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Help us inform other podcast listeners by subscribing to the Issues et cetera podcast with YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. There's no doubt that we're in the midst of a long trend that amounts to a fertility crisis.

It's not uniform to every country, but the United States certainly has a dropping fertility rate. Is it related in any way

to the likelihood of people getting married or the marriage rate? Welcome back to Issues,

etc. I'm Todd Wilkin, joining us to talk about marriage and fertility. Lyman Stone, he's a PhD

candidate in population dynamics at

McGill University, Director of Research for Demographic Intelligence, Senior Fellow and Director of the

Pranatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies and author of a recent column titled

Yes, Marriage Still Matters for Fertility, New Evidence. Lyman, welcome. It's always good to be with you all.

How would you describe the worldwide fertility crisis? Birth rates are going down. In most countries,

almost every country, we could talk a lot about all sorts of extreme cases, but I think just the U.S.

case is striking

enough. In 2007, the average American woman could expect to have about 2.1 children.

That's close to what we conventionally call a replacement rate, but basically, you know,

people are having two child families.

But today, the U.S. fertility rate is closer to 1.6 children per woman.

So what you can think of that is saying is that the average woman in the U.S. is having about

half a child less than 17, 18 years ago. Or another way you can think of it is every other

woman is missing a child versus what she

...