Submission by Patti Johnson

America’s falling birth rate is often blamed on the soaring cost of housing, childcare, student debt and the financial pressures facing young couples. But money may only explain part of the story. Over generations, something deeper has changed in the way our culture views children themselves, increasingly treating them as an economic burden, an environmental cost or an obstacle to personal freedom rather than what Scripture calls them: “a heritage of the Lord” and a blessing from God.

I recently read Felix Yang’s article “The Six Nooses: How Interventionism Is Strangling the Family’s Will to Reproduce,” published by the Mises Institute and printed on a financial website. Yang contends that the collapse in birth rate is not a mysterious cultural anomaly. Instead, he argues, it is the rational response of individuals living under a century of government interventions that have broken the link between parental sacrifice and long-term reward. He identifies six “nooses” that strangled the benefits of having children. According to Yang, each noose is rooted in economics. In other words, Yang was saying that because of specific and compounding government regulations, the economic reward of having children has been strangled, causing the collapse of birth rate in countries worldwide.

An additional and equally forceful reason is spiritual and cultural decline.

This reason goes far deeper than the economy and government regulations. Cultural and spiritual shifts are largely why couples increasingly treat children as an optional economic liability rather than a blessing. As the U.S. has drifted from its biblical roots and turned away from God, many now see children primarily as a financial burden or a drain on the earth’s resources. Scripture is clear on this point. Psalm 127:3 states, “Lo, children are a heritage of the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is His reward.”

Children were never valued chiefly as future providers for their parents in old age; they were received as a gift. Today, they are often reduced to a self-centered economic calculation, a commodity or asset omitted from the “portfolio” if it fails to add financial value. In short, children have been demoted from a gift of God to a human resource or an ecological threat.

Viewing the decision to have children solely through a financial or institutional lens overlooks deeper moral shifts that have shaped public thinking for decades. Other influences deserve attention: Darwinism (with its emphasis on survival of the fittest and the idea that humans are merely animals), Malthusian overpopulation theory, the legacy of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood, and the United Nations’ Agenda 21 (now Agenda 2030). I will examine these factors in the remainder of this article. 

As Paul Harvey used to say, here is “the rest of the story.”

Darwin, Malthus and Paul Erlich’s “Population Bomb and the United Nations Sustainable Development Plan”

Darwin’s Evolution and Survival of the Fittest theory and Malthus’s overpopulation theory have been taught side by side in the public schools as factual. The biblical truth of human beings created in the image of God has been replaced with a story involving man evolving from animals. Only the fittest survive. I contend that these theories are flawed in principle.

Malthus was a British economist and statistician who wrote in 1798 “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” He came from the elite upper class in England. He despised the poor, underclass “useless eaters,” who were multiplying in the slums of England. He believed that they were a drain on the economy. Malthus used fundamentally flawed mathematical calculations to claim that the population would soon outpace the food supply if they were left to procreate.  He was a promoter of eugenics and believed that the poor were inherently inferior. His theory was embraced by the elite ruling class of England. His flawed mathematical overpopulation theory is still taught in schools today.

In the U.S., biologist Paul Ehrlich amplified Malthusian panic with his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, which was co-authored with Anne Ehrlich. As a Stanford professor and co-founder of Zero Population Growth, he predicted imminent catastrophe:

• “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death…”
• He warned of U.S. food rationing by 1980, water by 1974, and a “Great Die-Off” killing tens of millions of Americans.

None of it happened. Food production tripled while population doubled, and famine deaths plummeted. Yet, in spite of these occurrences, Ehrlich never retracted his core claims.

He went further, endorsing and proposing extreme coercive measures when “voluntary” methods failed:

• Adding sterilants to water supplies or staple foods.
• Compulsory sterilization (praising India’s forced programs and urging U.S. aid with helicopters and doctors).
• A powerful “Department of Population and Environment” with authority to take “whatever steps are necessary.”
• Withholding food aid from countries refusing aggressive population control.
• Tax penalties on larger families and other disincentives.

Ehrlich called population growth a “cancer” needing excision. His ideas shaped policy debates and influenced real-world abuses.

Ehrlich received dozens of major awards, including the MacArthur “genius” grant in 1990 and the Crafoord Prize, which is ecology’s Nobel Prize-equivalent. He remained a media and scientific darling until his death on March 13, 2026, at age 93. 

Ehrlich’s philosophy aligns seamlessly with the Neo-Malthusian infused UN Agenda 21/2030 and school curricula, indoctrinating generations that humans destroy the planet and should limit reproduction. 

Schoolchildren are being taught that human carbon output is destroying the planet, humans are a cancerous, spreading disease and are encouraged not to have children in order to save the planet.  One study actually stated, “humans are fueling global warming just by breathing.” 

This philosophy fits perfectly with the push for couples not to have children. The Malthus theory of overpopulation was promoted in the United Nations Agenda 21 program of Sustainable Management of the earth. Agenda 21 started in 1992 and has been taught throughout the public schools’ system since then. Agenda 21 has been followed by Agenda 2030. Every public-school child is exposed to this global governance agenda and curriculum.

Prince Charles, a leader in the sustainable development agenda, was infused with neo-Malthusian ideology and promoted eugenics. He publicly stated, “In the event that I am reincarnated I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.”

Generations of schoolchildren have effectively been brainwashed to believe that if we do not stop having children and restrict our carbon output to net zero, the earth will cease to exist.   

Magaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood, Abortion and Eugenics

Roe v. Wade was passed by the Supreme Court on January 22,1973, with the promise that abortion would be a very rare event used only for the life of the mother or in cases of rape or incest. The opposite quickly unfolded. 

Abortion is now legal for purely economic reasons, and it is permissible in many states if the baby is defective in any way or for whatever reason a person has. There is no reason excluded. Eugenics are in play. Today, in certain states, it is actually legal to abort up to birth. Legalized unrestricted abortion was the dream of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.

Further, murder of children is now legal after birth.

Governor Newsome just signed infanticide legislation. By deliberately using the word “perinatal,” or after birth, in the family of the term “prenatal,” or before birth, the law will effectively allow a living child to die up to 28 days after birth. Similar legislation is now being introduced in other states. Note the handpicked verbiage that casts a medical filter to remove the public, along with the families of these babies, from the atrocity that is actually occurring. 

And now, women are demonstrating in support of a woman who strangled her three children to death. They have already raised a million dollars for her defense. Subsequently, another woman committed a copycat murder and slashed her three children’s throats. That is how low our culture has fallen. The bar is essentially in the pit of hell. 

If Margaret Sanger were alive today, she would enthusiastically back Bill Gates’ vaccine-driven depopulation efforts. She would have appeared repeatedly in Epstein’s Lolita Express flight logs right beside Gates, helping orchestrate their shared eugenics vision. She would have been at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in New Mexico working side by side with him and Gates to develop the perfect human through “genetic seeding” and “gene editing.”

Sanger, unsurprisingly, was a racist who loved Hitler. If you still doubt her depraved worldview, and you’d rather remember her as the glorified founder of Planned Parenthood, just read below her own venomous, racist quotes openly calling for depopulation and racial cleansing.

Despite the desperate lies peddled by Snopes and every other progressive fact-checker, every one of these quotes is fully verifiable.

Margaret Sanger Verifiable Quotes:

“The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” — Woman and the New Race, Chapter 5, “The Wickedness of Creating Large Families.” (1920)

“We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population…” — Letter to Dr. Clarence J. Gamble, December 10, 1939, p. 2

“I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan… I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak…In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.” — Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography, 1938, p. 366

“Eugenics without birth control seems to us a house builded [sic] upon the sands. It is at the mercy of the rising stream of the unfit.” — Sanger, Margaret. (1919) Birth Control and Racial Betterment. The Birth Control Review.

“Apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.” — Sanger, Margaret. “My Way to Peace,” Jan. 17, 1932. Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress 130:198.

“Birth control itself… is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives… If we are to make racial progress, this development of womanhood must precede motherhood in every individual woman.” — Woman and the New Race, 1920

“No permit for parenthood shall be valid for more than one birth…” — Margaret Sanger, “America Needs a Code for Babies,” Article 6, March 27, 1934.

“Birth Control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.” — 1923 statement on racial elements

“Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease… Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.” — The Pivot of Civilization, 1922

“The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” — The Pivot of Civilization, 1922

These quotes hammer home Sanger’s relentless language of people as “human weeds” and “defective stocks,” her fixation with sterilization and segregation, and her “racial betterment” crusade. These words are straight from her own books, letters and papers.

The Real Crisis: We Forgot What Children Are Worth

The collapse in birth rates is not solely a story of rising housing costs, student debt, or career pressures. Those issues have gravity, but they are symptoms of the collapsing culture, not the disease. At its source lies a profound cultural and spiritual degradation. Our society has abandoned the biblical conviction that children are a heritage from the Lord and instead absorbed a century of Darwinian, Malthusian, and eugenic ideas that treat human life as a disposable burden on the planet or a liability on the balance sheet. 

From the classroom indoctrination of overpopulation panic and “sustainable development,” to the institutionalized abortion industry founded on Sanger’s vision of weeding out the “unfit,” to the quiet normalization of viewing children as optional lifestyle accessories rather than divine gifts, we have systematically devalued the very people who once embodied hope and blessing. 

Yang is right that interventionist institutions have made family formation harder. He is wrong, however, to treat those institutions as the sole explanation. Until we recover the older, truer understanding that every child is a reward from God rather than an economic calculation or ecological threat, no policy tweak or financial incentive will reverse the demographic winter we have chosen. The real crisis is not that children cost too much; it is that we have forgotten what they are worth.

In the words of Paul Harvey’s famous closing line, “And now you know the rest of the story” as to why couples are choosing to remain childless. 

Featured: Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash