Why are people freaking out about the birth rate?

It's Been a Minute

NPR

News Commentary, Society & Culture, News, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 8.8K Ratings

🗓️ 25 June 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

There's one little statistic that seems to have gained a lot of attention recently: the birth rate. With pro-natalist ideas showing up in our culture and politics, Brittany wanted to know: why are people freaking out? Who's trying to solve the population equation, and how? Brittany is joined by Kelsey Piper, senior writer at Vox, and Gideon Lewis-Kraus, staff writer at The New Yorker, to get into how the birth rate touches every part of our culture - and why we might need to rethink our approach to this stat.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Ira Glass of This American Life.
0:02.2	Each week on our show, we choose a theme, tell different stories on that theme.
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0:22.7	this American life.
0:26.3	Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about
0:32.3	what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
0:44.8	Yeah. culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. There's one little statistic that I've been hearing about constantly.
0:49.3	And I'm sure you have two.
0:50.9	The birth rate.
0:52.4	Women in the United States are still having fewer babies than usual.
0:56.2	The number of children women have, a metric known as a fertility rate, has been dropping since the year
1:01.7	of 2008. I want more babies in the United States of America. The birth rate is very low in almost every
1:09.7	country. America had the lowest birth rate, I believe, ever that was last year.
1:13.9	And nothing seems to be turning that around.
1:16.4	Humanity is dying.
1:17.9	The number of kids each person needs to have to sustain the population is two.
1:22.9	The U.S. birth rate, it's around 1.6.
1:26.3	I've seen so many thing pieces arguing about what we should do about it.
	...

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