On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data on fertility trends from 1990 to 2023, showing that the birthrate declined slightly in 2023 to 1.62 from 1.66 in 2022. The demographer Jennifer Sciubba summarized the statistics in her newsletter, noting that overall, fertility has declined 22 percent since 1990 in the United States but that “the real decline is much more recent, taking a turn around 2007, just before the Great Recession.”
The biggest drop in fertility is among teenagers, Sciubba writes, and the birthrate among women over 30 has increased, with a particular surge in births among women over 40. Sciubba predicts that the birthrate overall will plateau, continuing to hover between 1.55 and 1.7 for the next decade.
Being below replacement birthrate presents economic challenges, including to Social Security, though this may not yet be cause for immediate alarm. I don’t know how you can argue that fewer teenage parents is a bad thing, since very few teenagers are emotionally or financially equipped to raise children.
I’m not worried that the United States is going to become South Korea. That country, which has the world’s lowest birthrate at 0.75, is the subject of a recent article by The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who does a good job describing what a truly anti-natal society looks like. A 20-something South Korean woman tells him: “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.”
Governmental and societal pressure has not really worked to increase the birthrate in South Korea. It’s a society that enforces traditional gender roles and that blames feminists and working women for the decline in fertility. “The insinuation that women are at fault for the demographic crisis has turned gender friction into gender war,” Lewis-Kraus writes, with women swearing off men entirely with the 4B movement rather than become tradwives.
In the United States, we see our own very muted version of this dynamic playing out. Religious conservatives slam “childless cat ladies,” and in return, some liberal young women are going “boy sober.” Again, I do not predict that this is going to greatly affect the birthrate in the near term; the United States is a much more gender-progressive and diverse country than South Korea is.
But I also wonder, if we did less shaming of child-free people, could we create a more pro-child culture? This seems counterintuitive, but when people feel judged or coerced, they’re more likely to dig in their heels. When name calling starts, it’s easy to see it devolve — the flip side of childless cat ladies is parasite moms. It is notable, of course, that the criticism around low birthrates is targeted at women; though men are involved, they’re never the ones insulted.
Right now, the framing of the discussion is very us (parents, moral exemplars maintaining civilization) versus them (nonparents, decadent and empty). Even The New Yorker’s Lewis-Kraus, who otherwise presents a pretty balanced picture, falls into the trap of suggesting that the child-free are frivolous. He writes, “we should be able to acknowledge that there is something slightly discomforting about a worldview that weighs children against expensive dinners or vacations to Venice — as matters of mere preference in a logic of consumption.”
This is a straw man fallacy. Many people who don’t have kids aren’t weighing the financial cost of children against expensive meals and trips; we just had an entire election that hinged on inflation and the cost of basics, like eggs and housing. I think the average person is far more worried about being able to retire or falling into financially ruinous medical debt than they are concerned about being able to go to Italy regularly.
Having children should not be a moral issue; it’s intensely personal but also circumstantial. I’m not a miraculously better person because I have kids. At the same time, in the United States we make parenting so much more difficult than it needs to be because we don’t have basic safety nets like universal health care and paid parental leave. We do not tend to support parents beyond lip service.
I do think that it matters to be a pro-child culture because I have the radical idea that children are people and they deserve a cultural and political environment that supports their well-being. I also think if our birthrate continues to slide closer to South Korea’s levels, that would be cause for real concern.
Claudia Goldin, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, has a good idea about how to potentially increase, or at least stabilize, the birthrate in the United States. In a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published in December, she explains that countries like South Korea that have “the lowest low” fertility rates became this way because they experienced rapid economic growth before society’s gender roles could catch up. It created a mismatch where men still expected very traditional families but economically empowered women said no thanks. Places like the United States, Denmark, Sweden, Britain and France had more gradual and consistent economic growth, and gender norms had more time to evolve.
Men want more children than women do, Goldin argues, because women know that the more children they have, the more financially vulnerable they are. “But if fathers and husbands can credibly commit to providing the time and the resources, the difference in the fertility desires between the genders would disappear.”
Ball is in your court, fellas.
Can’t pronatalists be normal? Something I think about a lot, but don’t have a good solution to, is how to make a secular pro-family agenda. Religious conservatives have cornered the market on pronatalism in the public sphere, because their message is so simple: babies = good; no babies = bad. The idea that we should support people who want to have kids and make it easier to have them, while also not demonizing or shaming people who don’t want kids, does not fit on a bumper sticker.
Also, the pronatalist movement keeps really unseemly company, as this Guardian article from March 3 points out:
A natalist conference featuring speakers including self-described eugenicists and promoters of race science, apparently including the man behind a previously pseudonymous race-science influencer account and the founder of a startup offering I.Q. screening for I.V.F. embryos, will be held at a hotel and conference venue operated by the public University of Texas, Austin.
Yikes! The arch-conservative Heritage Foundation’s solution to the birthrate crisis is discouraging higher education while empowering and funding religious K-12 schools. That’s definitely not part of my vision of a good future for America’s children.
“The Mother Lode.” The most thoughtful meditation on having children I have witnessed in a long time comes from the comedian Rosebud Baker. I mentioned her in my newsletter in 2022 because I loved the way she documented her I.V.F. experience on her Instagram and because she managed to pull off the impossible: She made a miscarriage joke that worked. She has new special on Netflix called “The Mother Lode,” half of which was filmed while she was pregnant, and the other half after her baby girl was born. Most important, it’s incredibly funny. But it also considers the role of children in a modern woman’s life in a way that feels more honest than anything I have seen in ages.