Blythe Terrell

And it's just this interesting group together.

And I just wanted to know, like...

Okay, so are they right?

Like, is there something going on here?

Yeah, I'd like to know that too.

All right, so to start off here, just like right out of the gate, one thing that the pronatalists are right about is that in lots of places, birth rates are going down.

Like, yes, people are having fewer kids on average, and that is true in basically every country in the world.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow.

I've shocked you already.

No, the trend, the downward trend for birth rates, for what's called, for something called specifically total fertility rate, is happening almost everywhere.

Wow.

And it has been for decades.

Huh.

Okay, so if you take the U.S., the total fertility rate, which is basically like a snapshot of the kind of average number of kids one woman will have in her lifetime, is a shorthand for it.

That average is right now 1.62 births per woman.

Okay.

And that's actually the lowest it's ever been.

So the concern is that if you want the population to stay where it is, if you want it not to fall, the total fertility rate needs to be 2.1 kids per woman.