Demographers have determined that the replacement fertility rate for a country's population to remain stable over time is at least 2.1 live births per woman. The U.S. is currently at 1.62.
The White House has reportedly been batting around ideas for how to improve that number, including college scholarships for the kids or just plain cash - $5,000 to every American mother after she gives birth.
Gary Bauer of American Values says he was tackling this problem back in the '80s when he was working for the Reagan administration.
"Reagan supported … a doubling of the child tax credit," he recalls. "When I then went on to the Family Research Council, we argued strenuously for doubling it again."
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says President Trump is "proudly implementing policies to uplift American families" in a culture that pushes for exactly the opposite.
"There is an ongoing cultural effort to discourage childbirth, to encourage abortion, and to underplay the fact that a nation's wealth is measured in parents at the dinner table raising the future generation," Bauer observes.
Meanwhile, the birth rate in Muslim communities is somewhere between 2.9 and 3.1 – numbers Bauer says are high on purpose as certain prominent Muslim sects aim to take cities and countries for their faith.
The Christian advocate says that does not make headlines, though, because the people who write them cannot figure out how to do so without being accused of saying that is a bad thing.
According to the National Library of Medicine, it will take several generations for a real change in total fertility rates to be reflected in birth rates because the age distribution must reach equilibrium.
