Women in the United States are having fewer children, with the country’s birth rate falling to an almost record low last year, preliminary data show. Roughly 3.6 million babies were born in the U.S.

KELSEY PIPER: A lot of the way the economy is set up, institutions like Social Security, they were built when we had a growing population. And they do have a sort of assumption baked into them that ...

Pronatalism – the belief that low birth rates are a problem that must be reversed – is having a moment in the U.S. Demographers generally gauge births in a population with a measure called the total ...