Welcome to Wellness on Mass. I'm your host, Dr. Nicole Sapphire. And today we're diving into kind of a quiet, but potentially a consequential crisis.

America's steadily declining birth rate. That's right. When it comes to how many babies we're having, we are below what it's recommended if we're going to keep our population up.

Meaning as our population continues to age, we're going to keep our population up, meaning as our population

continues to age, we're having fewer and fewer babies. And ever since 2023, our numbers are

way below where it needs to be. That 2.1 is that goal mark. They want people to be having on

average about about two kids per woman. While Elon Musk has been been very vocal about this for anybody who follows him on

X. I mean, he obviously makes headlines for a lot of reasons, but he's absolutely been sounding the

alarm on the very issue we're going to be discussing. He said, in quote, population collapse due to low birth

rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warning.

Mark these words.

And he continues to say things like he argued that we need a fertility rate of at least 2.7

children for women, so not two children for women, but he's arguing up to three to stabilize

the population because so many today are choosing not to have children at all.

So why is that? Well, there's a lot of reasons. There are fewer people getting married.

People are getting married and having babies later on in life. So therefore, they're having

fewer kids. It's more expensive. We're also seeing fertility issues here in the United States and across the

world. You have menstruation changes in young girls, a lot of women having difficulty, having babies.

And then on top of that, the answer to everyone's problem seems to be IVF. Well, IVF is expensive

and it's not something that everybody wants to do. And so instead of tackling

the root causes of why people aren't having as many babies anymore, we keep just saying, all right,

we'll just do IVF or we'll do whatever it is. But we need to look at some of the root causes.

I'm extremely excited today to have Emma Waters. She's a policy expert at the Heritage Foundation.

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