The Problem With Fewer Babies: China Finally Gets It, Why Don’t We? By John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera

So just as America’s fertility rate is tanking, China is waking up to the damage of its one-child policy.

In mid-May, the Centers for Disease Control reported that “The birthrate fell for nearly every group of women of reproductive age in the U.S. in 2017.” A drop that led to “the fewest newborns since 1987.”

Even more, it was the single biggest one-year decline—three percent—since 2010, which was in the depths of the great recession, and which lower birth rates were expected.

The fertility rate is an estimate of how many babies a hypothetical group of 1,000 women would likely have over their lifetime. In 2017, America’s was just a paltry 1.76 births per woman.

We’ve talked before on BreakPoint about the economic and cultural consequences of declining birthrates. As Jonathan Last, author of the book “What to Expect When No One’s Expecting,” has written, “There is no economy that has managed to knock out gangbuster growth with a declining population.”

This truth has not been lost on, of all people, the People’s Republic of China. The same day the CDC announced its findings, a story in the UK’s Telegraph reported that the Communist Party “is considering scrapping the limits it places on how many children families can have.”

As the Telegraph told its readers, the move is in reaction to the “consequences of four decades of strict family planning controls,” most notably, the infamous “one-child policy.” Consequences include “a dwindling workforce and a huge increase in elderly citizens.”

In a dramatic turnaround, China is using its formidable propaganda machine to urge “prospective mothers to ‘seize the time and conceive.'”

The irony in all of this is that China’s total fertility rate isn’t that much lower than ours: 1.57 births as compared to 1.76 births per woman here.

While China’s leaders are scrambling to reverse demographic trends, our intelligentsia is, to the extent they notice the issue at all, in denial.