March

Main page listing all the articles / presentations at the 2025 Council on Contemporary Families Symposium.

Immigration. Abortion. Anti-Trans laws. Student debt. Reversing the falling fertility rate. All these topics have been the subject of intense debates in the past several years, and some have been the subject of executive orders and new actions by the Trump administration in his first 50 days in office. In this symposium, the Council on Contemporary Families brings together leading experts on these topics to discuss how these policies affect families, and what to expect in the second Trump administration.

Birth outcomes are strongly linked to income but proving a direct cause-and-effect relationship has been challenging. Our new study, published in Demography, uses the economic boom from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale natural gas development as a “natural experiment” to examine how community-level income gains affect pregnancy behaviors and birth outcomes.