I'm at @FamStudies today talking about declining fertility *before* the pandemic.

Basically, if you straightline 2008 fertility rates for each racial-ethnic group to 2019, there'd have been 5.8 MILLION more births 2009-2019. https://ifstudies.org/blog/5-8-million-fewer-babies-americas-lost-decade-in-fertility

Since the US has about 3-4 million births a year on average, that gap is, uh, big.

It's big enough that it would have changed 2010-2020 from "lowest population growth ever" to "lowest since the Great Depression."

This birth decline is not some trivial rounding error of population. Talking about 5.8 million fewer people in a society with 330-ish million people total is an extremely large difference.

Obviously, people will differ in their assessments of if that difference is socially important. I think it is, other people will think it isn't. Some people will think immigration can offset it, other people will disagree.

Among those who think immigration CAN offset falling fertility, some people will think immigration SHOULD offset falling fertility, and other people will think it SHOULD NOT.

You all know my views:

I think falling fertility will create some social problems ***but more importantly*** will create individual and family-level problems. I think immigration SHOULD offset fertility decline, but IN FACT CANNOT.

But you can disagree with that. That's not today's argument.

Today's article is just exploring the fertility decline.

So, we've established that it was big.

But.... whose fertility fell?

The popular narrative is that minority women have a lot of babies but that white people are delaying and delaying and delaying and ultimately adopting super anti-family attitudes.

That popular narrative is completely wrong.

Here's TFR by racial/ethnic group in CDC's classification. What you can see is in 2007, non-Hispanic whites had BARELY higher fertility than Asians, but WAY below other groups.

But by 2019, the gaps had shrunk, and NHW were tied with indigenous peoples.

The result of this larger-fertility-decline among minority women is that the decline in births has not been symmetrical across all groups. Births are down nearly a third versus a flat-TFR counterfactual for Hispanics and indigenous people. Whites have the LEAST decline.

This isn't just mean-regression. Asians had lower initial TFR than whites, but have had a LARGER decline.

This is a situation where white fertility has actually been more resilient than non-white, even controlling for mean-regression.

So, when people like me say, "OH NO FERTILITY RATES ARE FALLING TOO MUCH!"

We emphatically do not mean "fertility rates" as a stand-in for "white fertility rates."

This problem is *mostly* about non-whites having huge declines in their fertility rates!

Now before someone jumps up to say, "Well, that's just because these groups don't want that many kids; they WANT to see their TFRs fall."

No. Wrong. We can compare fertility preferences in various surveys; here's the General Social Survey.

What we can see is that actual fertility rates across a decade are MUCH lower than stated fertility ideals for *every* group.

The same broad patterns show up if I use NSFG intentions, or if I use Gallup ideals, or if I use the survey my consulting company ran last year. Every metric we have suggests that fertility is below preferences even among relatively high-TFR minority groups!

So saying, "I think fertility rates are too low" is not a way of saying, "I would like to see white people have more babies to keep America white."

It's literally the opposite. It's saying, "I'd like to see minority women not thwarted from achieving the families they want."

Now just to hammer this point into the incredibly dense heads of "pronatalism for white people" racists and also "pronatalism is racist!" progressives, we can calculate what share of moms would have been white if race/ethnic TFRs were stable vs. what actually happened.

So here it is!

If 2008 TFRs had remained stable, motherhood would have become minority-majority in 2017. If you use a 2007 benchmark, it's 2016.

On current trends that event will now occur in 2026.

Let's be clear on what happened.

Fertility declines extended the non-Hispanic white "motherhood majority" ***by an entire decade***.

The lower fertility goes, the **whiter** America gets.

I know this is not peoples' intuition. In their heads, "fertility" is white people and "immigrants" is brown people and more fertility means more white people and more immigrants means more brown people.

But that just ain't so! Many immigrants are white, many babies not.

Because the population of reproductive-age women is MUCH less white than the wider population, and because the population of 65+ people is the whitest group of all, ***increasing fertility reduces the white population share***.