thank you. Glad to know.

But the academic part of this that really started the conversation was we are seeing historically

low birth rates across the board. And so that later comes from some of the solutions that people have, maybe not killing

your children, not being on birth control, not violating people might help.

They're concerned about our solution to it is having children, which is scary to some people.

But just going over the raw numbers here before we get into it, CNN reported Thursday that

according to the National Center for Health Statistics, there were about 3.6 million babies born

in 2023 or 54.4 live births for every 1,000 females every ages 15 to 44.

Same day, Axios indicated that U.S. fertility rate in 20203 amounted to about 1.6 births per woman,

well below the replacement rate of 2.1 that will allow a generation to completely replace itself.

According to government data, birth rates fell among adult women younger than 40

and were unchanged for women in their 40s. Furthermore, birth rates declined across nearly all

racial groups.

And after a steep plunge in the first year of the COVID pandemic, the fertility rate has fluctuated.

But the 3% drop between 2022 and 2023 brought that rate just below the previous low from 2020, which was about 56 births for every 1,000 women of reproductive age.

Now, I don't think we need to do basic math math with the loopcast audience. Sorry, is that math there? It was a little bit British. That was very British.

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