Americans who love this country should be waking up to a demographic alarm bell. Once, in the 1950s, roughly two-thirds of adults were married; today fewer than half are, with Barna reporting only 46 percent of U.S. adults married in its 2025 analysis. This collapse of stable, married households is not a harmless lifestyle shift — it undermines the social fabric that sustained our prosperity and security for generations.
The birth picture is no less worrying: long-term fertility has fallen well below the replacement level of about 2.1 children per woman, and experts warn we are living with the consequences of that decline. Federal data show births and fertility patterns shifting in ways that should make policymakers uneasy — even if 2024 saw a small uptick in the raw number of births, age-adjusted fertility and younger-age birth rates remain historically low and below replacement. This isn’t cultural hand-wringing; it is a national security problem with economic and stewardship consequences for Social Security, the labor force, and our ability to remain an independent, thriving nation.
Conservatives who truly believe in limited government must still be willing to fight for the family, because liberty depends on strong families to raise responsible citizens. The Heritage Foundation’s new report, Saving America by Saving the Family, lays out real and responsible proposals — everything from NEST accounts to a newborn tax credit for married parents, home-childcare equalization, marriage support programs, and a national Day of Rest — designed to remove the policy penalties that punish marriage and childbearing. These are targeted, pro-family reforms that strengthen civil society without turning the federal government into a caregiver of last resort.
Make no mistake: these proposals are not calls for an ever-expanding welfare state, they are corrective measures that stop the government from subsidizing the breakdown of marriage and instead reward commitment and self-reliance. Heritage’s plan rightly focuses on ending marriage penalties in tax and welfare policy, encouraging savings and stable family formation, and giving parents real choices about childcare and work. For conservatives, the goal should be to empower families, not replace them, and to use prudent policy to restore incentives that make marriage and children feasible again for hard-working Americans.
Those who still think cultural elites and big-government programs are harmless should read the testimony of front-line conservatives and policy analysts sounding the alarm. Emma Waters of the Heritage Foundation has been blunt: the nation faces “a massive decline in the number of babies being born” and a decline in marriage that will not fix itself without a serious cultural and policy reorientation. If you care about lower crime, stronger schools, and men and women who take responsibility for their families, you should be rallying behind practical reforms that reverse these trends.
This is a patriotic fight. Demography determines destiny, and a country that stops reproducing itself loses more than population — it loses the next generation of workers, soldiers, and citizens who will defend our freedoms and maintain our prosperity. Conservatives must stop treating family policy like a taboo and start treating it like the infrastructure it is: foundational, priceless, and worthy of careful investment. Heritage’s roadmap is a starting point, not an endpoint, for the kind of commonsense, limited-government solutions Americans deserve.
Now is the moment for conservative lawmakers, grassroots activists, pastors, and patriotic parents to demand action. Push Congress for tax fairness that rewards marriage, support state pilot programs for marriage mentoring and skills training, defend policies that make childcare and home parenting viable options, and insist that our culture stop celebrating atomized individualism at the expense of family. The future of the republic depends on whether we choose children and marriage over convenience and consumerism — and real conservatives should be leading that fight, proudly and without apology.
