What’s Really Behind the Baby Bust?
If you’ve followed the debate over falling birth rates in the United States, you could be forgiven for thinking that most of the fretting comes from the anti-feminist right. In recent years, Vice-President J. D. Vance has emerged as a cranky pro-natalist, deriding “childless cat ladies,” blaming “secular global liberalism” for population decline, and, in happier moments, as at an anti-abortion rally last year, declaring, “I want more babies in the United States of America” and more “beautiful young men and women” eager to make and rear them. A report from the conservative Heritage Foundation earlier this year sounded the alarm over the drop in U.S. fertility, linking it to “second-wave feminism” and other familiar culture-war culprits: “casual sex, abortion, childlessness by choice, and no-fault divorce,” all of which menaced “the natural family,” which was helmed by a heterosexual husband and wife. Many of these voices agree with the determinedly fecund Elon Musk (at least fourteen kids and counting), who has said, “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Recent polling shows that, among the growing percentage of Americans who think we should be at least somewhat worried about the birth rate, men worry more than women, and Republicans more than Democrats.
Running through this conversation is a theory about what people want. A big reason people have fewer children, the argument goes, is that they no longer want them enough. Feminism, secularism, individualism, and sexual freedom have weakened the old attachments to marriage and family. In this account, the explanation is largely cultural.
Another story about falling fertility, however, begins from almost the opposite premise: plenty of people still want children, often more than they wind up having. What has changed are the social and economic conditions people need to create the families they’d hoped to have. Housing is ruinously expensive. Child care is costly, too. Jobs are demanding and insecure. Finding a reliable partner can feel harder than ever. From this perspective, the fertility slump is a record of frustrated longing.
Anna Louie Sussman, the author of “Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty” (Dey Street), forcefully makes this second case. She is not a social conservative or a soapbox pro-natalist. The censorious baby boosters at Heritage would not be fans of the way she chose to reproduce. Sussman, a single journalist in New York, travelled to Bologna to retrieve eggs that she’d frozen there six years earlier, when she was thirty-four (egg freezing was cheaper in Europe), then flew to another European city, charged about three thousand dollars to her credit card for an embryo-transfer procedure (it would have cost about fifteen thousand dollars in the U.S.), and got pregnant. Her gay best friend, Anthony, became her daughter’s adoptive father, and his parents joined a small, devoted community of caregivers for their child.
Sussman nevertheless shares Vance and Musk’s conviction that something has gone seriously wrong when so few babies are being born. She just views the shortage as symptomatic of societal woes that conservatives have little to say about: the costs of housing, health care, and higher education; fear of a climate-changed future; feelings of precarity, immediate and anticipated; and obstacles to finding a potential co-parent. She largely attributes these phenomena to the workings of modern capitalism on our bank accounts and psyches. She is less concerned with the birth rate per se than with the experience of forgoing children. She is not, she writes, “arguing for people to have more or fewer children, or about the importance of children for economic purposes”—shoring up tax bases, saving pension systems, and the like.
