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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

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This is “The Opinions,” a show that brings you a mix of voices from “New York Times Opinion.” You’ve heard the news. Here’s what to make of it.

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I am Jessica Grose. I am an opinion writer at “The New York Times,” and I cover family, religion, and the way we live now.

Well, the fertility rate in the United States has been trending downward for decades. And now a new report shows the rate is the lowest in more than a century.

According to the CDC, 3.6 million babies were born in 2023 in the US. That’s about 76,000 fewer than the previous year and —

Well below the replacement rate of 2.1 that would allow a generation to completely replace itself.

There is a lot of media coverage of the falling birth rate around the world, but the story is almost always framed negatively.

More women than ever are choosing to be child-free.

The downward trend is quote, “a reflection of a society increasingly soaked in an anti-family ideology that views children as burdens.”

But modern feminists, working women and bossbabe culture is taking over. Speaking of culture —

Often this is framed as like, what’s wrong with women? Why don’t they want to have babies anymore? It’s always, like, women, women, women. The problem here is feminism. Society has changed for women more rapidly than it’s changed for men, and I fail to see that as a problem.

So the birth rate really fell a lot after the introduction and growing use of the pill in the ‘60s. It started to level off a little bit by the mid -‘70s with some ups and downs until 2007. And since then, we’ve seen a pretty sharp decline. This is a result of a lot of positive trends.

One of the positive trends is that people are more educated, and when people are more educated, they tend to delay child rearing. Part of that trend is also, in the United States, a massive decline in teen pregnancies. When we were way above replacement, it was because there was no reliable contraception. Marital rape barely existed as a concept. Women thought that their only purpose in the world was to be wives and mothers.

And now we live in a society where you can plan your reproductive life. And that is why there are very few people, men or women, who want to have five or six kids. There are definitely still people who do, and God bless them, but it is not a majority desire.

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I should say we’re also now seeing something new happening since 2007. And I think this trend has to do with more than just birth control and women getting education. What I think has changed is a deep feeling of financial instability. And it has to do, in part, with the fact that millennials entered the job market just as the recession was peaking, and that fundamental instability and job loss stuck with them. And then the pandemic hit. And so some people who might have started having kids in 2020 either pushed it off or decided, you know what, it’s not for me.

My biggest advice, if you’re still really worried about the birth rate, is don’t be. I think there are some people who are genuinely worried about programs like Social Security and the solvency of the American economic system. But I think there are some people who just want........

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