What: Foreign Affairs has experts explaining that the global drop in fertility rates is partly a product of women having children later in life—because how it is measured is a snapshot in time, not the total number of children per women over a lifetime. TLDR: it shouldn’t be used as a scare tactic by the incoming Trump administration.
Key line: “The heated rhetoric is interesting given that the United States, by comparison with other high-income countries, has a relatively high total fertility rate: 1.67 children per woman in 2023, versus 1.47. The lifetime fertility of the most recent cohort for whom data is available, women born in 1976, stands at 2.2 children per woman, equivalent to the average number of children the country’s men and women say they want to have.”
Source: Foreign Affairs // https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/low-fertility-fallacy