The Solution to a Declining Birth Rate? A Radical Change for the American Education System
February 7, 2025
The Heritage Foundation, infamous for their role masterminding Project 2025, is a prominent conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., and a key driving force behind much of the right-wing agenda that defines conservative politics today. Examples of their policy prescriptions include limiting access to abortion and birth control, ignoring climate change concerns, and opposing legal protections on the basis of gender and sexual orientation, among others. This leads me to an article published by the Heritage Foundation in November 2024 titled “Education Policy Reforms Are Key Strategies for Increasing the Married Birth Rate,” authored by Jay Greene and Lindsey Burke.
The article nonsensically ties religiosity and fertility rates together, claiming that those who are more religious tend to have more children, while those who aren’t religious don’t have as many, or don’t have any at all. The article quotes Lyman Stone at the Institute for Family Studies, claiming that “low fertility rates among the non-religious and their growing share of the population” account for “virtually 100% of the decline in fertility in the United States from 2012 to 2019.” While it is true that some religions, especially some denominations of Christianity, encourage members to have children, non-religious people cannot be entirely to blame for decreasing fertility rates.
