The Liberty Daily 
(The Daily Signal)—America’s cultural divide now extends to parenthood.
A new report from the Institute for Family Studies states that a fertility gap has opened up between the Left and the Right. Based on a survey of 7,000 Americans, age 18 to 54, the study found that conservative respondents had on average 1.40 children, compared to 1.09 for liberals.
A birth rate of 2.1 children per woman is the minimum to sustain a population. More than half of liberal respondents reported having no children at all, compared to 40% of conservatives.
“Progressives are more likely to look at marriage and parenthood as decent options to consider but not necessarily as primary vocations,” Brad Wilcox, IFS senior fellow, told the Daily Signal. “Conservatives are more likely to see marriage, motherhood and fatherhood as core parts of their identity.”
Religion likely plays a key role.
“In the U.S. and in other parts of the world, political conservatives tend to be more religious than political liberals, and more religious people tend to have more kids,” Tom Vogl, an economics professor at the University of California, San Diego, told the Daily Signal.
Religious parents are “more likely to be grounded in the idea of a purpose that is found outside ourselves,” JP De Gance, president of Communio, a family advocacy, told the Daily Signal.
Those on the Left often find that purpose in career or social causes rather than children.
“If you’re fighting to save the planet, if you’re fighting against white supremacy, that gives your life meaning,” Timothy Carney, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Daily Signal. “And so, what secularization means is that politics becomes their religion.”
Across the board, America’s fertility rate has fallen by more than half over the last century, from 110.9 births per 1,000 women in 1924 to 53.8 in 2024, according to USA Facts. This brings significant societal ramifications.
“An aging society with fewer young workers must either raise productivity dramatically, attract more workers, reduce government spending, raise taxes or some combination of all four,” Thomas Savidge, a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, told the Daily Signal.
Raising children certainly comes with costs. A new Harvard report, for example, states that house prices rose 54% since 2020, now averaging five times the median income.
Despite this, however, fewer conservatives (24%) than liberals (36%) saw parenting as “very complicated, difficult, and stressful,” the IFS noted.
The IFS survey found that anxiety about parenting also played a role: 18% of liberals doubted whether they would be good parents compared to 9% of conservatives; 19% of liberals said their mental health wasn’t good enough to have children, compared to 10% of conservatives; and 18% of liberals worried about passing down unhealthy traits, compared to 10% of conservatives.
“The act of having children is fundamentally an act of hope,” De Gance said.
“When we’re open to life and want to bring a new child into this world, it’s being hopeful in the future for that child,” he said. “I think our friends on the left are more likely to be fearful of the future.”
Beliefs regarding the impact of people on the environment are also relevant.
“If you want to understand why the birth rate is collapsing, you can’t just look at economics or politics, you have to look at spiritual questions, and one of the questions is: are we good?” Carney said.
“There’s a Christian answer to that, which is that we’re good, but we’re fallen,” he said. “If you’re a secular liberal today, you look at the obvious flaws and it’s hard for you to think the human species is a good thing.”
It’s not just that blue states are having fewer children, many of the families they have are leaving. Since 2000, red states saw a 7% increase in their child population, while blue states experienced a 7% decline, according to the IFS.
“We’re seeing hundreds of thousands of families migrate from blue states to red states,” Wilcox said. “States like Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Idaho have been the recipients of a lot of families looking to move to places that are often more culturally, educationally, and economically attractive to them.”
Despite “family friendly” mandates on parental leave and childcare in many blue states, parents appear to prefer red states’ lower taxes and housing costs, better job prospects, and school choice.
But all is not lost, even for low-fertility regions.
“Some of the current below-replacement fertility rates may reflect the postponement of births to later ages, so it’s not obvious that population decline is around the corner for the U.S.,” Vogl said.
Indeed, while the number of mothers under 25 has declined, the number over 35 increased significantly, such that more women over 40 are now giving birth than are teens. And when asked the number of children they ideally wanted to have, conservatives averaged 2.71, and liberals averaged 2.16, IFS reported.
While government programs are seldom effective in boosting fertility, experts say things like increasing child tax credits and cutting regulations that discourage construction of single-family houses could help.
“[Parents] don’t need a huge home, but people want to have their own place,” De Gance said. “One of the big things blue states have done is make it harder to build homes and skewed their policy to high-density and mixed-use communities, and these are things that generally tend to discourage fertility.”
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
