Declining Birth Rates and Catholic Social Teaching

In this episode we’ll look at declining birth rates and see what Catholic Social Teaching has to say about this global long-term trend.

Here are references and notes:

1. National Center for Health Statistics - Births: Provisional Data for 2025 – report issued April 2026
2. World Bank - Interactive chart showing birth rate trends for US and all other countries
3. Which countries have fertility rates above or below the “replacement level”? - visual map
4. World Population – overview from UN
5. International Monetary Fund - The Debate over Falling Fertility - June 2025
6. How Countries might Reverse Plunging Birth Rate - 26 January 2026 - Interesting secular analysis from the Global Policy Journal
7. Harvard Gazette article on “How to reverse nation’s declining birth rate” - August 20, 2025
8. Catechism of the Catholic Church - The Family in God’s Plan - 2201-2213
9. Pope Leo’s October meeting on marriage, family gains urgency amid declining birth rates in West - April 27, 2026
10. Amoris Laetitia - 2016 - see section 42
11. The Marriage Crisis Driving America’s Fertility Decline  (April 22, 2026) and Catholic family experts tie marriage to dropping US fertility rate (August 7, 2025) - some overlap between these articles
12. ‘Dramatic’ decline in Catholic marriage (January 31, 2026) and What is causing our fertility crisis? Catholic experts weigh in (May 2, 2024) - some overlap between these articles
13. Pope Leo urges Europe to confront ‘declining birth rates,’ strengthen family life - October 14, 2025
14. Pope Francis: World's ills rooted in too much greed, not too many babies - May 10, 2024
15. Podcast website with full transcripts for this episode and all other episodes.

Transcript

Welcome to “Headline News and Catholic Social Teaching,” where we take a brief look at stories in the news, not from a left or right political perspective, but through the lens of Catholic Social Teaching.  I’m your host, Tom Mulhern, and I hope that this podcast will help us grow in our love of God and love of our neighbors.

In this episode we’ll look at declining birth rates, in the United States and in much of the world, and see what Catholic Social Teaching has to say about this long-term trend.

So, in April 2026, the National Center for Health Statistics released its annual report with data on US births. There were just over 3.6 million births in the United States in 2025, a 1% decrease from the previous year.  This works out to 1.6 lifetime births per woman of childbearing age (ages 15-44), which is well below the rate of 2.1 births per woman needed to replace the mother and the father in the total population.

This is part of a downward trend over the past 65 years.  In 1960, there were 3.7 lifetime births per woman, and now it's less than half of that.  And, while there is considerable variation from country to country, most countries are trending in the same downward direction.  There are links to charts in the notes.

Although birth rates are coming down, the total population continues to increase, because people are living longer.  The world population is just over 8 billion people now.  Even with declining birth rates, it is projected to increase to around 10 billion people later this century, when it will level off and start to decline. 

Well, are declining birth rates a good thing or a bad thing?  That seems to depend on your perspective.

Lower birth rates are seen by many as a positive and necessary trend, as fewer people mean less competition for food, housing, water and other scarce resources and less environmental destruction.  Hold that thought, as I’ll come back to the environmental argument at the end of the episode.

Another more immediate aspect of declining birth rates that appears to be positive is that the greatest percentage decrease in birth rates in recent years has been among teenage girls.  In the United States, the fertility rate for teenage girls declined 7% in 2025, compared to a 1% decline for all women of childbearing age.  

But from a national perspective, declining birth rates are a cause of real concern.  Birth rates below replacement levels will eventually lead to population decline, which most national governments see as an economic negative, as it means fewer workers, fewer consumers, and a host of related consequences throughout society.  

Because of this concern, governments have tried and are trying a variety of policy approaches to increase birth rates, including paying people baby bonuses to have children, providing more accessible and affordable child care, offering more parental leave and more flexible work schedules, and more.  And while such policies provide significant social and economic benefits for workers and families, they have had mixed results in terms of their impact on birth rates.  I’ll link to a couple of articles in the notes.

When you ask why birth rates are declining, you get many different answers: economic uncertainty, cultural and lifestyle changes, lack of social support for childrearing, anxiety about the future, rising rates of infertility, and on it goes.  The correct answer seems to be “all of the above,” but that may not be particularly helpful.

And this trend is something that many of us can see in our own families.  My parents had 8 children and my wife’s parents had 5 children.  My wife and I have 3 children (all 3 adopted, but that’s not the point here).  Our children are all in their 30s now and have no children, which is a good thing, because they aren’t married, but it does reflect what’s happening in the larger society.

So how does Catholic Social Teaching apply to a complex and increasingly global demographic pattern like declining birth rates?  Well, to say Catholic teaching is big on the family is an understatement.  As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains in sections 2201 to 2213, the family is central to God’s plan for life and salvation.

This coming October, Pope Leo XIV will convene the heads of bishops’ conferences from around the world to renew and deepen the Church’s discussion on marriage and family, following up on “Amoris Laetitia,” or the joy of love, a major document on family life issued by Pope Francis back in 2016.

In “Amoris Laetitia,” the pope reviewed the challenges families face in the modern world, including economic and social pressures that affect birth rates. He stated, “The decline in population, due partly to a lack of interest in having children in some places, is also linked to the culture of individualism and material well-being.”

A number of Catholic observers point out that the decline in birth rates correlates with the decline in marriage.  And to see how dramatic the decline in marriage has been throughout society, we need look no further than the US Catholic Church itself.  In 1970, there were 426,000 Catholic marriages in the United States.  In 2025 there were 108,000 US Catholic marriages – a 75% drop in 2 generations.  This despite the fact that the total number of US Catholics increased from 48 million to 68 million during the same time period.

And marriage does have a direct bearing on birth rates.  In the United States, the birth rate among married women is more than twice the birth rate of unmarried women.  Which is good, from a Christian moral perspective, but the point is that fewer marriages means fewer children.

Catholic leaders remind us that the decline in birth rates is fueled by artificial contraception and abortion, which are both contrary to established Church teaching.  To state the obvious: if the 1.1 million abortions in the US last year had been births, the US birth rate would have been significantly higher.

Catholic observers also describe cultural attitudes that work against birth rates and against Catholic teaching, including a prevailing sense of individualism and self-focus, where it’s all about me and what I want for my life, rather than a religious view of life based on self-denying love for God and love for others.  

Related to individualism is a growing reluctance to make the long-term commitments needed for marriage and children.  This reflects a mindset that associates freedom with avoiding commitment and keeping your individual options open, which is very different from the classical and Christian notion of freedom as the capacity to know and commit yourself to what is truly good.

Catholic and secular observers also point out that the lack of social support and social validation for having children is a very significant factor in declining birth rates.  Throughout most of human history, children were not born into isolated nuclear families, they were born into extended families and communities that placed a high priority on having and raising children. That is no longer the case.

Pope Leo the 14th commented on falling birth rates in his visit with Italian President Sergio Mattarella on October 14, 2025, when he said:

“In recent decades, we have witnessed in Europe, as we have seen, a notable decline in the birth rate.  This calls for a concerted effort to promote choices at all levels in favor of the family, supporting its efforts, promoting its values, and protecting its needs and rights.”

The essence of the Church’s concern is that falling birth rates are a symptom of many forces that are working against the family as the basic unit of society.  Church teaching does not say that families are obliged to have multiple children; it does say that the family needs to be supported and protected and promoted.  When that happens, children naturally follow.

I want to close with a brief comment on the environmental argument against increasing population.  Is Catholic teaching on supporting the family and welcoming children in any sense at odds with Catholic social teaching on protecting and caring for the environment, for ourselves and for future generations?  I briefly outlined Church environmental teaching in my recent episode on climate change denial.

 Well, at a meeting in 2024, Pope Francis stated:  "Human life is not a problem, it is a gift.  The problem is not how many of us there are in the world, but what kind of world we are building." 

Pope Francis said that the reasons for pollution and world hunger, for example, are not based on the number of children being born, but on "the choices of those who think only of themselves, the delusion of unbridled, blind and rampant materialism, of a consumerism that, like an evil virus, erodes at the root the existence of people and society.”

This frames the question in a very different way.  If our way of living continues to be based on the kind of materialism, consumerism and waste that currently prevail in the United States and much of the world, then people – those of us now living, and those us yet to be born – are indeed a threat to the carrying capacity of the earth – that is, to the future existence of people and society.

But it’s not a choice between having children or protecting the environment, it’s a call to action on both fronts.  To reclaim and rebuild a world where families are supported and children are welcomed as a gift from God, then we do need family-focused policies and practices in our workplaces, our schools and our parishes, and we also have to change our patterns of environmental damage, material consumption and waste.  

Catholic teaching guides us to do both.  It doesn’t say it will be easy.  However, our faith does offer us the promise of God’s grace and it reminds us that, with God, all things are possible.

Well, that’s all for this episode of “Headline News and Catholic Social Teaching.”  If you found it worthwhile, I invite you to share it with others.  If you’d like to make a comment or send me a message or a question, there’s a link in the notes that will enable you to send a text or voicemail message.

And I do hope that, in some small way, this episode might help us live our lives guided by the Holy Spirit through the teachings of the Church.  

Thank you for listening.