Pope Francis lamented news of plunging birth rates worldwide in a Friday address, warning that there is “no future” without the family.
“If the family is not at the center of the present, there will be no future; but if the family takes off again, everything will take again,” the pope tweeted Friday.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released in early May found that the provisional number of births in the United States in 2020 is down 4% from 2019. Women in the U.S. gave birth to approximately 3.61 million babies in 2020, compared to about 3.75 million births in 2019, and the United States total fertility rate fell to 1.64, the lowest rate since the government began tracking such data in the 1930s.
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