Ideas

Are Men to Blame for the Birth-Rate Collapse?

Whether dads do their fair share of the housework appears to have no effect on fertility.

First published in The Atlantic on August 11, 2026.

by Marc Novicoff, The Atlantic
August 13, 2026 | reading time: 8 Min.

Society is running out of babies, and no one can agree on why. Most people around the world, including Americans, live in a country where overall fertility is below what demographers call the “replacement rate,” meaning that without migration, the population will shrink from one generation to the next. In some places, the birth rate is so low that each generation is set to be half the size of the previous one.

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