North Carolina’s fertility rate is currently well below replacement level. Our population continues to grow because we’re importing people from other states and countries. Should policymakers care about this? I say yes.
There are several different ways of measuring fertility. A common one is the total fertility rate (TFR), defined as the average number of children a hypothetical cohort of women would have at the end of their reproductive period. The TFR of the U.S. and most other countries has certainly been on the decline in recent years, but the historical trends are more variable. After falling for most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, fertility bounced back during the 1940s and 1950s (the so-called Baby Boom), fell again until the mid-1970s, recovered a bit during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and has now fallen to record lows.
North Carolina’s own experience bears this out. The Institute for Family Studies recently published a database with state-by-state statistics going back in time. For our state, it starts in 1917, when our total fertility rate was 4.16 children per woman of childbearing age. By 1940, North Carolina’s TFR had dropped to 2.42. Then it began to rise (notice the trend preceded, not followed, the end of World War II). It hit 3.41 in 1956, then fell again, reaching 1.57 in 1983. Another recovery followed, to 2.05 on the eve of the Great Recession. As of 2025, North Carolina’s TFR was 1.63.
Fluctuations over the past century, coupled with declines in fertility across much of the world rather than just industrialized countries, make simplistic explanations hard to sustain. Access to contraception is part of the story, of course, as are economic changes that alter the costs and benefits of childrearing.
As agriculture became mechanized and larger in scale, for instance, households stopped farming small plots and starting earning income elsewhere. That reduced the extent to which additional children increased the total output of the household (through chores such as feeding livestock, milking cows or weeding gardens). Similarly, labor-saving devices made it less sensible for women and their children to perform all household tasks or engage in home-based production.
On balance, to be sure, these were wonderful developments! However, purely as an economic matter, they had the effect of shifting the focus from sheer quantity of household labor to higher-order skills that took longer to acquire. Even before widespread contraception, in other words, families got smaller, with the smaller number of children receiving more individualized attention from their parents and spending more time in school, apprenticeships and other skill-building activities.
Again, we know these structural explanations have some merit because fertility has declined in lots of places — wealthy, middle-income and even poor. But it isn’t all about the labor market. Does the rising cost of housing, child care and other goods and services create barriers to family formation and fertility? Sure. Do personal values, social norms and even political ideologies play a role? No question about it. Places with higher religiosity have higher rates of childbirth. So do some places where inhabitants feel themselves, their nations, or their ways of life to be under siege.
As a Freedom Conservative, I believe the proper object of public policy isn’t to achieve some targeted rate of fertility (or any other social indicator). It is to maximize the extent to which people can form their own preferences, choose their own goals, and then reach them. Most compelling to me are surveys indicating that men and women would like to have more children than they are currently having. I believe that argues for tackling barriers to family formation and fertility. We should lighten regulations that raise the cost of housing, encourage entrepreneurship and job creation, facilitate remote work and flexible schedules, and eliminate penalties to marriage and fertility in our tax and entitlement systems.
Human flourishing requires a political culture that nurtures freedom and a civic culture that nurtures family and fertility.
John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books “Mountain Folk,” “Forest Folk” and “Water Folk” combine epic fantasy and American history.
