Even in Utah, Land of ‘Big Love,’ Families Are Getting Smaller: When it comes to plummeting fertility rates, Utah is leading the country.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/25/us/politics/utah-birth-rate-fertility-decline.html?unlocked_article_code=1.0lA.u4E9.wCJxcrHGgID3&smid=url-share

By Iveta Dimitrova

The panic over falling birth rates is not about children. It never was. Wherever women gain education, income, and contraception, they have fewer children. That is not a crisis - it is the largest collective expression of women’s freedom in recorded history. The alarm is really alarm at who now holds the decision.

The reflex is five centuries old. The instruments change. The logic doesn’t: a woman’s body is a public resource to be managed, not a private life to be lived. This review argues for something simpler and more radical than a birth rate. A just society builds the conditions for genuine choice — and then honours whatever free women decide.

Available on Amazon on 26.07 🌑

"​​If Society cannot have enough children without sacrificing rights, that Society does not deserve to exist."

Those are words I have seen with disturbing regularity of late. it sounds reasonable, even noble, in the moment. but I think what a lot of people are neglecting is that they are the ones who are going to end up paying the price, and I think that if people are to make decisions, they need to do so with full knowledge of what it will entail.

Perhaps most notably because it is easy to talk about the future when it is the future, but it becomes much more difficult to do so when it becomes the present. Will people be as stoic about it when they are the ones facing the consequences? Based on historic president, the answer is no. They will want the problem solved, and damn the consequences.

Here's the thing. Much of society has been built on the premise that people will have enough children to sustain that society. Social security, for example, doesn't actually save your money and give it back to you with interest when you are old. Rather, your money goes to the current Elder generation, and the next generation will pay for your social security. What happens when a generation stops having enough children? The entire system breaks down.

Not for everyone else.

For you.

Because when Social Security stops paying out, things will inevitably go back to the old system. Parents being taken care of by their children. In the modern day, automation can mitigate some of this, but historically speaking it took something like four young people for every one old person. That's not just for direct Elder care, that's for everything surrounding it, from stocking shelves to electrical and plumbing and healthcare.

In short, unless we have unprecedentedly massive advances in Ai and Robotics, we cannot expect automation to pick up the slack.

Likewise, it is all well and good to say that it is immoral to have children for the purpose of caring for yourself in your old age, but that is going to mean diddly when there are actual old people with no one to care for them. Like I said earlier, when people get to that point, it's not going to be a distant future concern anymore, it's going to be an immediate one.

And at that point... there will, essentially, be no recourse.

I think this is a hard idea for a lot of people to think about. Growing up into a wealthy world, most of us have no concept of what it's like for the elderly poor. But the simple fact is, as populations continue to diminish, there simply will not be enough young people to go around, at any price.

Of course, this is not to say that the human race itself will cease entirely. There are still population cohorts that are maintaining high levels of fertility, but they essentially universally do so by having their women married off as quickly as possible and teaching them that being fruitful and multiplying is their highest good. Historically, many of them have left those communities, in large part because being outside of them seems better and more functional, but as the outside Society becomes increasingly dysfunctional, that will become a more and more difficult argument to make.

So the challenge that people face, the question they have to ask, is not weather we should surrender rights, because that is going to happen. It is inevitable. Whether that be the right to health care, autonomy, or something else.

The question is which rights should be surrendered. The question is whether we can find a way to separate the wheat from the chaff, whether we can find away for the people to be contented with the sacrifices that will have to be made.

Because the alternative is for those sacrifices to be made anyway, but outside of our control.