“Regarding Louise Perry's "Falling Birth Rates Are a Mystery" (Free Expression, May 23): To solve the mystery, she might look at regular attendance in organized religious services, which declined from 42% to 30% in the U.S. during the first 20 years of the 21st century, according to Gallup, mirroring the decline in fertility.
Pew Research found that Christian Americans had birthrates of 2.2 children per respondent, compared with 1.8 for religiously unaffiliated respondents. More religion is correlated with more children.
Everyone in America faces the same access to contraception, prices and taxes. But the religiously affiliated find the investment in noisy, expensive and time-consuming children worthwhile. Participation in religious communities raises marriage rates and increases the chances of having children. If we want to raise birthrates, the mystery is how to get young people back into the pews.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth
Washington
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The causes of fertility decline aren't obscure. One factor increasingly predominates -- declining marriage. The accelerating fertility decline worldwide has been driven overwhelmingly by rising childlessness. Family size is stable; having a family at all is what is declining.
Turkey's birth rate was stable for more than a decade before 2014 at around 2.1 but today stands at 1.4. What happened? After virtually no decline in the preceding decade, the married share of 25-to-29-year-olds fell from 72% to 56% between 2014 and 2025. The marriage recession varies in scope and speed but is observable in nearly every country on earth.
Why marriage is declining remains debated, but the digital revolution -- internet connectivity, social media, smartphones, pornography -- is hard to ignore. Digital technology isn't merely accelerating some inevitable tide but is a force unto itself -- one that makes solitary leisure more appealing, corrodes the incentives for sociality and, as a downstream consequence, reduces marriage and fertility.
Lyman Stone
Institute for Family Studies
Lexington, Ky.” [1]
1. Go to Church, Get Married and Have Babies. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 29 May 2026: A14.
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