‘The De Los Podcast’: Latinos carry the U.S. birth rate. But can we talk about family planning?

In August, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also known as AOC, began documenting her decision to freeze her eggs on Instagram. Egg freezing is a process in which unfertilized egg cells are extracted, frozen and stored to preserve fertility, which has become more popular among women who want to have children later in life.

Her social media posts opened up a national conversation around women’s reproductive care — and revealed lingering taboos among Americans, and more specifically the Latino community, surrounding sex and family planning.

“It’s a good thing that AOC is talking about this,” said De Los editor Suzy Exposito. “Family planning [is] not just about preventing pregnancy, but about exercising the choice to have a child when you want, if you want it.”

On the latest episode of “The De Los Podcast,” hosts Fidel Martinez and Suzy Exposito unpack the falling national birth rate, sexual education among Latinos and what informs their thoughts on having kids in the 21st century.

“As someone whose job is to capture and report on how we, as a demographic of 70 million people, are changing, I think we are in a period now where Latinos are redefining who we are,” said Martinez, director of Latino Initiatives at the L.A. Times.

Latinos are stereotypically known as a “pro-family” community, as Martinez points out, and are leading the American birth rate when compared with other racial and ethnic groups. According to the CDC and Pew Research Center, 32% of infants born in the United States in 2024 had a Hispanic mother or father, while Latinos made up about 20% of the U.S. population that year.

Meanwhile, Latin America is seeing a decline in birth rates; from having 5.8 children per woman in 1950 to dropping to 1.8 in 2025, per Pew Research Center. The same study mentioned that each country would need about 2.1 children per woman to maintain population growth.

“My mom is one of 11, so there is some historical truth to [us] having large families,” Martinez said. “But in recent years, the fertility rate in Latin America has declined significantly. If people say that Latinos having lots of children is a cultural thing, what’s happening in Latin America now [counters] that.”

As Exposito and Martinez point out, there is a clear lack of education around sex in Latino communities. This extends to gendered expectations surrounding family planning and reproduction, which put the responsibility on women to manage.

“A study published in the National Library of Medicine determined that Latino parents are less likely to talk to their kids about sex education,” Exposito said. “In my family, my sister and I got the [sex] talk; my brothers didn’t.”

Exposito and Martinez also discuss their differing realities in this regard; Exposito as a child-free queer woman, Martinez as a married father who welcomed his first child at 40. Their stories reveal the range of experiences among millennials and Gen Z in the U.S. who, as data shows, are no longer planning for large families as previous generations did.

“De Los” hosts cite a strained economy and access to reproductive healthcare — though it is being increasingly restricted in the U.S. — as factors in declining birth rates.

“Many of us are the first [in our families] to go to college, first to own homes ... first this, first that, right?” Martinez said. “And I think being intentional with when you [start] a family is something that traditionally has not really been available to us within our communities.”

“I don’t think it’s just Latinos,” Exposito added. “I think a really common thread is just a fear of having those conversations ... family planning is something we need to be talking about more.”