Published February 19, 2026
On a Thursday afternoon, on a trip to a shared workspace in Jerusalem above its central bus station, I heard something I’ve never experienced before at any WeWork: children laughing. Alongside some Yiddish-speaking employees with twisted sidelocks talking about their Sabbath plans, hipster start-up founders, and a mélange of Israeli entrepreneurs conversing in French, I was surprised to find that I had rented an office with a kids’ movie theater and a playroom. I had never seen anything like it in any office in Washington, D.C., where I usually work.
Parents wrapping up their week — the Israeli weekend runs from Friday to Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath — had brought their kids along to the office to play. I texted my wife that the adults were outnumbered by a good factor by rambunctious children. The prophet Zechariah once envisioned a Jerusalem that “shall be crowded with boys and girls playing in the squares.” I doubt he imagined they would also show up to co-working spaces.
Yet that scene was a handy illustration of an astonishing fact: Jerusalem’s total fertility rate in 2025 stood at 4.57 children per woman. That’s more than triple the rate of Washington, D.C.,and the cultural contrast is jarring. When a close friend of mine delivered at Sibley Memorial Hospital in December, which has one of the largest maternity wards in the D.C. area, a nurse flattered her by calling her a “teenage mom” — even though she was two weeks shy of her 30th birthday. The nurse explained that the median age of mothers in her ward was 36.
It is now common knowledge that Israel is the only country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to have a natural fertility rate above the replacement rate — and nearly double that of the next-highest country. More children per capita are born in Israel’s capital city than in the capital cities of most sub-Saharan African countries, such as Nigeria and Zambia.
What is less commonly understood is why.
To keep itself going, any society needs a certain number of children to be born per year. And yet a specter is haunting the world — the specter of childlessness, of sparsely populated playgrounds and schools. In Japan and South Korea, companies that once produced baby diapers have retooled to make adult diapers. Chinese baby formula companies are pivoting to selling vitamins and supplements. Market forces have a way of revealing what politicians prefer not to say out loud, and the same will happen in the United States soon.
This crisis is not coming in some distant generation. It is already here. In January, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly reported that, even assuming stabilized fertility rates in the United States, deaths will outpace births in just four years. It is an ominous milestone that other countries have already reached, permanently: Japan every year since 2007, the European Union since 2012, China since 2022. In 2025, for the first time since World War II, more people died than were born in France; the United Kingdom is poised to experience the same this year.
Israel stands alone among wealthy countries in bucking the global trend of childless cities. Completed fertility measures the total number of children born by the time a woman turns 50.A 2024 study predicted that just as the completed family size halved between 1950 and 2021, from 4.84 children per family to 2.23, by the end of this century Israel will be one of only eight countries, and the only wealthy one, to have a fertility rate above 2.0. This is also a fertility rate grounded in family formation. While the share of children born out of wedlock in Israel rose modestly to 8.6 percent of all children born in 2023, the United States’ rate stands at an astonishing 40 percent.
So why is Israel the exception?
The two most common explanations, generous family policy and a uniquely pronatalist religious culture, are insufficient. Plenty of cultures and faiths prize children. Judaism alone cannot explain why fertility in the only Jewish state is dramatically higher than Jewish fertility in other countries with much more generous family policies. Progressives, meanwhile, often point to Israel’s unusually expansive fertility benefits, including universal coverage of IVF up to age 45 and donor eggs potentially up to age 54, as well as partial coverage of surrogacy. But there is considerable evidence that such subsidies mostly delay parenthood rather than increase the total number of children that aspiring parents ultimately have.
Conservatives have their own rejoinder. Earlier this year, the Heritage Foundation released its controversial 165-page report on how to save the American family for the “next 250 years” through what it called “a culture-wide Manhattan Project.” Its policy proposals, ranging from tax breaks for married families to marriage savings accounts, would add, per Heritage’s own estimates, another $280 billion to the U.S. debt over the next decade. By contrast, adjusted for inflation, the original Manhattan Project cost only $36 billion.
The researchers at Heritage state that they traveled across many countries for their paper, and they repeatedly invoke Israel’s exceptional fertility and marriage rates as evidence that nationalism and religious observance increase fertility rates, which is why generous child benefits are necessary. Israel is mentioned dozens of times.
Both sides, however, are missing something important. And curiously, both deploy Israel mainly as a prop for policy agendas they already prefer.
Here’s what the data say: Despite Israel’s aging Baby Boomers, the total fertility rate in Israel has remained remarkably stable since the 1990s, at around 2.89 children per woman. That poses a problem for both arguments. Israel’s legalization and expansion of IVF (for what it is worth, my twin sister and I were born through IVF) led to many outcomes, among them encouraging women to delay marriage for education, but it had virtually no impact on Israel’s overall fertility rate.
On the conservative side, the case for massive subsidies fares no better. In 2003, Israel sharply cut back child allowances, particularly for large families. If cash benefits were the main driver of high fertility, one would have expected a collapse. Instead, Israel’s total fertility rate rose slightly over the next two decades before dipping modestly after 2018 — still well above replacement.
Other favored policies also fail to line up neatly with the Israeli example. Affordable homeownership? Israel has lower homeownership rates than the United States. Earlier marriage? Israelis, on average, have historically tended to marry later than Americans.
And it is not only marriage and fertility where Israel diverges from the rest of the world. Israel’s abortion rate has been steadily declining since 1988, despite a loosening of abortion eligibility rules in 2022. Its abortion rates are much lower than anywhere in Europe or in the United States, even though Israeli committees that adjudicate abortion requests rubber-stamp virtually all of them.
Israel’s low abortion rate deserves emphasis. In New Jersey, for example, in 2025 there were more than 57,500 abortions and only about 100,000 live births, indicating that roughly a third of all pregnancies were aborted, a rate similar to that of the United Kingdom and other jurisdictions with broad access to abortion on demand. In Israel, by contrast, there were 15,089 reported abortions in 2023, compared with about 179,000 live births — an abortion rate of under 8 percent of pregnancies.
Put differently: If Israel’s abortion rate matched that of New Jersey or the U.K., its fertility rate would be roughly a third lower. Its total fertility rate would fall from about 2.85 in 2023 to something closer to 2.0 — still higher than any other OECD country, but slightly below replacement at 2.1.
So what actually explains Israel’s exception? The answer is less glamorous than sweeping policy blueprints and more demanding than onetime subsidies: It is culture, transmitted through social networks and reinforced by everyday norms. The choice to be married, to have children, and not to choose abortion are all tied together.
A 2024 paper by the Taub Center, an Israeli think tank, found that Israel’s high fertility rates are strongly shaped by geographic and sociocultural norms — both the norms of one’s neighbors and the norms of one’s age cohort and ethno-religious group nationwide.
The results were significant and striking. An increase of one percentage point in the marriage rate in a person’s geographic area is associated with an increase of roughly half a percentage point in that individual’s likelihood of getting married. A similar increase in the marriage rate of one’s sociocultural peer group raises the individual probability by about four-tenths of a percentage point. In plain English: Move to a place where more people marry, or spend time in a peer group where marriage is common, and there is a strong correlation with your being more likely to get married.
The effects on children are even stronger. Each additional child in the average family of a person’s social network is associated with nearly one additional child — 0.9 — for that individual. In the spatial network, the effect is smaller but still substantial, at about 0.25 children. These patterns hold across different groups in Israel, though in different ways. Haredi Jews (the ultra-Orthodox), who are socially insulated, are little affected by the behavior of neighbors outside their community but strongly shaped by norms within it. Among non-Haredi Jews, who make up the majority of Israeli society, fertility and marriage behavior are more sensitive to sociocultural peer groups than to immediate neighbors. For Arab Israelis, it’s the reverse, perhaps reflecting minority dynamics in a broader national culture.
None of this should surprise us. A long list of academic studies shows that marriage and fertility are powerfully influenced by social networks. People copy what they see around them. Norms spread. Expectations, whether from friends, family, peers, co-workers, or neighbors, become self-fulfilling.
Marriage and having babies are contagious. I know this from experience. My close friend, the “teenage mom” who elated the nurses at Sibley Hospital, gave birth to a beautiful baby girl in December. My wife and I are expecting one of our own.
This is the part of the story that policy debates usually evade. Governments can move money around, tweak tax codes, and subsidize procedures. What they cannot easily manufacture is a culture in which marriage is normal, children are expected, and abortion is rare, even when it is legal.
Israel did not get where it is by discovering a secret line item in the budget. It got there because large, overlapping communities still treat family formation as the default life path, not as an eccentric lifestyle choice. People grow up assuming they will marry. They grow up assuming they will have children. They see it modeled by friends, siblings, neighbors, and co-workers. And then most of the time they do it themselves.
That is why Israel’s fertility has proven so stubbornly resistant to both subsidy cuts and cultural globalization. And it is why no single policy memo, left or right, can replicate it on command.
If you want to fix the fertility rate, the prescription is almost offensively simple and personally demanding: Get married. Have children. Don’t treat either as optional lifestyle accessories. Do it visibly. Do it in community. Your friends and neighbors will notice — and some of them will follow suit.
That is how cultures change. And that, more than any tax credit, is how societies survive.
Alexander Raikin is a Visiting Fellow in the Bioethics, Technology and Human Flourishing Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His research focuses on the dignity of human life and end-of-life issues, especially on its impact on the field of medicine and broader ethical questions of social belonging.
