Fertility is one of the main topics discussed when talking about the demographics of the United States. The US economy plays a rather large role in the patterns of rise and fall of the country's fertility rate. In many past cases of economic hardship in the country, fertility levels had declined. One of the main reasons is that, in times of financial difficulty, men and women are less likely to want to have children. Being able to support a family is already a difficult task, but when people are laid off from jobs, unemployment rates rise and the economy is struggling, many people can barely afford to buy the basic necessities for themselves and for the entire family. A prolonged decline in fertility levels could have extremely negative effects on the country's demographics. Lower fertility rates mean fewer child births, which in turn diminishes the younger population while the aging population slowly increases. This is one of the main problems related to low fertility because it does not uniformly decrease the country's population. I found a couple of previous newspaper articles to support my thesis. The first article I found from WND Faith is titled “Birth Rate Poses Looming Economic Cloud.” According to the article, China's one-child policy has negatively affected the country's economy and created a shortage of workers. The author of the article, Leslie Fain, states that “Prediction has now emerged that the US economy may be under stress in the future – due to the lack of children.” The same things that happen in other countries, like China, could easily happen here in the United States if our fertility rates continue to decline for an extended period of time. The second article I found was from the New York...... middle paper ......ensus of the Bureau. I could use census data to further prove my point about the country's fertility rates. I could also look at immigration records and look at the fertility rates of immigrants coming to the United States and how these numbers are affected by the economy and how they also affect the demographics of the country. If I were to conduct a survey, I would choose a random sample of people of childbearing age (ages 19 to 39) and ask them a few questions. For example: are they single or married/divorced? What is their annual income? What is the partner's annual income? Do they have children and if so how many? Are they thinking of having more children? Why or why not? I think this type of survey would give me a little more personal perspective on some people's feelings about having children based on their income.