Editor's Note, March 2026
Written by Marian Starkey | Published: March 9, 2026
Our members have written! The flood of letters and emails I’ve received about religion’s role in population growth since I published Konrad Kummli’s letter to the editor in the June 2025 issue exceeds the number of letters I’ve gotten about any magazine subject I can recall. I replied to each writer about the nuanced connections between religion, birth control, and fertility, and many of them responded that we should dedicate an issue of the magazine to the topic. Here’s that issue.
Kirsten Stade researched and wrote a compelling feature article that details the pressures various religious doctrines and leaders place on women to bear children, and also points to the abundant examples of countries with strong religious identities — of all faiths — that have very low fertility rates. The common denominator in all these examples is access to a range of affordable modern contraceptive methods.
The United States has a higher total fertility rate (TFR) than most other high-income countries, at 1.6 births per woman. One widely accepted explanation is the elevated levels of religiosity here compared to many other industrialized countries. A 2022 study found that US women who attend religious services at least weekly have a TFR of 2.1 while women who never attend religious services have a TFR of 1.3. Of course, confounding factors such as higher rates of unintended pregnancy and more restrictive abortion bans in states with more religious residents play a role.
Meanwhile, according to 2023 CDC data, nearly every woman who had ever had sexual intercourse with a male partner had used modern contraception at some point in her life. That goes for Catholic women (98.8%) and Protestant women (99.3%) alike. And, perhaps most surprisingly, for 98.6% of women who said that religion is “very important” in their daily lives.
I want to underscore a crucial point here: Even the most devoted religious women in the United States have replacement-level fertility, on average. In other words, women know better than their pope, priest, or pastor, or their rabbi or imam, whether and when they should have children and how many they can manage physically, emotionally, and financially. And when they have access to family planning information, services, and supplies, they tend to postpone childbearing and limit their family size in ways that women without access cannot.
Some countries that previously supported and even encouraged contraceptive use have done an about-face and now discourage or even penalize people’s use of contraceptives. Still, fertility rates in those countries — e.g., Iran, China, Russia, the US — remain low. Once small families become the norm, regardless of how hard religious, business, and political leaders try to reverse the trend, people often still find a way to make their own best decisions about parenthood. It’s only in the poorest, most underserved, and least gender-equal regions that people continue, at the population level, to have large families. Religious dogma, it seems, is no match for women’s empowerment.