The Brief

When Sarah and Ben Brewington got married and moved to Los Angeles, they expected their next life step would be having kids. It just seemed like the natural thing to do. Instead, they kept delaying their first child, focusing on their careers, enjoying travel and spending time with friends.

"I started thinking, 'What do I want?'" Sarah Brewington said. Gradually, they reached a decision: "It's a resounding no. It's not something I'm interested in or want," she said.

"This life we're building together didn't need this other element in it," agreed her husband, Ben Brewington. "I don't feel guilty at all about it now to say I don't want kids."

The Brewingtons, both age 35, say they understand they are part of a wider trend. Far more people in the U.S. and around the world are choosing to have significantly fewer children or opting out of parenthood altogether.

A framed photo of Ben and Sarah Brewington sits on the mantel. They both agreed that parenthood wasn't right for their future.

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"I think it probably should be a concern for the government, the declining birth rate," Sarah Brewington told NPR. "There is going to come a time when everyone is retiring and there's not going to be a workforce."

Many researchers believe this accelerating global shift is being driven in large part by a positive reality. Young couples, and women in particular, have far more freedom and economic independence. They're weighing their options and appear to be making very different choices about the role of children in their lives.

"It's not that people don't like kids as much as they used to," said Melissa Kearney, an economist who studies fertility and population trends at the University of Notre Dame. "There's just a lot of other available options. They can invest in their careers, take more leisure time — it's much more socially acceptable."

This change in decision-making and behavior appears to be accelerating. New research from the United Nations found that the number of children born to the average woman worldwide has reached the lowest point ever recorded. In nearly every country and culture, women are having fewer children. Worldwide, the number of children born to each woman has dropped from five in 1960 to an average of 2.2, according to the latest United Nations report.

"Especially in high-income countries, the birth rate has very quickly plummeted in a sustained way," Kearney said. "We're actually really facing the question of depopulation."

Many women are choosing fewer children — or no children at all

In the U.S., this shift is driven in part by a growing number of women deciding against motherhood. According to Kearney, half of American women now reach age 30 without having at least one child. That's a dramatic increase from two decades ago, when only about a third of American women didn't have a child by that age. Many families are also choosing to have significantly fewer children.

"I remember at one point I was like, 'I definitely want three kids.' I was like, 'That's gonna be great.' That's what my mom had. That's what I want to have," Lusely Martinez, age 35, told NPR.

Martinez said she loves being a mother. "We get to watch our little heart walk around and learn and discover things. It's just so incredible." But after a lot of discussion, she and her husband decided that sticking to one child is best for their family.

"Having a child is extremely expensive," she said. "We're stopping and we're thinking, 'Is this actually smart for ourselves?'"

Lusely Martinez, 35, prepares dinner for her family while her daughter draws. Martinez previously wanted to have three children, but she and her husband decided that one child was best for their family.

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One relatively simple way to track the scale of this shift in human behavior is what's known as the "total fertility rate." It's a measure that predicts how many children a woman will have during her lifetime.

To maintain a stable population — no growth, no decline — the average woman needs to have roughly 2.1 kids. In the U.S., total fertility began dipping below that 2.1 threshold decades ago, and then after 2007, fertility rates plunged rapidly to a record low of roughly 1.6.

"I don't have a number in mind where if we hit it, I'm going to start freaking out," said Kearney, the economist at the University of Notre Dame. "But I already look around and see so many young people are finding themselves childless, and I worry we're doing something wrong as a society."

The population bomb that fizzled

The world's rapid pivot toward declining birth rates and older, smaller populations can seem dizzying, especially after decades of warnings about the environmental harms and quality-of-life impacts of rising populations.

In the 1960s and 1970s, scientist Paul Ehrlich popularized the idea that the Earth was being threatened by what he described as a population bomb.

"No intelligent, patriotic American family should have more than two children, and preferably only one," Ehrlich said in a 1970 interview with WOI-TV, warning that crowded U.S. cities faced a "fatal disease — it's called overpopulation."

Most demographers now say the population bomb has largely fizzled, and some predict that the long-term trend toward a smaller global population, with fewer consumers and a smaller human footprint on the planet, could benefit the environment.

There appear to be other upsides to declining fertility. Along with growing individual freedom and economic empowerment of women, the U.N. study also found a rapid drop in the number of girls and teenagers giving birth.

"The decline of the adolescent birth rates has been, I would say, one of the major success stories in global population health over the past three decades," said Vladimíra Kantorová, the U.N.'s chief population scientist.

But as more women and couples delay parenthood, have fewer babies or don't have children altogether, a growing number of nations around the world — more than 1 in 10 countries — have plunged to levels of childbearing so low that many scientists are worried.

"There's just, relatively speaking, no children being born in South Korea," said economist Phillip Levine at Wellesley College. According to U.N. data, by midcentury, 40% of South Korea's population is expected to be age 65 or older.

"Nobody expected that fertility would go to these low levels," said the U.N.'s Kantorová. "We don't have experience with this prolonged decline. This is something new."

In part because people are living so much longer, the global population is expected to keep rising for decades before these trends take hold, triggering a decline by the end of this century.

But many countries, including China, Italy, Japan, Russia and South Korea, have already seen populations begin to shrink. China alone is expected to lose more than 780 million people, more than half its population, by 2100.

An elderly woman holding leafy vegetables and a cane walks past street vendors selling farm produce and traditional goods under an overpass in Chongqing, China. Amid rising concerns about the aging population and the growing cost of living, many elderly citizens continue to rely on informal street markets and small-scale farming to supplement their income and maintain community ties.

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"It's difficult to predict whether these very fast declines, to very low fertility levels, will be happening all over the world," Kantorová said.

How will the U.S. navigate far lower fertility?

So far, the U.S. population is relatively stable despite record-low fertility, but new data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows the nation's fabric is already changing. Older people, those age 65 or above, now outnumber children in 11 states. That has risen sharply from just three states five years ago.

"Children still outnumber older adults in the United States, despite a decline in births this decade," said Lauren Bowers, chief of the Census Bureau's Population Estimates Branch, in a statement. "However, the gap is narrowing as baby boomers continue to age into their retirement years."

A 2023 study by the Brookings Institution, meanwhile, found that without significant numbers of immigrants coming to the U.S. in the future, the country's population would plunge by more than 100 million people this century.

"We would be losing about a third of our population between now and 2100 if there were no immigration to the United States," said the study's author, William Frey.

"What is our labor force going to be going forward? What is our productivity going forward?" Frey said. "We're going to have lots of jobs, and there's going to be nobody there to take those jobs. I think there's going to be a lot of pressure to increase immigration into the U.S."

Responding to these shifts, however, some politicians, researchers and activists in the U.S., especially on the right, have begun to champion ideas and policies — known as pronatalism — designed to encourage higher fertility and birth rates among Americans.

Lyman Stone, who leads the Pronatalism Initiative at the conservative-leaning Institute for Family Studies, says the U.S. needs to do more to help families prioritize children, in part by making parenting more affordable. He supports child tax credits and policies allowing parents to work from home.

Stone believes many young people would like to have more children but are struggling to achieve the milestones they believe are necessary to begin having children.

"They're not marrying in time. They're not getting a house in time," Lyman said. "They're not getting a stable job in time. So what's really happening is people are involuntarily falling short of their desired fertility."

Emma Waters, with the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, agrees it's time for a national conversation about birth rates and the choices families are making. "We're going to have more adults than we have children to replace them, and that will heavily impact things like our military readiness, GDP and economic growth in the United States."

One major concern in the U.S. will be the viability of Social Security, the nation's most important safety-net program for older adults. The ratio of young workers to elderly retirees is already dropping to levels that alarm some economists.

Some leading American conservatives argue that declining birth rates could be catastrophic. "Let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America," said Vice President Vance during a speech at the March for Life, an annual anti-abortion rally in Washington, D.C., earlier this year.

The billionaire Elon Musk, who has fathered at least 14 children, was one of the first high-profile figures to argue that declining birth rates, in the U.S. and around the world, are a threat to civilization: "People who have kids do need to have 3 kids to make up for those who have 0 or 1 kid or population will collapse," Musk wrote on X last month.

But Kantorová, Levine, Kearney and others said these "crisis" narratives about population decline are exaggerated and misleading. In most countries, demographic shifts are expected to play out over decades. Some nations, including France, have managed to stabilize declining fertility, albeit at relatively low levels.

Some progressives — as well as many population experts — also view conservative pronatalist policies, including opposition to reproductive rights and calls for a return to "traditional" family structures, as a threat to women.

"Some of these measures and policies can be deeply harmful, especially those related to sexual and reproductive health and choices and women's empowerment — and that's worrying," said the U.N.'s Kantorová.

But many of those same experts agree that declining birth rates are a real and pressing issue that should be addressed by thinkers and policymakers across the political spectrum.

"This demographic issue is poised to potentially remake so much of our society in ways that people just don't seem to be thinking about," said Kearney, the University of Notre Dame economist. "This should not be ideological."

While scientists and politicians grapple with the declining number of children, many of the couples and women interviewed by NPR said this issue is deeply personal, private and often difficult.

Ryan Holley, 37, and Annie Platt, 31, are on the fence about whether to have children.

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Annie Platt, age 31, who lives in South Carolina, said she and her husband, Ryan Holley, 37, have struggled with a choice that would redefine the rest of their lives.

"We've always kind of been on the fence like, 'Oh, it'd be cool to have kids, and this is what their names would be,'" Platt said. "Then in more recent years, it's been like more leaning towards no."

Platt and other women said they see little role for the government in trying to encourage or incentivize their choices about parenthood.

"I think it's gross," Platt told NPR. "I feel very icked out, I guess, when I hear people like JD Vance, Elon Musk, talk about their family values and, like, incentivizing having a child."

Platt added that she is suspicious of right-wing political leaders' motives. "I think they just want to use women to have babies, and maybe that would also distract the mothers, or the mothers-to-be, from pursuing other things in life, maybe other career goals," Platt said.

Ben and Sarah Brewington are comfortable with their decision to not have children but acknowledge that others may perceive their choice as selfish.

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Sarah Brewington had similar feelings: "It feels unethical to tell people to go through a grueling process because you want to have another baby in the world."

"Trusting individuals to make those decisions is kind of what it comes down to," said Ben Brewington.

Lusely Martinez, who told NPR she and her husband decided to have only one child, said she doesn't believe the U.S. will embrace the kinds of changes — from affordable housing and health care to day care and paid family leave — that families need in order to make their lives easier.

"My biggest concern is like what is the big focus on us having children when you're not necessarily focused on how the rest of the life of a person is?" Martinez said.

Lusely Martinez doesn't believe the U.S. will embrace the things that families need in order to make their lives easier.

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Activists and scientists across the political spectrum, including those who view population decline as a grave concern, agree it will be difficult and costly to create a culture and environment where Americans return to having significantly more children.

"Absent a very dedicated response, I absolutely think it is not just possible but likely that fertility rates will keep falling," said Kearney. "I'm a bit more worried about where we are than some other people, who are waiting to reach, let's say, a point of no return."

NPR producer Liz Baker contributed reporting for this story from Los Angeles.
Copyright 2025 NPR

A long-running court battle between California veterans and the Trump administration will continue, as federal officials consider asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s order to build more housing for unhoused L.A. veterans.

A federal appeals court on Thursday agreed to temporarily pause the order to construct more than 2,500 new housing units on the Veterans Affairs campus in West L.A.

Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney with Public Counsel representing the plaintiffs, told LAist the delay could spell life or death for unhoused veterans, especially as the region braces for strong El Niño-driven storms.

“These are veterans who risked their lives and suffered both the visible and invisible wounds of war,” Rosenbaum said. “What the government is saying to them is, you're supposed to stay on the street."

VA officials did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

Veterans' lawyers in a court filing called a possible appeal to the Supreme Court a “hopeless shot.”

“The government has lost every time they have taken this to court. No court has ruled for them on any of these matters,” Rosenbaum told LAist. “This is part of the administration’s war on its own veterans, and it’s time for that war to come to an end.”

Could long-running case end up at the Supreme Court?

The litigation was initiated in 2023 by L.A. veterans struggling with homelessness. The case has centered on the 400-acre V.A. campus, which U.S. District Judge David O. Carter has ruled should offer more housing to the approximately 2,250 veterans experiencing homelessness in L.A. County.

In 2024, Carter ordered officials to add thousands of temporary and permanent homes, and end leases with UCLA, a private K-12 school and an oil drilling company, which he said did not serve the needs of veterans.

An appeals court last month blocked the federal government’s efforts to halt the housing construction. But veteran advocates knew that federal officials could ask for further delays as the case winds through the courts.

VA officials now have until Dec. 10 to decide whether to appeal their fight to the Supreme Court. Judges with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals told lawyers for the federal government that if they do not decide to appeal by Dec. 10, “the stay will be lifted immediately.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District shortened the application window for specialized academic programs this year, and will no longer accept paper forms.

Applications for the district’s magnet, dual language and affiliated charter schools for the next academic year opened Oct. 1 and are due Nov. 6, 2026.

How does it work?

If you want your child to attend their neighborhood school, enrollment is fairly straightforward. There’s a separate process for the district’s specialized programs called Choices.

There are two windows to apply — on-time and late. The latter consists of all the spaces left after families who applied on time accept their offers.

Here’s the timeline for the 2027-28 school year:

• Sept. 2026: School fairs start.
• Oct. 1, 2026: Choices application opens.
• Nov. 6, 2026:  Deadline to apply online.
• Dec. 1, 2026:  Late applications begin. 
• February 2027: On-time applicant results sent. 
• March 5, 2027: Deadline to accept or decline school offers for on-time applicants. School assignments for late applications follow the processing of on-time applications. Students may be offered a spot through the start of the spring semester. 
• Aug. 12, 2027: The school year begins.

LAUSD will no longer accept paper Choices applications. If families do not have a computer, they can use a smartphone to complete an application. LAUSD will also allow families to use computers at school parent centers.

How to prepare

Every child within LAUSD boundaries is assigned a school — find yours through the district’s “resident school identifier.”

But there are also hundreds of other programs available through the Choices process.

Those include:

• Magnets: Programs on a specific theme, such as science, math, language, advanced studies or art. These programs were originally established to integrate segregated schools and have a unique “points” system to prioritize applications. 
• Dual language or immersion: Students learn in English and in a second language such as Spanish, Mandarin, Korean or Armenian. 
• Affiliated charter schools: District-run schools with more freedom to try different types of teaching or other programs. 

No one type of school is inherently better than another, and no one metric defines a great school — there are many factors beyond test scores to consider, and we go over some of those here.

By far the most frequent piece of advice we’ve heard is to go on an in-person school tour if possible.

“The very best thing that people can do is go to the school and try to watch the way that educators interact with students, the way that students interact with each other, and the way that families are included or not in the life of a school,” said Jack Schneider, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, education researcher and parent. “Once you do that, you really get a sense of what kind of place kids are going to school.”

Some schools post tour information online, but you may need to call for details.

LAUSD also hosts fairs, organized by geographic region, where multiple schools table and share information about their programs, through mid-October.

The Justice Department found Thursday that the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, illegally considered race in admissions.

The announcement follows a similar finding against the university’s medical school and comes as President Donald Trump’s administration ramps up scrutiny of colleges’ processes for selecting students. The administration also has accused the UC Berkeley Law School and the medical school at the University of California, San Diego, of illegally discriminating against white and Asian applicants.

The UCLA School of Law said in a statement that it was committed to making admissions decisions in compliance with all applicable laws.

“Students are admitted through a comprehensive, merit-based review process that considers each applicant’s achievements and experiences,” the statement said. “We are confident in our process.”

Affirmative action in college admissions has been illegal since a 2023 Supreme Court ruling forbade it. The same ruling said colleges could continue to assess how applicants’ backgrounds might speak to broader characteristics, but Trump has accused colleges of using applicants’ personal statements and other proxies to consider race in admissions — which conservatives view as illegal discrimination.

The Justice Department’s investigation found UCLA’s law school discriminated against white and Asian American students by favoring Black and Hispanic applicants in its 2023, 2024 and 2025 incoming classes. Its analysis found the mean LSAT score was lower for admitted Black applicants than for admitted white applicants.

The department also said admissions staff at the law school instructed applicants during recruitment efforts, including one called the “Diversity Admissions Open House,” how to reveal their race in essays.

“Like many of its peer institutions, UCLA Law School runs a two-tiered admissions system whose academic bar for acceptance shifts up or down depending on the color of your skin,” said Harmeet Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, in a news release.

California voters ended affirmative action in college admissions in a 1997 ballot measure. In a brief filed in the Supreme Court case, the UC system said the change led to a precipitous drop in underrepresented minorities, especially at the system’s most selective campuses. The brief said UC went on to implement a range of race-neutral measures to increase diversity.

The Trump administration also has sued over the main UCLA campus’s response to allegations of antisemitic harassment. The administration’s latest finding sets the stage for a voluntary resolution to bring UCLA into compliance with the Justice Department’s legal interpretation or, if none can be reached, potential legal action.

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Artist Hedy Torres asked a 20-something student from Cal State Northridge to sit for a portrait nearly a decade ago. Using charcoal on paper, she drew the dark-haired young man in black and white — but she deliberately kept the portrait unfinished.

The idea was that she would complete the piece if her subject, a DACA recipient named Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas, ever attained lawful permanent residency.

And now he has.

DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is a program that provides two-year work permits and deportation relief for people who were brought to the U.S. as children. The permits can be renewed, but the program does not grant a pathway to citizenship. 

In late September, Pérez Cuevas — who is now married, a father, a green card holder and an adjunct instructor at his alma mater — sat with Torres once again.

Torres’ project involves interviewing subjects as she sketches them. This year, she invited the public to watch her complete the portrait as she spoke to Pérez Cuevas about what it took for him to get a green card and what that means for his life.

About two dozen people gathered at a community center in West Hollywood’s Plummer Park to see her add details to the piece that speak to the passing of time.

“I just wanted to make people empathetic to what [immigrants] go through during this process,” she said. “You have to be very patient. There is a lot of uncertainty.”

Responding to the potential loss of relief

Pérez Cuevas, who was born in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, was brought to the U.S. by his parents when he was 2.

When Torres drew him in 2017, he was pursuing a master’s degree in kinesiology at Cal State Northridge. That year, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced intentions to rescind DACA, which had enabled him to set goals without the fear of being deported. A 2020 Supreme Court decision allowed the program to continue.

Torres was once undocumented herself, so she understood the 2017 announcement was earth-shattering for the approximately 800,000 people who were then in the program, she said.

The original, unfinished portrait of Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas.

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That year, Torres was also a student at CSUN, working toward a master’s in fine art.

She recalled recently that she wanted people to see DACA recipients as people, not numbers. And so, for her master's project, she proposed creating portraits of DACA beneficiaries.

The portraits would be rooted in interviews conducted as she drew her subjects. Leaving them unfinished, she said, would symbolize the precarity of the moment.

The pieces would have enough detail for viewers to see the subjects’ faces clearly, particularly their eyes and expressions. Other elements, including their bodies and clothing, would be more of an initial sketch.

The university greenlit her project and gave her a grant to pursue it. There was just one problem: Torres had to convince reticent DACA recipients to share their stories.

Building trust 

When Torres first messaged Pérez Cuevas about the project, he ignored her for two weeks, he said. But because they had a mutual friend, he eventually agreed to meet with her.

“I was trying to see whether this person was just an academic trying to complete a project for her own benefit, or whether she really cared about the community,” he told LAist.

They met at a coffee shop. Pérez Cuevas learned about the artist’s journey from the Mexican state of Colima and everything she’d lived through since.

Before 2015, for example, an undocumented person in California could not get a driver’s license. When she was undocumented, Torres was stopped by police and had her car impounded. She said she had to cobble together thousands of dollars to get her car back from a tow yard.

Pérez Cuevas could relate. He had experienced the same thing.

He decided to trust her.

After she drew him, Pérez Cuevas helped Torres connect with more DACA recipients at the university. She drew four other portraits, which were also left unfinished.

These works were acquired by the university, with the agreement that Torres would be able to borrow and complete them when — and if — her subjects attained lawful permanent residency.

Community members watch Artist Hedy Torres update the portrait at Plummer Park in West Hollywood.

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‘A sense of freedom’  

As she worked on the portrait, Torres added soft lines rendered in charcoal to the image of Pérez Cuevas’ face, along with a robust mustache. And she continued the interview.

“What did you imagine your life would be like when you were young?” Torres asked.

Thinking back to high school, Pérez Cuevas said he realized then that not having a social security number barred him from decent-paying work.

“I didn't really understand what I was doing with my life,” he said, adding that he used to not think higher education was for him even while he was at CSUN. “My state of mind was really dark back then.”

He credited a college counselor with helping him navigate school. He earned his degree in 2017.

Pérez Cuevas said he has intimate knowledge of what it’s like to live with constant uncertainty: not knowing how he would pay for college because he did not qualify for federal financial aid; not being able to travel outside the country; and waiting anxiously for federal officials to make decisions on immigration laws that could transform his life.

“I can't stress enough how difficult it is psychologically to wait because it's something that can revolutionize your life,” he said. “You're betting your whole life on this approval and just that suspense of waiting, waiting, waiting, living with that anxiety.”

Torres completed her portrait of Pérez Cuevas in September 2026. Four other portraits remain unfinished.

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U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services continues to process renewal requests for existing DACA recipients, but the agency is no longer approving first-time applications.

Under the second Trump administration, DACA recipients are also experiencing significant delays with renewals. Some have lost their jobs. Recipients have been deported. According to the agency, the median processing time for DACA renewals was one month in 2023. Currently, it’s taking seven months to process most cases.

Pérez Cuevas said he was able to adjust his immigration status after marrying a U.S. citizen and consulting with an attorney. His lawyer helped him secure a document that allowed noncitizens to travel abroad and seek legal re-entry.

“Did getting permanent residency give you a sense of freedom, a freedom you probably didn't have when you were under DACA?” Torres asked him.

“Absolutely,” Pérez Cuevas said. “The biggest freedom was psychological freedom. You have this weight that you've been carrying all these years that finally just gets thrown off your shoulders.”

One of the things he feared most was long-term separation from his parents, he said.

When his mother and father migrated to the U.S., they did not see their own parents — his grandparents — for 40 years, Pérez Cuevas added. After his parents moved back to Mexico during the pandemic, he feared they would also go decades without seeing each other.

But having a green card enables him to travel and see his family.

Pérez Cuevas told Torres that, paradoxically, the threat of losing DACA made him “weirdly ambitious."

He said he doubled down on his studies and took on every internship he could. He figured that if the U.S. decided to deport him, he’d still have his education and work experience.

“Even on the days where I didn't necessarily have the greatest energy or the greatest state of mind, I showed up for myself,” Pérez Cuevas said.