Fewer Teen Births Is Good, Unless You’re the Patriarchy

Conservatives are drilling down on distracting young women by pressuring early motherhood.

How on-brand for the federal government to announce that U.S. birth rates are falling — just as The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaids Tale, dropped on Hulu last week. In the fictional nation of Gilead, first envisioned by Margaret Atwood in her 1985 dystopian novel and expanded on screen for nearly a decade now, declining fertility catalyzed a Christian nationalist revolution in modern-day America, spawning a society rooted in patriarchal dominance and state-sanctioned violence. The Testaments, now three episodes in, is making a deliberate appeal to Gen Z and young viewers, featuring the spectacularly savvy Chase Infiniti and Lucy Halliday among Gilead’s tradwife-in-training rebels.

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Doubly fascinating then, that it is the real-life status of teen birthrates in particular now driving the news. In a drop considered “extraordinary” by statisticians, the number of babies born to mothers between the ages of 15 and 19 fell by 7 percent in 2025. Translated into hard numbers, NPR reports around 126,000 babies born to mothers in that age range last year — 11.7 births per 1,000 females — compared with 35 years ago, when the teen birth rate was 61.8 births per 1,000. (The rate has declined nearly every year since 1991.) Southern states, where teen pregnancy rates are highest, account for much of the recent calculus, according to the New York Times: more than 50 percent in Kentucky, and just under 50 percent in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Declining birth rates globally have been the supposed rationale for much of the Trump administration’s unabashed and self-professed pronatalist agenda. (He dubbed himself the father of IVF, the fertilization president, remember?) But unpacking the complicated, and sometimes contradictory, realities of teen pregnancy and parenting can make for a far stickier set of political talking points.

Seemingly, it would be good news for both parties to quantify the success of initiatives to enable consistent contraceptive usage and improve reproductive literacy, yes? Though I certainly can’t imagine a world where conservatives would recognize the value of continued access to abortion care, were that one of the drivers. Another possible metric — if, why, and by what measure teens are having less sex — may not necessarily point to a healthier society, especially in this age of growing isolation and loneliness. Economic pressures faced by families across the board have been attributed to the increased need or desire to postpone parenting — though Gretchen Sisson, a sociologist, reproductive health expert, and author of the book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, posted a reminder that adolescent motherhood is almost exclusively the domain of those who are low-income in the first place. (In her book, she writes it is often the case of teen parenting: “They have children early because they are poor; they are not poor because they had children early.”)

Nevertheless, many on the right — the same crowd that has long extolled the virtues of abstinence-only sex education (the Alabama house just last week joined the state senate to pass a bill requiring it in lieu of comprehensive information) — jumped directly into the fray to publicly lament that teens are having fewer babies. Fox News senior medical analyst Marc Siegel remarked on air: “We still have 3.6 million births a year, but the problem is teens and young adults…. We’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation, more financially secure.” Katie Miller, spouse of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, complained on social media of “a crisis fueled by delayed motherhood, toxic career-first culture, and the lie pushed by Legacy Media and feminists that kids are a burden.” She went on to opine that “hormonal birth control isn’t just poison for women’s minds and bodies — it’s killing population growth.” Not all conservatives are in lockstep. An aide to Florida Gov. Ron De Santis posted: “Teens should be in school, sports, going to prom, enjoying the end of their childhood! We do not just want ‘more births,’ we want more healthy strong FAMILIES: Married adult parents raising their children in a stable home.”

A fascinating Times analysis indicates that the data shows we are indeed headed in that direction — and the most drastic shift among American women is not to forgo having babies altogether but wait longer to do so. There’s even a demographic name for it: a “postponement transition,” which is what happened in the United States in the 1970s and Europe in the 1990s. According to the article, women in their 40s are now more likely to become mothers.

I have no real horse in the race about what is the “right” age to become a parent. But I know a thing or two about the influence older women are flexing in the Trump era. As reported by the Contrarian, we have seen it play out recently in the fight back against ICE in communities, in who is opposing the SAVE Act, in who is showing up for No Kings rallies. No wonder conservatives are now drilling down on distracting young women by pressuring early motherhood; look no further than the Heritage Foundation’s 2026 report Saving America by Saving the Family, which makes explicit the depravity of the call.

Authoritarians know it too: When women amass our power, it hews toward more robust democracy.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU School of Law. She also leads strategy and partnerships at Ms. Magazine.

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