The Fertility Crisis and Its Political/Intellectual Roots

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Jul 24

[Editor’s Note: We aspire to have “The Forum” a place where controversial and emotional issues are handled with care, but not with kid gloves. The ideas, beliefs, and opinions expressed in our essays are those of the author, and publication does not imply editorial agreement. The question of birth-rates is in many ways the most consequential issue in society and politics today and, given the combination of how personal and how complicated the issue is, bound to generate strong emotions. We invite readers to weigh in on this important topic.]

The decline in fertility throughout the developed world is a widely noted problem: both in the U.S. and most of the developed world, the rate of reproduction is well short of what would be required to sustain our population at existing levels. As political scientist Darel Paul reported in the May issue of the journal First Things, while the U.S. total fertility rate was above the 2.1 per woman replacement level as recently as 2007, it is now just 1.62 children per woman over a lifetime. But the decline in fertility over the past 15 to 20 years in the United States and France of 20 percent is substantially exceeded by declines of 30 percent in Sweden and Finland, 40 percent in Argentina and Chile, and 50 percent in South Korea.

The fact of this decline alone poses such upcoming societal problems as an aging population, with fewer workers available to support the elderly; a declining supply of potential members of the armed forces to defend the country; and a potential decline in the innovativeness that comes with youth. (The population decrease in this country has been partly buffered owing to increasing illegal immigration over the past decade, which of course has generated its own widely debated social and political problems along with benefits. Aside from budgetary problems arising from having to support an unprecedented wave of some 10 million largely poor immigrants arriving during the Biden years, the question must be faced of how easy it will be to assimilate such immigrants into American mores including patriotic respect for the Constitution and laws, and – given the widespread availability of government support that didn’t exist for previous generations of arrivals – a spirit of self-reliance rather than dependency.)

To its credit, the Trump administration has recognized the problem of population decline, and weighed proposals on how to address it from a wide variety of pro-natalist groups. The result is that the just-enacted “Big Beautiful Bill” included such “carrots” as an increase in the child tax credit from $2,000 to $2,200, with the figure being indexed for future inflation; and a provision comparable to IRA’s allowing a child’s parents, relatives, and others to contribute up to $5,000 tax-free annually to accounts designed to help save for the child’s future needs for education, homeownership, and “entrepreneurship,” with the government contributing $1,000 in “seed money” to the accounts for all children born between 2025 and 2028. Less plausible proposals from Federal officials have included “educating” women on their menstrual cycles so as to determine when they are ovulating (is such knowledge really lacking?), to “prioritiz[ing] transportation in areas with higher than average birth and marriage rates,” to HEW Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s promise to discover the “toxins in our environment and food supply” that are supposedly causing a declining birthrate. (How would Kennedy explain the much higher declines in other developed countries?) Finally, in May Trump aides promised to issue a report on ways “to make in vitro fertilization more readily available and affordable.”

Social analysts outside the Trump circle have proposed such means of promoting “natalism” as more heavily subsidized child care. And others have attributed the declining birth rate to the increasing cost of goods and housing. Yet higher subsidies for child care have not been found to promote birth rates in the model “social democracies” of Scandinavia. Nor does the increased cost of goods like housing – leaving less room for children - seem to explain the decline, since the average size of housing in the U.S. is substantially greater than it was a half-century ago when fertility rates were higher. Additionally, note that most of the benefit of the tax-free savings accounts will go to those already well-off and presumably best equipped to afford the costs of parenting anyway: on top of the real costs of childrearing, how many parents, let alone friends and relatives, will be in a position to set aside close to $5,000 a year not only for higher education (as many already do) but for future homeownership, let alone “entrepreneurship”? Finally, since the Administration is reportedly still considering proposals for increasing the tax credit for child care, bear in mind that such credits have the effect of benefiting mothers who work full-time while their children are young over those who choose to work only part time, or not at all, so as to devote themselves to mothering (especially if they have several children). Is it a desirable social policy to further tax the latter for the sake of the former?

In any event, what most of the newly adopted tax provisions (adopted or proposed) ignore is the evidence that declining fertility seem to reflect a declining desire to have children, or at least more than one or two children. Surveys both in the U.S. and abroad report various reasons for this change, from a belief that population needs to decline in order to reduce global warming (so that it would be irresponsible to add to the problem), to an express wish to be free of the burdens of childrearing (economic and otherwise), in favor of greater leisure and funds for travel and entertainment; to an elevation of career success as a goal in life compared to the rewards of parenthood. (Another unfortunate factor is the inability of successful career women to find male partners of comparable education and success; to address the causes of that problem would require another column.)

Surveys show that many women who forego childbearing will regret it later on. But I want to focus particularly here on two curious or problematic responses to the situation from those who do not try to deter childbearing. First is the argument of the much-discussed 2024 book What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice, by two editors, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, one of them also a philosophy professor, and one of whom is a mother of two, while the other is expecting her first child, which aims not to persuade women to have children, but only to refute two commonly heard "anti-natalist" arguments, one of which is that "the world [as it now is] is too terrible for children"; the other of which is that "human beings are too terrible to exist, period." To their credit, the authors refute these arguments, which in the present writer's view embody a deeply distorted view of life.

But the authors' position was made more controversial following its juxtaposition with the notorious, shameful denunciation by (then) vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance during the 2024 election campaign of childless women – apparently, all childless women - as "cat ladies," worthy of societal contempt. In an appearance on the Megyn Kelly Show, Vance wrongly depicted the authors as "leftists" and "liberals" who "chastised their own side for the reluctance to have children." Dogmatically, the future veep asserted that "what brings the most meaning to life is family, .... not all those weird little accomplishments and degrees" (though Vance and his wife are both graduates of Yale Law School). The authors of What Are Children For?, who indeed identify as political liberals or progressives, hastened to explain that Vance had distorted their arguments. They were not maintaining that all women were morally obliged to become parents - only trying to liberate educated women who did choose parenthood from the sense of embarrassment many now report at having that fact noticed by their peers, as a kind of betrayal of their duty to feminism if not to saving the world. (In a journal article co-edited by one of the authors, an issue of which had the same title as what became their book, a University of Chicago philosophy professor who was a mother of three and later organized a symposium on natalism reported that when she unexpectedly found herself expectant with a fourth, she actually asked "a conference group of philosophers" whether she ought to have an abortion, presumably with a view to finding out whether she had a moral right to do so).

While social conservatives often attribute the decline in childbearing to declining marriage rates, in his essay “Feminism against Fertility,” Darel Paul plausibly argues that the roots of the decline lie deeper, in a “retreat from lifelong, socially binding care relationships,” including not only marriage and parenthood, but even in long-term cohabitation. As he remarks, “[a]cross the globe, rich democracies are pioneering a society such as was never seen before … in which women’s lives are no longer ordered toward care.” Over the past ten to fifteen years, he notes, “the percentage of American women under thirty who had ever formed a union” of either marriage or cohabitation “dropped markedly from the late 2000s, to the late 2010s,” while even “for women in their thirties the rate remained flat,” with cohabitation “less and less likely to turn into marriage.” A 2023 Pew poll reported that “only 26 percent of Americans regarded having children as extremely or very important to ‘living a fulfilling life.’” Perhaps most significantly, the Pew poll found that “childless women aged eighteen to thirty-four were 12 percent less likely than childless men of the same age to say that they want to be parents someday.”

It is that gap between the sexes that justifies Paul’s title. As he observes, the enthusiasm that groups of young American women expressed, following the Trump election, for South Korea’s radical-feminist “4B” movement (comprising a vow to avoid the for “Noes” of dating, sex, marriage, and childbearing) reflects a “profound cultural funk” of “heteropessimism,” now “common among the rich democracies,” a “malaise” in which women express “regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness” about “sexual-romantic relationships with men.” (It can be argued that Donald Trump’s behavior, with its combination of boastfulness and crudity, might tend to encourage that feeling. But fortunately, most men are neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden – just as most women aren’t Kamala Harris.)

Writing as a retired professor of political philosophy who has enjoyed the great good fortune of having the company of three remarkable women (one wife, two daughters) who have achieved admirable professional success in careers that benefit the public, but who have also provided me with six highly impressive grandkids (three of each sex) whose well-being always came first to their parents (now watching them move from teenagerhood to college), I feel deeply sorry for the young women Paul describes. I see in that development the consequence of two unfortunate modern trends. The first, identified by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the late eighteenth century, is the outlook of the “bourgeois,” whom he defines as the person who foregoes the natural pleasures of life – among which lasting marital love and parenthood are surely among the foremost – for the purely artificial pleasure of attaining goods (wealth, social status) whose value lies chiefly if not solely in winning the admiration (or envy) of other human beings. (When teaching Rousseau’s Second Discourse, I used to cite as an example the woman who, not being in financial need, nonetheless gives birth only to race back as soon as possible to her job as Vice President for Media Relations in some corporation or other, leaving her very young child in the hands of a nanny or day care employees. Later in life, will rising as high and as quickly in the corporate hierarchy possibly have left most such women with more satisfaction than if they had cut back to part-time work for a while until their kids were at least ready for kindergarten? And as women and men age, will success in the corporate, governmental, or nonprofit hierarchy typically provide as much satisfaction, to say nothing of support, if they have done without children entirely?)

The other, more recent trend, documented by the authors of What Are Children For? as well as by Paul, is a sense with which young women have been inculcated, on social media, on television, and especially in high school and college, that they are engaged in a struggle for supremacy with men, such that no relationship in which a man doesn’t commit to doing (at least) half of the housework, and otherwise facilitate his wife’s career at least as much as his own, is worth pursuing. It is certainly fair and just that women have been liberated, especially since the mid-20th century, to pursue vocations with as much legal freedom and opportunity as men traditionally enjoyed. (Bear in mind, however, that it was only by the beginning of that century, and then only in the most economically developed nations, that enough societal wealth existed that many men had the freedom to choose satisfying careers, with more leisure than peasants or the urban proletariat had enjoyed.) But it will probably always be the case that men will feel a stronger urge to be breadwinners, and enjoy public success, and parental care be more commonly associated with motherhood, at least in most people’s minds.

If this latter observation is correct, women will face a choice: is having a family more important to me than achieving “victory” in the battle of the sexes? Doubtless, some women, dedicated to meaningful careers that matter most to them, will choose to avoid having children or even marrying. Neither Paul nor the authors of What Are Children For? would deny them the legitimacy of that choice. But in the end, considering the anti-natalist arguments with which young women (and men) are now being confronted, as Berg and Wiseman argued in a New York Times essay, “The question of children ultimately transcends politics … Is life, however imperfect and however challenging-however fraught with political disagreement and disaster-worth living?”

The ostensibly “moral” arguments against childbearing – whether from the perspective of militant feminism, or that of rejecting the very existence of human beings on this earth – amount to sheer nihilism. Purely economic or institutional responses will not suffice to refute them. But what is truly at stake is the survival of human civilization. What is called for is a thoroughgoing refutation of such nihilism at all levels of our educational and social order. (It certainly wasn’t helpful when my bright granddaughter, attending a Conservative Jewish day school, was told by her third-grade teacher that thanks to climate change, the world was likely to end by 2030, which seemed awfully close. Fortunately, her parents were able to disabuse her of that fear.)

As Abe Greenwald pointed out in an April 23 newsletter from Commentary titled “Baby Bust, Baby Boom,” responding to adults who cite the difficult state of the world (owing to climate change, inflation, the Trump administration, etc.) as reasons not to have children, “[t]hey should try that line on their Israeli counterparts. During the last months of 2024, Israel saw a 10 percent increase in births over the same period in 2023. A country fighting an existential war on multiple fronts, with a perpetually deployed citizen army, a torn and traumatized public, and a thoroughly destabilized economy is having a baby boom. And according to Israel’s Bureau of Statistics, the boom has continued into 2025.” This fact “speaks to the real factors that determine whether a population shrinks or grows... A developed country has babies when its citizens feel confident about their nation, when they share a sense of purpose that stretches into the future. For Israelis, deeply divided over a number of issues at any given time, personal and national purpose have always been aligned: to ensure the survival and flourishing of the Jewish people. That purpose came into even sharper relief after [the Hamas attacks of] October 7, 2023. Jihadists brag that they love death more than [Jews] love life. Israel’s wartime baby boom is a straightforward refutation of that claim. “As Greenwald concludes. “Israel’s self-perception makes it a serious nation. And a serious people knows what matters most.’”

Americans displayed that seriousness of purpose preeminently in the sacrifices they made during World War II, and the “baby boom” that followed. While in a free nation, choices about whether to marry and have children, and if so how many, are left entirely to the individual, it is to be hoped that as a nation, we will overcome the temptation to allow faddish ideological trends, or the attraction to transient pleasures like fine dining or luxury tourism, to sway us from fulfilling our debt to previous generations, as well as reaping the joys of rearing new ones.