Just 15% of Democrats think too few babies are being born in the United States, according to the annual American Family Survey released Friday.
The newly released report also found that 41% of Republicans said the number of births in the U.S. is too low. Meanwhile, just 23% of independent voters said the same, according to the survey.
The survey also found that 35% of men said Americans are having too few babies, compared with only 18% of women. Moreover, just 45% of respondents under age 50 who who currently have no kids said they desire to have children someday, according to the report.
The report indicated that there was little support for government policies aimed at encouraging Americans to have more kids, with just 22% of respondents saying they were in favor and 46% expressing opposition.
Though the nation’s fertility rate has been declining for decades, it dipped to a new record low of 1.6 children per woman in 2024, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data released in July. However, the CDC data showed that the total number of births in the U.S. ticked up 1% from 2023 to 2024.
Among those surveyed, 43% said that having “insufficient money” was the greatest barrier to having children. Additionally, 22% of Americans stated that a “lack of personal desire” was the greatest factor related to limiting the number of children they have already had or intend to have in the future, the survey found.
“People really want to make sure that they have all their economic and financial ducks in a row before having kids,” Matt Brooks, a sociology professor at Florida State University, told The Washington Post on Friday.
An August 2022 report from nonprofit public policy organization the Brookings Institution found that the total family expenses for a child born in the U.S. in 2015, adjusted for higher future inflation, would cost an estimated $310,605.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in February aiming to bolster access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the U.S. and to help “aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for such treatments” for American families. IVF is a series of procedures in which an embryo fertilized outside the womb is surgically implanted in a woman’s uterus, per the Mayo Clinic.
Some “pronatalist” Republicans have recently been attempting to encourage American families to have more children in an effort to help combat declining fertility rates across the U.S.
The 2025 American Family Survey was conducted by Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute and Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy, and the Deseret News. The survey’s sample size was 3,000 people, who were surveyed between Aug. 6 to 18.
The survey’s margin of error was plus or minus 2.1%.
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