Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is raising alarms over America’s declining birth rate. He even called it an “existential crisis” tied to growing concerns about fertility and environmental health.
Speaking during a White House event on Monday, Kennedy said it is “a threat not only to our economy,” but also “to our national security.”
Kennedy said the department is currently examining whether factors including obesity, metabolic health, pesticides, endocrine disruptors, and what he described as a “toxic soup that our young women are walking around in” could be contributing to fertility issues.
According to Kennedy, the decline in fertility among women began around 2007, pointing to government data showing birth rates have generally dropped since then.
“This is an existential crisis for our country”
He also argued that men are facing a growing reproductive health problem of their own.
“In 1970, men had twice the sperm count as our teenagers do today,” Kennedy said, according to PEOPLE. “This is an existential crisis for our country.”
The health secretary has repeatedly pointed to concerns about falling sperm counts as a major factor behind the nation’s declining birth rate. His comments reference findings from a 2022 review published in the journal Human Reproductive Update, which analyzed global sperm count trends — though the study itself did not specifically mention teenagers.
Kennedy has made similar claims in previous interviews as he continues pushing the issue into the national spotlight. “We have fertility rates that are just spiraling,” Kennedy told Fox News host Jesse Watters in April 2025. “A teenager today, an American teenager, has less testosterone than a 68-year-old man.”
Trump administration proposed a new rule
At the same time, the broader scientific debate over sperm count decline remains unsettled. While multiple studies have suggested sperm counts may be falling, researchers have also cautioned that tracking long-term reproductive trends is complex and difficult to measure consistently over decades.
“The idea of a global decrease in sperm count is ‘an important hypothesis, but the data is not good [enough] to be able to draw conclusions,’” Dolores Lamb, a male reproductive health researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine, told Scientific American in 2023.
The issue has also become a growing focus for Donald Trump, who has said reversing the country’s falling birth rate will be a priority during his second term. Over the weekend, the Trump administration proposed a new rule aimed at making it easier for employers to offer fertility-related benefits.
