(OSV News) — As declining birth rates reshape the West, a global conversation on marriage and family is gaining urgency ahead of an October gathering in Rome convened by Pope Leo XIV.
New data highlight the trend: U.S. births fell 1% in 2025 to about 3.6 million, while Europe’s fertility rates remain well below replacement levels.
Pope Leo XIV called bishops’ conferences presidents from around the world to convene in Rome in to renew and deepen the Church’s discussion on marriage and family in light of “Amoris Laetitia” just as in much of the Western world, fewer people are marrying, and fewer are having children — with Catholic experts pointing out it’s an urgent matter to address, with the Church, especially parishes having the role to play.
According to the April report from the National Center for Health Statistics issued as part of the National Vital Statistics System Rapid Release Quarterly Provisional Estimates, the number of births for the United States in 2025 was about 3.61 million, a 1% decline from 2024.
The general fertility rate was 53.1 births per 1,000 females ages 15–44, which is also a 1% decline from 2024.
In the European Union, almost two times fewer children were born in 2024 than six decades ago, with 3.55 million children born in the EU in 2024. The crude birth rate, or the number of live births per 1,000 persons, in the EU in 2024 was 7.9, in 2000 it was 10.5 in 2000, 12.8 in 1985 and 16.4 in 1970.
In the United States, the total fertility rate remains around 1.6 births per woman, while in much of Europe it is closer to 1.3. Demographers note that beyond falling family size, a growing share of adults have no children at all.
Catherine Pakaluk, an economist and professor at The Catholic University of America and executive director of the James Cardinal Gibbons Institute for Human Ecology, told OSV News that understanding today’s fertility decline requires looking beyond financial explanations.
“The most important shift may be structural: We have quietly dismantled the contexts in which those reasons once flourished naturally,” she said. “For most of human history, children arrived within a web of community, extended family and shared expectation,” she said. “The desire for a child didn’t need to be individually justified — it was woven into the fabric of how life was lived.”
She said technological and cultural changes altered that framework. “When contraception severed the natural link between sexual union and children, it did not simply expand individual choice — it revealed a utilitarian logic that had been latent all along,” she said. “Once couples must plan for children rather than plan around them, an inarticulate system of cost accounting enters the most intimate decision a family can face.”
In that accounting, she added, “children struggle to appear on the ledger at all — because their value is future and largely unseen.” Pakaluk said hesitation about parenthood is widespread and should not be dismissed. “I take the hesitation seriously — it isn’t simply selfishness or confusion,” she said. “Many people genuinely want children and find themselves unable to get there.”
She pointed to economic pressures such as housing costs and job instability, but said they do not fully explain the trend.
“What I observe in the data — and in my students — is something more like a paralysis about commitment itself,” she said. “We have developed a cultural ideal of adulthood in which one is perpetually self-authoring, keeping options open, deferring finality.” Children, she said, challenge that model. “They change you irreversibly. They make claims you cannot escape.”
Mary Eberstadt, a Catholic author, including of “Primal Screams,” social researcher, essayist and novelist, also pointed to cultural factors. “America used to be a lot poorer than it is today,” she told OSV News. “So, something else is at work in the turn away from marriage and family.” She identified what she described as a loss of lived experience.
“Many young women now reach middle age without ever having cared for a child, because they had no experience of siblings or babysitting in an age when fewer and fewer children came into being,” she said. “Taking care of a baby isn’t terrifying to someone who’s been doing it for years. Having to do so without benefit of experience, ratchets up the anxiety about motherhood immensely.”
Eberstadt also pointed to the role of social imitation. “A second cause is that human behavior, as Rene Girard famously described, is mimetic,” she said. “A world in which fewer people know people who are married, or people with children, or people who get engaged in their 20s, is a world where we can expect more of the same trends.”
She added that pornography is another factor affecting relationships and family formation. “So destructive is this force that it seems unlikely to be remedied without a religious awakening — because the secular world not only offers no answers to pornography’s destruction of romance, but doesn’t even regard it as a problem,” she said.
In Europe, where fertility rates have remained below replacement level since the 1970s, Gudrun Kugler, a member of the Austrian Parliament and vice president of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly, said public policy alone has not reversed the trend.
“Extensive family support — through tax breaks, transfers and in-kind benefits — is both just and necessary,” she told OSV News. In some cases, she warned, policies may even encourage delay — which can become a decisive barrier. In Europe, the average age of a first birth is now around 30.
“Statistics suggest that if someone has not had a child by that age, the likelihood of ever doing so drops below 50%.” As a result, she said, “we not only have too few children; we also have too few people who have children at all.”
“At present, having children carries relatively little social prestige,” Kugler, a mother of four, said. “The desire for status is a fundamental human trait, deeply rooted in our social nature.”
The Austrian politician and family role advocate also pointed to the broader social consequences of demographic decline, echoing Eberstadt’s concern that the whole generation was raised without siblings — which has further societal consequences.
“We are becoming accustomed to empty streets, shuttered shops, and the absence of children’s laughter, often without consciously noticing these changes,” Kugler said. “In the end, this raises a deeper question of purpose and meaning: What is all of this for? What is the point of great achievements if there is no one with whom to share the joy?”
Pakaluk, a mother of eight children, pointed to deeper cultural consequences of that trend. “When fewer people experience it deeply, something happens to the moral imagination of a society. We become less practiced in the kind of self-donation that a serious community requires. The risk isn’t only demographic; it is, in the end, a risk to our capacity for solidarity,” she said.
All three experts, who are Catholic, pointed, in different ways, to the need for broader cultural reflection.
Pakaluk said that reconsidering the meaning of freedom may be part of that process.
“The dominant cultural narrative treats freedom as the maximum preservation of choice,” she said. “On that account, every commitment is a cost, and children are the ultimate commitment. But the older tradition — philosophical and theological — understood freedom as the capacity to give oneself fully to what is genuinely good. That is a freedom that grows through commitment, not in spite of it,” Pakaluk told OSV News.
“Practically, this means recovering contexts where the desire for children can be named and honored — where ‘I want a family’ is not treated as a failure of ambition or a retreat from the world. It means communities of support, not only policies,” she added.
Kugler stressed the importance of recognition and meaning. “People choose to have children when they have a compelling reason to do so — and recognition is a more powerful motivator than a marginal increase in state support.” She added: “In Western culture children are seen as a burden, not a gift or a blessing. Instead of ‘just loving them,’ we worry a lot about so many secondary things.”
Eberstadt, who also is a mother of four, pointed to the role of religious communities in responding to current trends.
“The Church, and especially parishes, can help with family formation at the grassroots,” she said, suggesting practical support such as meal trains and childcare cooperation among families.
“Pushing back against the idea of money first, family second would be invigorating for young people who may never have heard anything else,” she said.
Pakaluk added: “Many people who delayed or forgone parenthood did not gain the freedom they expected; they gained a different kind of loss,” she said. “That honest conversation — neither moralistic nor sentimental — may be where renewal begins.”
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