Maggie, the increase in the number of unmarried births may not be something to celebrate but nor, necessarily, is the increase in the fertility rate. There’s a lot to be said for maintaining the sense (and reality) of space that is one of America’s delights. The idea that a falling population (and the resulting change in a country’s age distribution) is always a problem is one of the more pernicious of modern myths. Notably, it has played no small part in the disastrous decision by so many EU nations to encourage mass immigration, when what they should have been doing was encouraging increased economic productivity or, in other words, making the best possible use of the people they already had.