In the News, June 2026
Written by Olivia Nater, Communications Manager | Published: June 8, 2026
Paul Ehrlich passes away at 93
Population Connection co-founder and distinguished scientist, Paul R. Ehrlich, died on March 13.
Dr. Ehrlich was the Bing Professor of Population Studies (Emeritus) at Stanford University and President of its Center for Conservation Biology, which he founded. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. He won many prestigious national and international awards over the course of his lengthy career, including the MacArthur Prize.
Despite writing and contributing to dozens of other books and more than 1,100 scientific papers, The Population Bomb, coauthored with his wife, Anne, came to define Ehrlich’s career and his image as a controversial figure. The 1968 book’s openness to considering coercive population control was certainly problematic. Surprisingly, though, this was not the primary reason that so many posthumous media articles condemned Ehrlich. Instead, they focused on The Population Bomb’s unfortunate scenarios of continued population growth leading to mass starvation.
Unable to foresee the magnitude of success that the Green Revolution would have in the near future, Ehrlich warned that population growth would soon outstrip available food supplies and that “hundreds of millions of people” would starve to death in the 1970s. While several million people have died of famine since the late 1960s, the death toll was nowhere near what Ehrlich predicted, because of the dramatic increase in crop productivity brought about by modern agriculture.
Fixating on the fact that Ehrlich’s mass mortality scenarios did not pan out as he predicted, and because he famously lost a bet to cornucopian Julian Simon about the future cost of raw materials, media outlets concluded that Paul Ehrlich “was wrong about everything,” while neglecting that his warnings about environmental devastation, natural resource shortages and conflicts, pandemics, and the growing risk of nuclear war were actually pretty spot-on. The media response to Ehrlich’s passing largely ignored the environmental impacts of population growth, and argued that his unrealized mass starvation predictions prove that the very concept of planetary limits is wrong, with many journalists erroneously concluding that humanity can grow and innovate its way out of every crisis.
US fertility rate reaches new record low
The US general fertility rate (GFR) — the number of births per 1,000 women aged 15–44 — has reached a new low, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. The 2025 GFR was 53.1 births per 1,000 women, a 1% decrease from the 2024 rate (53.8). The rate has been consistently trending downward since 2007, when it was 23% higher. The total number of births in the US in 2025 was 3,606,400, also 1% lower than in 2024.
The decline is in large part driven by welcome progress towards reducing teen births. The fertility rate for teenagers aged 15–19 dropped by 7% between 2024 and 2025, and by 72% since 2007. The new data also confirm that women are increasingly delaying childbearing, with GFR declines for women in their 20s and increases for women in their 30s and 40s.
According to the age-specific birth rates in the report, the 2025 total fertility rate (TFR) was 1.57 births per woman, a 1.6% decline from the 2024 TFR of 1.59.
Trump hijacks Title X
In April, the Trump administration announced radical changes to Title X, the federal program that helps low-income Americans access family planning services, STI testing and treatment, and cancer screenings. During his first term, Trump made it possible for anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers” to receive Title X funding, while all but excluding the participation of organizations that offer, discuss, or provide referrals for abortion services. After returning to office in January 2025, Trump withheld Title X funding from dozens of grantees over “possible violations” of his anti-DEI executive orders. Following a lawsuit, the administration quietly restored the money in December.
Now, Title X is essentially being turned on its head, from a program that helps people access contraception to a vehicle for advancing Trump’s anti-rights pronatalist agenda. The new application guidance published by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) seems to entirely redefine Title X’s primary goal as boosting conceptions, soliciting applications from entities that “support family formation” and offer “infertility services” and “reproductive goals counseling.” The only reference to modern contraception in the entire document highlights its recently declining prevalence and users’ high rates of discontinuation due to side effects. What the HHS guidance doesn’t acknowledge is that the largest decline in contraceptive use in recent years has been among teens. While contraceptive use among women of all reproductive ages (15–49) has declined by 17% since 2017–2019, it has declined by 34% among girls ages 15–19, alongside reductions in sexual activity among that age group.
Trump zeroed out funding for Title X in his fiscal year 2027 budget proposal.
India embarks on new census
India, estimated by the UN to be the world’s most populous nation at over 1.46 billion, has launched an ambitious two-phase effort to count its people, to be completed in 2027.
The Indian government aims to conduct a national census every 10 years, but this one, involving over 3 million workers as well as both in-person and digital surveys, will be the first since 2011 due to administrative issues and setbacks caused by the pandemic.
Controversially, census officials will record caste affiliation, which some argue risks deepening division and inequality, while proponents claim it will help shape fairer policies.
The resulting demographic data will inform a wide range of policies, including the distribution of government welfare programs, as well as a contentious planned redrawing of electoral constituency boundaries to reflect population change. In terms of political impact, this could mean more north-south tension due to declining parliamentary representation for southern India, where fertility rates are lowest.
Email Olivia at onater@populationconnection.org