A nation’s birthrate, known as the total fertility rate, or TFR, is measured by the ability of a population to replace itself from one generation to the next. The birthrate in career-focused Japan, for example, is 1.26 births per woman versus 3.12 births per woman in family-growing Kenya.
Around the globe, the total fertility rate has dropped from about five children per woman in the 1950s to a current global birthrate of 2.2 children.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the current U.S. birthrate is 1.62 births per woman. That number is down from the 1990s, when the number was a parent-replacing 2.1 births per woman.
Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, has three solutions to increase the number of children being born in the United States. First on her list is to revoke mifepristone, the two-step abortion pill that ends the pregnancy by blocking progesterone.
"If we're saying, 'Hey, our birth rate is too low, our birth rate is below the replacement level,' well one quick and easy way to change that is if we stop killing America's future," Szoch tells AFN.
Even though it is unsafe for women, Mifepristone is now used in about 60 % of abortions in the U.S.
A study by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which studied insurance claims, reported it found 1 in 10 women taking the abortion pill have reported serious side effects.
Second on Szoch's list is banning pornography.
"It is not something that people typically think of when they think of the declining birth rate,” she allows, “but pornography prevents relationships from developing.”
Szoch also recommends the U.S. support Restorative Reproductive Medicine, known as RRM, which studies the underlying cause of infertility and miscarriages.
In the U.S., about 15% of women struggle to get pregnant and 20% of pregnancies end in a miscarriage.
"Restorative reproductive medicine has an over 60% success rate and it has that because it is actually restoring people's health," says Szoch.
