The article from EWTN News portal (April 9, 2026) reports that U.S. births declined by 1% in 2025, according to provisional CDC data, with the general fertility rate dropping to 53.1 births per 1,000 women aged 15–44 — a 23% decline since its 2007 peak. Teenage births reached a historic low, falling 7% to 11.7 per 1,000. The article quotes analysts from The Heritage Foundation and the Population Research Institute attributing the decline to abortion (Planned Parenthood reported a record 434,450 abortions in 2023-2024), economic pressures, “girl-boss feminism,” and reduced illegal immigration. The piece frames these statistics as evidence of a “culture of death” threatening America’s demographic future. Yet the article’s own framing reveals the impotence of a Catholic commentary that diagnoses the disease while refusing to name its deepest spiritual cause: the systematic apostasy of the conciliar sect and the abandonment of the Social Reign of Christ the King.
The Demographic Abyss: A Symptom of Apostasy, Not Mere Policy Failure
The statistics presented are staggering in their spiritual implications. A 23% decline in the general fertility rate since 2007, record-low teenage birth rates, and Planned Parenthood performing nearly half a million abortions in a single year — these are not merely sociological trends. They are the fruits of apostasy, the inevitable consequence of a civilization that has expelled God from its laws, its institutions, and its families. As Pope Pius XI taught in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), the removal of Christ and His law from “private, family, and public life” leads directly to the “outpouring of evil” that “afflicted the whole world.” The demographic collapse of the United States is not an isolated phenomenon; it is the biological manifestation of a nation that has formally and materially rejected the Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The article quotes Emma Waters of The Heritage Foundation, who identifies “anti-life technologies, economic pressures, bad policies, and cultural movements such as girl-boss feminism” as drivers of declining birth rates. Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute points to the “increasingly widespread use of the abortion pill” and “stricter immigration enforcement.” These analyses are factually correct but theologically superficial. They treat the symptoms while ignoring the disease. The disease is not “feminism” or “economic pressures” — these are themselves effects of a deeper cause: the systematic destruction of the Catholic family and the Catholic state by the forces of Modernism, both within and without the Church.
The Silence About the Conciliar Sect’s Role in the Culture of Death
What the EWTN News article conspicuously omits — and this omission is itself a damning indictment — is the role of the post-conciliar sect in facilitating the culture of death. Since the “Second Vatican Council,” the structures occupying the Vatican have systematically undermined the Church’s teaching on marriage, family, and the sanctity of life. The conciliar sect’s embrace of false ecumenism, religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), and the “spirit of the Council” has created a spiritual vacuum in which the most barbaric anti-life ideologies have flourished. When the “bishops” of the neo-church refuse to excommunicate pro-abortion politicians, when they promote “dialogue” with the enemies of life, when they reduce the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass to a communal meal that no longer propitiates for the sins of the world — they become accomplices in the demographic suicide of Christian civilization.
The article’s reference to “Catholic perspectives” weighing in at upcoming events is particularly galling. Which “Catholic perspectives”? Those of the conciliar sect that has spent six decades dismantling the Church’s social teaching? Those of the “bishops” who have refused to defend the indissolubility of marriage, who have welcomed divorced and “remarried” “Catholics” to “Communion,” who have blessed homosexual unions? The “Catholic perspective” that America needs is not the watered-down naturalism of post-conciliar commentary but the uncompromising Social Teaching of the pre-conciliar Church: the recognition that Christ the King must reign over the laws, the institutions, and the families of the nation.
The Theology of the Body vs. the Social Reign of Christ the King
The demographic crisis cannot be understood — let alone remedied — without recourse to the fullness of Catholic social doctrine. Pope Leo XIII, in Arcanum Divinae Sapientiae (1880), taught that the family is the “society of the domestic home” that is “prior to the State” and whose rights and duties are “independent of the State.” Pope Pius XI, in Casti Connubii (1930), condemned contraception as “an offense against the law of God and of nature” and warned that those who deliberately frustrate the procreative end of marriage commit a “sin which has the stain of intrinsic malice.” These teachings are not optional “perspectives” — they are binding doctrine from which no Catholic may dissent without falling into heresy.
Yet the conciliar sect has systematically relativized these teachings. The “Theology of the Body” of the antipope John Paul II — himself a figure whose canonization is null and void, having been elevated by the apostate Bergoglio — replaced the Church’s objective moral law with a subjective, phenomenological approach to human sexuality that opened the door to every form of sexual deviancy. The result is the demographic catastrophe described in the article: a nation of women who view childbearing as a “luxury or elite enterprise,” a nation of men who have abandoned their God-given role as fathers and providers, a nation of children who are slaughtered in their mothers’ wombs by the hundreds of thousands.
Abortion: The Unspeakable Crime and the Complicity of the Neo-Church
The article notes that Planned Parenthood performed a record 434,450 abortions in 2023-2024, an 8% increase from the previous year. This figure does not include telehealth chemical abortions, which are “a growing percentage of all abortions, especially for teenagers and young adults.” Let us be clear: each of these 434,450 abortions is a human murder, the deliberate killing of an innocent child made in the image and likeness of God. The Church’s teaching on this matter is unequivocal: “If anyone says that the direct killing of an innocent child is not a grave sin and should not be punished with the most severe penalties, let him be anathema” (Council of Trent, Session 25).
The article’s mention of “stricter immigration enforcement” as a factor in declining birth rates is also noteworthy. Steven Mosher observes that “ten percent of all births in the U.S. in 2024 were to illegal aliens, a percentage that is undoubtedly lower in 2025 as deportations and remigration reduce their numbers.” This is presented as a negative development by the analysts quoted. From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, however, the question is not whether the birth rate declines due to reduced illegal immigration, but whether the nation is fulfilling its duty to uphold the moral law — including the law against murder in the womb — regardless of the demographic consequences. A nation that fills its cradles while filling its abortion clinics is not pro-life; it is merely slower in its suicide.
The Remedy: Christ the King or Demographic Extinction
The EWTN News article, like virtually all commentary from the conciar structures, offers no supernatural remedy for the demographic crisis. The analysts quoted speak of “policy” and “cultural movements” — naturalistic solutions to a supernatural problem. The Catholic Church, before the conciliar revolution, taught that the only true remedy for the ills of society is the recognition of the Social Reign of Christ the King. As Pope Pius XI declared in Quas Primas: “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church… but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.”
This means that the United States — like every nation on earth — has a divine obligation to publicly recognize Christ as its King, to order its laws according to the commandments of God, to protect the sanctity of life from conception to natural death, to uphold the indissolubility of marriage, and to promote the Catholic faith as the one true religion. As the Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX (1864) condemned in Proposition 77: “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.” This error — the foundation of the conciliar sect’s teaching on religious liberty — is the root cause of the demographic and moral collapse of the West.
The demographic decline of the United States is not a problem to be solved by “policy analysts” or “cultural commentators.” It is a divine judgment on a nation that has rejected its Creator. The remedy is not “natural family planning” or “pro-life advocacy” within the framework of liberal democracy. The remedy is repentance, conversion, and the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King. Until that remedy is embraced — until the structures of the neo-church are rejected and the immutable Tradition of the Catholic Church is restored — the demographic collapse will continue, and the United States will follow the path of “Old Europe” into the grave of civilizations that forgot God.
Non possumus — we cannot accept the conciliar sect’s naturalistic framework for understanding the demographic crisis. The crisis is spiritual before it is demographic. The remedy is supernatural before it is political. And the responsibility lies not only with the “girl-boss feminists” and the abortionists, but with the “bishops” and “popes” of the neo-church who, for six decades, have betrayed the Kingship of Christ and delivered the faithful into the hands of the enemies of the human race.
Source:
U.S. births declined slightly in 2025, CDC reports (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 09.04.2026