The number of babies born in the United States fell again last year.
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 adult milestones, including stable employment, leaving the parental home, and marriage,” she said.
Most American women, she said, still complete their childbearing years with an average of two children, suggesting a shift toward smaller families rather than an increase in childlessness.
“Having children has become more contingent and more planned,” she said.
Much of the decline since 2007 reflects women postponing births rather than forgoing them.
“The average number of babies women are having in their whole lives has not fallen. It’s still more than 2.0 for women aged 45,” said Philip Cohen, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland.
Phillip Levine, an economist at Wellesley College, said the birth rate has declined due to shifts in how women approach work, leisure, and parenting. “Efforts to reverse those patterns would be more successful if they can make childbearing more desirable, not make it harder to prevent a pregnancy,” he said.
Asked about the role of contraception in reducing maternal mortality and how the new funding notice advances that goal, HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard said in a statement: “Applicants for the 2027 Title X funding cycle will be expected to align with the administration’s stated priorities in the released Notice of Funding Opportunity. HHS, under the leadership of Secretary Kennedy and President Trump, will continue to support policies that support life, family well-being, maternal health, and address the chronic disease epidemic. HHS remains focused on improving maternal outcomes and ensuring programs are administered consistent with applicable law.”
Marcella said the new funding notice is the product of two converging forces: the Make America Healthy Again movement, with its skepticism of conventional medicine and emphasis on lifestyle and behavioral interventions, and a pronatalist agenda that seeks to boost birth rates by steering policy toward family formation.
The document’s language reflects both: It repeatedly invokes “optimal health” and “chronic disease” while sidelining the contraceptive services that have defined Title X for half a century.
Clare Coleman, president and CEO of the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association, which represents health professionals focused on family planning, said tying Title X to birth-rate goals replaces individual decision-making with a government objective. The program “is designed to facilitate access to family planning services, including services to achieve and prevent pregnancy,” she said.
Title X’s New Focus
The administration’s changes have been welcomed on the right.
Emma Waters, a senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, who has advocated for what she calls “restorative reproductive medicine,” said the new funding notice reflects overdue attention to neglected aspects of women’s health.
“I was particularly encouraged to see language that spoke to the delays in diagnosis for conditions like endometriosis, the need for women to practically understand how their cycle and fertility works, and to ensure that real root-cause was promoted through Title X,” Waters said.
She described the notice as an expansion, not a narrowing, of the program’s mission: “I see this iteration of Title X as the fulfillment of its purpose. The goal was never just ‘more contraception’ but a wholesale empowerment of women to govern their own fertility.”
Waters also argued that untreated reproductive health problems may contribute to lower birth rates.
“One of the interesting aspects of this debate, and one that is often overlooked, is the degree to which painful and unaddressed reproductive health problems may suppress or create ambivalence around a woman’s desire to have kids,” she said, pointing to endometriosis.
An estimated 5% to 10% of women of reproductive age have endometriosis, and of those, 30%-50% experience infertility. Scientifically speaking, the relationship is an association, not a proven cause. Women aren’t screened for endometriosis if they don’t have symptoms, and the condition may be more prevalent than is recognized. Researchers still do not fully understand why some women with endometriosis struggle to conceive while others do not, and treating the disease does not reliably restore fertility.
Infertility rates in the U.S., meanwhile, have not risen. An analysis of federal survey data found them essentially flat between 1995 and 2019, even as the national birth rate fell sharply — a divergence that points away from untreated reproductive disease as an explanation.
Meanwhile, in February, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued new clinical guidelines enabling earlier diagnosis of endometriosis without surgery, a step toward addressing the delays Waters described. But the first-line treatment ACOG recommends is hormonal therapy, part of the same category of care the funding notice dismisses as part of an “overreliance on pharmaceutical and surgical treatments.” The effect, reproductive health experts say, is a contradiction: Title X is now prioritizing diagnosis of endometriosis while deemphasizing the drugs clinicians use to treat it.
Treatments that have been shown to improve fertility in women with endometriosis, such as laparoscopic surgery and in vitro fertilization, are not covered by Title X. When President Richard Nixon signed Title X into law in 1970, he described it as a way to expand access to family planning services — helping women determine the number and spacing of their children by making contraception and related preventive care more widely available, particularly for those who could not afford it. Medicaid, not Title X, is the primary government health insurance program covering health care for low-income women, but, like many commercial insurance plans, it does not cover IVF.
Many of the conditions prioritized in the funding notice deserve attention, said Liz Romer, a former chief clinical adviser for the HHS Office of Population Affairs who helped write updated guidelines for the family planning program. But they fall outside the scope of what Title X can realistically provide.
“There’s not even enough funding to support the core premise of contraception,” Romer said. “And so, if you want to expand Title X funding, you can expand the scope, but you can’t move away from the foundation.”
The emergence of an anticontraception ideology within federal health policy is striking, she said, given how broadly the public supports access to birth control. Eight in 10 women of childbearing age surveyed by KFF in 2024 reported having used some form of contraception in the previous 12 months.
Laura Lindberg, director of the Concentration in Sexual and Reproductive Health, Rights and Justice at Rutgers School of Public Health, said, “If contraception is sidelined in Title X, it won’t just change language on paper but will show up as fewer options and more barriers for patients.” Funding could move away from providers who offer a full range of contraceptive care, she added, “toward organizations that are ideologically opposed to contraception and don’t deliver the same standard of health care services.”
The Stakes Are High
The United States already has one of the highest maternal mortality rates among wealthy nations — 17.9 deaths per 100,000 live births as of 2024. According to the CDC, 4 in 5 pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. may be preventable. Medical research shows that pregnancy carries substantially higher risks of blood clots, stroke, and cardiovascular complications than hormonal contraception.
And since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade, access to abortion has been significantly curtailed across much of the country. While national abortion numbers have risen, driven largely by telehealth and interstate access, research shows births have increased in states with bans, with an estimated 32,000 additional births annually, disproportionately among young women and women of color.
Dr. Christine Dehlendorf, who directs the Person-Centered Reproductive Health Program at the University of California-San Francisco, said “there is absolutely no evidence for any positive outcome of restricting access to contraception.” Restrictions would instead increase demand for abortion care and make it harder for women to prevent high-risk pregnancies.
Since Trump returned to office, more than a dozen Title X grantees have had their grants frozen, forcing some health centers to stop delivering services, lay off staff, or close. During the first Trump administration, regulatory changes led to a decline in Title X participation from more than 4 million patients to 1.5 million. The program grew slowly under the Biden administration, reaching about 3 million clients, before the current round of disruptions began.
The second Trump administration’s overhaul of the program, Marcella said, “directly undermines the public health intent of our nation’s family planning program and will potentially exclude millions of individuals from getting the care they have relied on for decades. It’s bad policy.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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