The number of babies born in the United States fell again last year.
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According to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 3.6 million births in 2025, a 1% decline from 2024. The fertility rate dropped to 53.1 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, down 23% since 2007.
The Trump administration has said it wants to reverse this trend. President Donald Trump has called for “a new baby boom,” and aides have solicited proposals from outside advocates and policy groups ranging from baby bonuses to expanded fertility planning. The administration is also proposing to reshape the federal government’s only dedicated family planning program: Title X.
For more than five decades, Title X has been geared — with bipartisan support — toward giving low-income women access to contraception, screening for sexually transmitted infections, and reproductive health care regardless of ability to pay. At its peak, the safety net program served more than 5 million patients a year. Six in 10 Title X clients have reported the program as their sole source of health care in a given year.
In early April, the Department of Health and Human Services invited nonprofit organizations to apply for Title X grants for fiscal year 2027, which begins in October. The 67-page Notice of Funding Opportunity included only one mention of contraception — describing it as overprescribed, associated with negative side effects, and part of a broader “overreliance on pharmaceutical and surgical treatments.”
The grant notification reshapes the program from its traditional public health intervention efforts to focus on fertility, family formation, and reproductive health conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome, endometriosis, low testosterone, and erectile dysfunction.
While Title X will continue to help women “achieve healthy pregnancies,” the grant document does not explicitly reference preventing unintended pregnancies — a long-standing goal of the program.
Jessica Marcella, who oversaw the Title X program as a senior official in the Biden administration, said the new funding notice amounts to a wholesale redefinition of family planning.
“What we’re seeing is trying to use our nation’s family planning as a Trojan horse for an entirely different agenda,” Marcella said, noting that Trump has proposed eliminating Title X altogether.
Birth Rates and Fertility Trends
The administration is overhauling Title X in the context of declining birth rates. But researchers who study fertility trends say the decline is driven by forces that have little to do with contraception access and that restricting it is unlikely to produce more births.
The most important factors, according to demographer Alison Gemmill of UCLA, are timing-related. “Childbearing is increasingly delayed as part of a broader shift toward later a