(LifeSiteNews) – Editorial note: The publishing of this opinion piece does not constitute the endorsement of any particular candidate. LifeSiteNews is totally opposed to the use of IVF, a procedure which divides reproduction from the marital act and has led to the deaths of millions of human beings.
The number of births in America set another record last year, CDC data shows, but it’s not one we should celebrate. Just under 3.6 million babies were born in 2023, about 68,000 fewer than the year before.
The general fertility rate has fallen as well. According to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, there were only 55 births for every 1,000 females of reproductive age—the lowest fertility rate in American history.
As recently as 2007, American women were averaging almost 2.1 children, the number needed—absent immigration—to keep the population stable. Now, 16 years later, that average has fallen to under 1.7 children, and the decline shows no sign of slowing down. And people are starting to notice.
Elon Musk, for example, has pointed out that low birth rates can lead to economic and societal collapse, warning that America’s total fertility rate has been below replacement for approximately a half century. Others point out than an aging population will not only create labor shortages but strain retirement and healthcare programs to the breaking point.
As someone who has been warning—literally for decades—hat America needs more babies, I am pleased that the Trump-Vance ticket has also joined the baby-making bandwagon.
As Donald Trump recently said in a recent interview with NBC, “We need great children, beautiful children in our country.”
We certainly do.
Kamala Harris, on the other hand, takes a much darker view of people in their numbers. During a speech in July 2023, she said that in order to help deal with climate change she wanted to “reduce population.” Her aides later said that she “misspoke”, and that she had meant to say “reduce pollution.”
But it has long been clear that, for radical environmentalists like Harris, people are pollution. Population control has been a cornerstone of the environmental movement from the beginning. In fact, “Popullution”—short for population pollution–was the slogan of the very first Earth Day in 1970. Environmentalists promote abortion, and supported China’s now-defunct one-child policy, for the same reason: they want to see the population of America and the world reduced.
In terms of encouraging the birth of more beautiful children, to use Trump’s phrase, some great proposals are coming out of the Trump-Vance campaign on how to make having children easier and more affordable. One such, recently announced by Trump’s running mate, is to raise the child tax credit to $5,000 from its current $2,000.
READ: Denmark and Norway relax abortion laws as Europe hurtles toward demographic suicide
Survey data show that many Americans aren’t having as many children as they’d like to because of the cost involved. Helping to offset those costs from birth to age 16 will make it easier to raise a kid and is in America’s interest.
The widespread popularity of this move among the American public is underlined by the clumsy attempt by Harris-Walz to imitate it. After learning of Vance’s proposal, Harris, who has voted against increasing the credit in the past, suddenly announced that she was in favor of raising it to $6,000, but only for the first year of the child’s life. Too little and too late, Kamala.
But while we applaud Trump’s concern about the falling American birth rate, there is a right way, and a wrong way, to go about raising it.
Trump’s current position on IVF, for example, does not serve pro-life goals.
Now I am willing to wager that Donald Trump, like most Americans, really has no idea what In Vitro Fertilization is. He virtually admitted as much when he described IVF as simply “fertilization.”
“As you know I was always for IVF, right from the beginning, as soon as we heard about it,” he told NBC in the same interview. “It’s fertilization, and it’s helping women, and men, and families,” he added. “But it’s helping women [be] able to have a baby. Some have great difficulty, and a lot of them have been very happy with the results. And we’re doing this because we just think it’s great.”
But IVF is not just “fertilization,” as in the joining together of sperm and egg. IVF involves the creation of countless innocent living human embryos, most of whom wind up being destroyed.
Those of us who understand this are appalled by the destruction of human life that IVF usually entails. But the unfortunate reality is that, according to a recent Pew survey, only a mere 8 percent of the population—less than one in ten—share our concerns.
An overwhelming 70 percent of our fellow Americans approve of the procedure for precisely the same reasons that Donald Trump does—it helps infertile couples to have babies. Another 22 percent don’t even know what IVF is.
What these numbers mean is that even most of our fellow pro-lifers do not know, or do not care, that IVF involves the destruction of human embryos.
Trump and Vance may not be perfect pro-lifers, although I would argue that they have proven that they are both reachable and teachable on our issues.
Harris and Walz, on the other hand, are by far the worst candidates on the life issue—and on many other issues besides—that we have ever seen on a major party ticket in America.
Pro-life voters need to understand that not voting in protest—as one prominent pro-lifer has suggested–is not only a vote for Kamala Harris but is also a vote for the most vicious, radical anti-life laws and policies imaginable.
My hope and prayer is that, one day, all Americans will realize that killing children in the womb, or even in petri dishes, is something that no civilized individual should ever support.
In the meantime, however, I want the president who wants more American babies, not the one who wants fewer.
Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of The Devil and Communist China (TAN books)