Dr Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump’s administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, has claimed the U.S. is facing a fertility crisis because “one in three Americans are under-babied.”
Speaking at an Oval Office event Monday to mark the launch of moms.gov, a government website for expectant mothers, the former TV physician encouraged U.S. citizens to have more children.
“So, let me speak a little bit about the reality that one in three Americans are under-babied,” Dr Oz said.
“What does under-babied mean?” he asked. “That means that you either don’t have any children or you have less children than you would normally want to have.
“We have a crisis that’s causing our fertility rate to drop below 1.5. Replacement rate is 2.1. So, we’re way below what we need just to even replace the people that we have in America.
“And one of the challenges is that rural America, where there’s 60 million people, has a maternal mortality rate, when they have babies, that’s about 30 percent higher than if you live in an urban area.”
According to the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the U.S. fertility rate did indeed hit a record low in 2024, with the number of infants born to women aged between 15 and 44 falling below the replacement rate to just 1.6.
However, the school also pointed out that the birth rate is still higher than the number of deaths, meaning the population is not in decline, and that the downtrend is a global one and not exclusive to the U.S.
Dr Oz went on to praise Trump in the Oval Office for “saving Medicaid,” despite his administration making severe cuts to the program last year, which looks likely to hit the same rural America invoked by the doctor hardest of all.
He claimed that $50 billion is being invested in rural healthcare, saying the money is “being used for incredibly beneficial advances to help Americans living in rural America have babies safely.
“Your zip code should not determine your mortality rate if you’re having a baby. That is gonna change.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has also previously warned against the declining fertility rate, making the highly dubious claim in October that American teenagers now have less sperm and testosterone than 65-year-old men.
Dr Oz spoke at the same event at which RFK Jr made that declaration, again praising the president by predicting there would be “a lot of Trump babies” as a result of his IVF treatment reforms after years of America being “under-babied.”
“The fundamental creative force in society is about making babies,” he said.
Trump himself raised eyebrows at Monday’s gathering by suggesting that “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a spoof condition with which he has diagnosed some of his most feverish media opponents, is in fact a real ailment.
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