Fine, Let Liberals Be Childless Heathens. It Just Means Conservatives Win

The future belongs to those who show up.

“Progressives have a birth rate problem,” writes Financial Times reporter John Burn-Murdoch. “For all the talk of a general fall in births, the drop is overwhelmingly driven by people on the left having fewer kids.”

Burn-Murdoch refers to a Financial Times analysis of U.S. Geological Survey data revealing a steep decline in birth rates among self-identified progressives, as compared to their conservative counterparts, since the late 1970s. 

U.S. conservatives and progressives had nearly the same number of children, on average, during that period: Around 2.7. Both groups trend downwards thereafter, but at different rates.

The average number of children born to an American progressive is less than 1.8, meaning progressive couples aren’t replacing themselves. The average number of children born to an American conservative is about 2.4. 

NEW: Progressives have a birth rate problem

For all the talk of a general fall in births, the drop is overwhelmingly driven by people on the left having fewer kids.

By ceding the topic of family and children to the right, progressives risk ushering in a more conservative world. pic.twitter.com/FmpYEsGVio

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) August 29, 2025

“The consequence of this emerging ideological slant in birth rates is that each successive generation gets nudged rightwards, increasing the likelihood that conservative politicians … get elected,” Burn-Murdoch writes.

Predation, hunger and disease once posed principal threats to reproduction. Disposition is the great filter guarding the future. 

Consider sex-differences in personality, such as those analyzed by a Frontiers in Psychology study. 

Women are more prone to negative emotion than men. Women are more agreeable. So you get more liberal women. 

Liberalism is explicitly anti-natal. Don’t have kids, it’s bad for the climate. Don’t have kids, it’ll stall your career. Marriage is old-fashioned, optional, suffocating. Inject exogenous hormones. Cut off your breasts. Go to India to find yourself. (RELATED: New York Times Columnist Perfectly Sums Up Post #MeToo Dating Woes)

Agreeableness renders women more vulnerable to falling for these memes. Plenty of men, too, are fooled. Modern hormonal upsets don’t help. 

WOW

In recent decades in the U.S. and across the developed world, birth rates have barely changed for right-wingers.

The more left-wing, the more fertility rates have fallen! pic.twitter.com/gFjziEJTp9

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) August 29, 2025

Such a bottleneck event for the female population would be remarkable. Supply and demand deals women a pretty favorable genetic hand. Sperm is common. Eggs are rare. 

For the clearest example of female advantage, rewind to about 10,000 years ago. Female population size was up to 17-fold higher than male population size at the time, according to a Genome Research study. Dramatic sex ratios appeared in every region the authors studied. 

One explanation: The Earth had recently suffered a nasty cold spell. Resources were rare. Competition intensified among men. The fittest men scooped up the most mates. The others were swept into the dustbin of history.  (RELATED: US Fertility Rate Plummeted To All-Time Low In 2024, New Data Shows)

To the dust-bin, too, goes the left.

“The greatest trick the right ever pulled was convincing the left that talking about families and children is conservative-coded,” Burn-Murdoch writes.

Again, he misses the dispositional difference driving the initial separation. 

Because more socially conservative people have more kids and parents transmit their beliefs to their children, socially conservative beliefs persist more than they would if there wasn’t a political divide in fertility. pic.twitter.com/pFOPj078ex

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) October 4, 2023

I’ll end on an optimistic-ish note. 

Our environment is selecting for resistance to bad memes. It’s also selecting for people who really want to have children.

That may seem obvious. But the desire to have children may have had little bearing on a woman’s lifetime fertility, pre-1965. Evading pregnancy was difficult before the pill. And when a “child-free marriage” was known as a “childless marriage.”

If the desire to have children is at all heritable, via genetics and/or culture, people with that trait will make up a greater share of the next generation. And the generation after that. And so on and so on. Our replacement fertility woes will probably solve themselves.

Follow Natalie Sandoval on X: @NatSandovalDC