By MIKE MAGEE

Last week, policy wonks from the right and the left, finally found a topic they could agree on – Kids are no longer having (as many) kids.

Specifically, teen pregnancies dropped an additional 10% in the US in 2025. This is an acceleration of a trend which began two decades ago. Teen births peaked in America in 1991 with 62 births per 1000 girls/women age 15 to 19. In 2025, the rate was below 12 per 1000, a drop of 80%, with the majority of that (72%) occurring since the 2008 Great Recession.

Obviously, this is “good news” for these young women according to Congressional reports. And most agree the causes are multifactorial, and include gains in health education, declines in sexual activity in youth, access to contraception and the Plan B pill, and expanded economic and professional opportunities for women in society.

But for societies worldwide, leaders look on with angst as the birth rates in their nations have broken through the replacement line, with deaths exceeding births. This “replacement rate” is roughly 2.1 births per woman. The CDC recently reported that without immigration, the 2023 total fertility rate was only 1.6 births per woman (1,616 per 1000 women over a lifetime).

Since 2007, trend lines have pointed decidedly downward. In that year, there were 4,316,233 births in the U.S. In 2025, American women gave birth to only 3,606,400 newborns (a 23%) decline.