Does the United States Have an Infertility Crisis?

It’s become a popular talking point among some of President-elect Trump’s most prominent supporters: America has an infertility problem.

“Why are so many couples infertile?” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, asked in a September post on the social media site X. Dr. Casey Means, a former surgeon and health influencer who has advised Mr. Kennedy, has called infertility a “crisis.”

And Mr. Trump himself has said he would task Mr. Kennedy with investigating “the decades-long increase in chronic health problems,” including infertility, or the medical inability to conceive.

Like people in many other developed regions across the globe, Americans are having fewer children now than before — a demographic trend that has alarmed some conservatives in particular. Some of that is likely a result of social and economic factors, like steep child care costs, housing prices and more people choosing to forgo starting families.

But whether infertility is becoming more common is a different question, and a difficult one to answer conclusively. Still, researchers and doctors said they are worried about a few health trends unfolding in the United States that can affect fertility.

How scientists track fertility

Researchers use a few metrics to examine fertility and infertility, and each offers a slightly different picture of the current landscape in the United States.