In the book of Genesis, God gives the humans He just created certain tasks to perform. Among them, He says to “be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it.”

The contemporary West, once the center of Christendom, has failed to adhere to this mandate. The average fertility rate needed merely to keep population levels steady is 2.1 children per woman. In 2021, the fertility rate among European women was 1.61. America used to defy these low rates but joined its European compatriots beginning in 2007, a product, at least in part, of the Great Recession. We now regularly receive dire reports about the fertility rate among American women as well. With low fertility rates come the threat of depopulation, a shrinking workforce, less proactive communities, and decreases in productivity as well as economic dynamism.

On that front, we received a small amount of good news recently. 2021 marked the first year since 2014 that the number of births in the United States increased. The fertility rate went up from 1.64 to 1.66 children per woman, despite fears the pandemic would drive numbers down further.

That still means fertility rates remain at a historical low, well short of mere replacement levels. Perhaps this slight uptick portends a broader and deeper rebound in Americans having children. Unfortunately, however, there is more reason to doubt this seemingly positive development. The opposite trend seems too longstanding, and thus, too fixed on the path of decline. We need to ask what options America possesses to reverse this general trend. What political options exist to spur childbirth in our culture and the economy? In essence, can public policy make America fertile again?

Montesquieu, the 17th-century French political thinker, provides an under-studied but worthwhile discussion of this subject. The American Founders leaned heavily on his seminal treatise The Spirit of the Laws for our systems of federalism and separation of powers. Yet, that same work dedicated an entire section to the issue of how a country’s laws related to the size of its population.

Montesquieu doesn’t paint a rosy picture for America. He begins with the particular difficulties involved in human reproduction. It comes from our reason combined with our freedom. Montesquieu points to “the way of thinking, character, passions, fantasies, caprices, the idea of preserving one’s beauty, the encumbrance of pregnancy, that of a too numerous family, disturb propagation in a thousand ways.” Animals reproduce from instinct. Humans can decide to try and avoid pregnancy. Their reason and passions give them various excuses to avoid reproducing.

But problems particular to time and place can dissuade further the desire to have children. Thus, Montesquieu admits that “Regulations concerning the number of inhabitants depend greatly on circumstances.” He then mentions differences in circumstances. Some population decreases, for instance, come from the combination of “internal vice and a bad government.” This internal origin presents a much harder problem to address than, say, an invader’s acts of destruction. Such acts are obvious and how to address them, namely by military victory, is clear. But regarding internal reasons for population decline, Montesquieu goes on to say that “Men there have perished from an imperceptible and habitual illness.” They suffer from bad habits whose culpability in depopulation we struggle to pinpoint. Such a situation describes our own.

First, we do too much to discourage marriage. Our government regularly has penalized marriage in filing taxes, especially for low-income earners. Our cities build and zone housing to make it hard, if not impossible, for larger families to reside there. Moreover, our culture’s long-running sexual revolution also discourages wedlock by normalizing cohabitation as well as sex outside of marriage. One could argue marriage inhibits population, tying men to reproducing with one female partner. Montesquieu, however, writes that “public continence is joined naturally to the propagation of the species.” In general, marriage comes about “wherever there is a place for two persons to live comfortably.” Marriage both arises from comfort and creates comfort in living, especially for raising children.

Marriage creates comfort because rearing human beings takes much longer and more effort than rearing animals. Because humans possess reason as well as passions, they must receive instruction, not just nourishment, in order to learn both to “sustain their lives” and to “govern themselves.” Thus, while female animals may alone take on the nourishment of young, the greater requirements for human offspring dissuade single mothers from having additional children.

Marriages, moreover, should see the wife as joining the husband’s family. Doing so, Montesquieu argues, makes the family a sort of “property” for the man, one that drives him to have male offspring in order to maintain the family line. The same proves true for last names. Sharing a name creates pride in its status and interest in its continuance. Thus, Montesquieu also supports the intimidating proposition that men should ask the father for his daughter’s hand in marriage. He argues that fathers, not the other potential option—the state—should have a say over getting the children married, since they will look out best for the benefit of their families. This attitude of family as property, legally supported, “contributes much to the propagation of the human species.”

On each count, we have failed to cultivate conditions for childbearing. About 40% of births in our country come to unmarried persons. People now delay marriage, averaging the age of 34 before tying the knot. An increasing percentage of persons do not marry at all. Moreover, views of gender equality have limited the number of women who take their husband’s name or require their father’s consent. Connected to this decline in marriage—and subsequently, childbirth—are the proliferation of vices related to sexuality. Montesquieu saw this connection in Rome, where the population gained a disdain for marriage and indulged in sexual debauchery that marriage would inhibit. With this came a drop in the population. Sadly, Americans should relate. Alongside illegitimacy, low birth rates, and delayed or denied marriage, our own time is marked by public sexualization, especially found in pornography.

Second, our laws do too little to help, and often hurt, families economically. Montesquieu said that to protect population growth, policies must avoid economic despotism over family property: Those who live under a “harsh government” do not want to reproduce. The harshness comes from governments “who regard their fields less as the foundation of their sustenance than as a pretext for harassments.” Here, we see that property rights and the family contain an important connection. Those whose fields receive protection by the laws can flourish and then desire to add to their families. Those harassed can hardly care for themselves, so why would they consider adding mouths to feed?

America does have some helpful policies, such as the child tax credit many families receive each April. But they hardly account for the costs of rearing children. Economically, many families today must have two breadwinners, leaving no option for one to stay home if that family so desires (and much data shows more women wish they could stay home than do). Our work conditions do not accommodate family life, either. They fail to offer the necessary flexibility needed to balance work and home. Add in the way our statutes can penalize marriage, and you have families squeezed from two sides, both by private business and public law. Incentivizing childbearing on both fronts, rather than discouraging it, would certainly help.

But we must acknowledge that such incentives are no silver bullet, for, in addition to the economics, we must add the cultural expectations that both affected and are affected by monetary concerns. Montesquieu observes that among “nascent peoples” having many children seems a comfort. Yet, he notes “The contrary occurs when the nation is formed.” Expectations of comfort and leisure turn children from an aid to a burden. We see in our own culture the rise of secularism and feminism giving voice to this view of children. Christianity encouraged larger families due to the creation mandate, a duty to God, His world, and His church. Traditional views of sex and family gave great dignity and honor to women who sought the vocation of homemaker.

Secularism and current iterations of feminism contradict both, seeing children as inhibitors to self-realization or roadblocks to gender equality. On this note, we must mention the legal regime of abortion that has cost more than 60 million children since 1973’s declaration of a Constitutional right to end a pregnancy. Though the Supreme Court recently overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, legal abortion will remain in many states and continue to be defended on grounds that peg children as drags on economic output and personal fulfillment.

The countries Montesquieu speaks of—with condemnation—that kill their young, in or out of the womb, are usually ones suffering from overpopulation. We find ourselves depopulating, yet a society that still refuses to conceive or to bear whom we do conceive. Kids seemingly do not help the economic output of their parents. Culturally, they do not appear to help our ease and comfort in life. Thus, our public opinions, laws, and markets do too much to undermine incentives to create them.

Third, our country has succumbed to centralization and its attendant problems of size. Our corporations are big. Our government is big. We have centralized at the cost of local communities. Montesquieu sees a population lesson for Rome on this score as well. The size of the political community matters. Families flourish in the context of vibrant neighborhoods which provide support, economic, spiritual, and emotional, that larger political and economic set-ups cannot. Montesquieu says the areas swallowed up by the Roman Empire had bursting populations before joining Rome. They suffered rampant depopulation afterward. When later, medieval communities grew in population, they offered a de-centralized model of feudalism. These systems, whatever their vices, offer the virtues of a connected, intergenerational community. They keep the family from suffering envelopment and seeming irrelevance before massive governments or businesses or markets.

Montesquieu turns to other policies that might help reverse our culture of childlessness. They involve reversing much of the problems just discussed. Regarding Rome, the laws sought to encourage marriage by giving those married special privileges. Married persons got the first choice of seats at the theatre, for instance. Other perks came with not just marriage, but from the number of children born in that marriage. For example, those with the most children received the first choice, “both in the pursuit of honors and in the exercise of these same honors.” These included both honors as vain as what one could wear in public to the nobler of holding and exercising public office. The laws even went so far as to actively punish those not married, giving them disadvantages similar to those privileges just described. Unmarried persons could not inherit from anyone else, childless couples only half. They prohibited the marriage of couples who were too old to bear children, for “the law did not want useless marriages.”

Here we run into difficulty. Would Americans stomach such methods for the sake of increasing population? Even if so, they would not pass constitutional muster, infringing on fundamental liberties rightly dear to our polity.

Along these lines, Americans have the child tax credit, yet, imagine if an amendment was added to the Constitution ranking giving electoral advantage to candidates married with children? Or businesses giving primacy in goods and services to persons based on marriage and children? Such policies risk reducing marriage only to procreation, ignoring many other goods to individuals and to society the institution offers. They thereby pose the danger of regulating unmarried persons and infertile couples to second-class status in the republic. Our views of human equality would balk at many such policies. Rome balked, too. So long as Rome had a culture open to children, methods like the above only aided childbearing. As its culture fell, Roman leaders avoided the laws, undermined them, then repealed them.

Yet we must understand that we encourage what we honor and we discourage what we disapprove. Encouraging the birth of more children while respecting all persons regardless of familial status will demand the careful balancing that attends all true statesmanship. It likely requires encouraging and rewarding numerous goods that people contribute to society. We should not neglect to acknowledge, support, and praise those benefits other than creating and raising children. But we must include family among those goods we encourage, and are justified in prioritizing that encouragement if familial goods, as they currently do, suffer neglect or inhibition more than other societal benefits. We must ask what policies we can stomach—nay, embrace—on this front.

Christianity, again, might play a vital role in this needed balance. For it embraces the inherent dignity of all persons and sees many goods that one can contribute to one’s political community and one’s church. But it also recognizes the special importance of making and raising children, citizens of political communities established by God and worshippers in religious institutions founded by the same. The family was, is, and should be the norm for most persons’ lives. Consistent with religious liberty, a statesman would be wise to encourage this view of human beings.

Perhaps we will learn something from the new economics emerging out of the pandemic, wherein remote work and its flexibility provide some incentives upon which policies can build. Perhaps we will make hard choices that seek to change how we see children socially and economically. Ultimately, Montesquieu gives us options to consider and warnings to heed regarding just how hard it is for public policy to change culture and economics. Regardless, we face a daunting but necessary task. After all, God commanded us to be fruitful and multiply. Can the contemporary West learn ancient obedience again?