Falling fertility: The world could end in empty cradles
by Don Feder · The Washington TimesOPINION:
Generation Z is easily the most self-absorbed, egocentric generation in history. Their hubris will have consequences for its members, society and the future of humanity.
A Barna Survey on Gen Z attitudes toward marriage and children signals looming disaster.
Overall, the survey by America’s foremost Christian pollster shows that Gen Z is largely disconnected from reality. Among 14- to 29-year-olds, support for socialism has increased 17 percentage points since the last time the survey was taken, from 22% to 39%. Why not? The signs of its success are all around us. What do you do when you get caught between Pyongyang and New York City?
Barna notes: “Young adults today report high levels of anxiety, uncertainty and emotional complexity in their daily lives — factors that may shape how they approach long-term decisions like marriage.”
In other words, they are emotional lightweights.
My parents married in 1936, in the depths of the Great Depression. They were married for 20 years before they could afford to buy a house.
Of course, there was nothing to be anxious about in 1936 — nothing except Nazis goose-stepping across Europe, Imperial Japan tearing up Asia and Marshal Stalin waiting to pounce.
The survey’s most troubling disclosure is this: Some 74% of Gen Z say life can be fulfilling without children. This attitude has been carefully cultivated by elites in education, news media and Hollywood.
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If marriage and children aren’t important, then what is the greatest source of satisfaction for this aimless generation? Their careers, condos, cars, investments or the number of likes they get on social media?
I have a friend who is a successful lawyer. In her 70s, she says she was focused on a legal career since high school. Now, she wishes someone had told her about the importance of children decades earlier, while she still had time.
The decisions Gen Z makes about marriage and children won’t affect them alone. It is a butterfly effect that starts in the maternity ward and eventually collapses the Social Security Trust Fund.
To put it bluntly, our civilization is dying because too many have unknowingly chosen for it to happen.
Our society is aging rapidly as fewer children are born to replace previous generations.
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Fertility is the key to a nation’s future. A nation’s fertility rate is the number of children the average woman will have in her lifetime. Replacement level fertility is 2.1. We haven’t been there in almost 20 years. In 2025, America’s fertility rate was 1.57, the lowest on record and well below replacement, and it keeps going down.
This means fewer taxpayers supporting more elderly people who need their pensions funded and their medical bills paid.
An industrialized society runs on people, all sorts of people, including architects, teachers, medical personnel, first responders, assembly-line and agricultural workers, investors and innovators. As more of them retire, fewer are waiting to take their place.
In 20 years, we will still have the abundant natural resources we have today, but we will have no one to harness them. We will still have the roads, railroads and ports, but not the truck drivers, trainmen and longshoremen.
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America will contract. Small towns and medium-size cities will be abandoned. Life will be centered on large cities, which will be increasingly unlivable, as the pool of police, firefighters and medical personnel dries up.
Fertility and marriage go hand in hand. In 1970, more than 40% of households consisted of married couples with children younger than 18. By 2022, that figure had declined to 22%. In 2024, for the first time, a majority of women weren’t married.
The survey shows one positive trend.
Barna reports that Generation Z has outpaced all other generations in church attendance. On average, they attend religious services 1.9 times a month, compared with 1.8 for millennials.
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There is a gender gap here too. Although 21% of Gen Z men attend church monthly, only 12% of Gen Z women are regular churchgoers. They are probably too busy marching with CodePink.
Regardless of their sex, when they are in church, do they hear anything positive about marriage and procreation, such as “Be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth” and “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh”?
Churches and synagogues need to do more than pay lip service to marriage and procreation. Otherwise, the world may end not in fire or ice but empty cradles.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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