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Hello again, Bulwark readers! You may have heard about the Trump administration’s interest in policies to boost fertility rates—you may even have read the great article about them written a few days ago by my colleague Mona Charen. I recommend it highly! It made me want to take a deeper dive into the underlying questions, and imagine where a more constructive conversation on the subject might lead. Here’s what I found.
We’d love to hear from you—and if you’d like to participate in the comments section below, consider signing up for Bulwark+:
–Jonathan
Can Donald Trump Get Americans to Make More Babies?
There’s an important conversation to have about fertility rates. It doesn’t look like this.
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BABIES. LOTS OF BABIES. As soon as possible.
That’s the goal of the intellectual and political movement that’s come to be known as “pronatalism.” And it has the attention of the White House, according to a report last week in the New York Times, which said the Trump administration has been fielding suggestions from some of this movement’s thinkers on how to reverse America’s declining fertility rate.
The impetus for this is a concern that, as a society, we are not replenishing our ranks quickly enough—that with people living longer and needing more care and support, the number of younger workers who can supply that care and support is diminishing in relative terms.
The concern has a solid empirical grounding. Experts say that a society’s total fertility rate (defined as the average number of births per woman¹) needs to be above 2.0, more or less at 2.1, in order for a society to maintain its population level, assuming no outside influx of migration.
The U.S. fertility rate was above that threshold until the early 1970s, when it dipped below for about ten years, then rebounded before falling again. Today it sits at around 1.6, the lowest U.S. officials have ever documented.
This isn’t just an American phenomenon. Far from it. The United States was actually something of an outlier for maintaining a high fertility rate for as long as it did. In many economically advanced countries the rate fell earlier or reached lower levels. Among the best-known, most-discussed examples is South Korea, which hit 0.72 before ticking up slightly last year and where the threat of depopulation prompted leaders to declare a national emergency.
Demographically speaking, there were a few reasons the United States held onto a higher fertility rate for as long as it did—among them, the high rates of fertility among some migrant groups, especially Hispanics, and a high rate of religiosity relative to peer countries. But now even those factors don’t seem to be enough to keep the U.S. above the replacement level line.²
How (if at all) to respond to America’s falling fertility rate is a complex question, the kind you would ideally want to leave in the hands of policymakers capable of holding complex discussions about policy.
Does that sound like the Trump administration to you?
Right, not to me either. And that’s really too bad.
An intelligent, open-minded conversation about declining fertility rates could reveal some common ground among some normally divided political leaders, and maybe even lead to some helpful legislation as well. Instead, we seem headed toward a conversation that rules out some of the most promising policy responses, while reinforcing retrograde—and in some cases downright creepy—attitudes about gender.
Not only would that fail to make the situation better, it could actually make things worse.
ANY CONVERSATION AROUND FERTILITY RATES WOULD IDEALLY begin by acknowledging some uncertainty and showing a little humility. It wasn’t that long ago that the big topic of discussion was the perceived dangers of overpopulation. The fertility rate was thought to be dangerously high, prompting worries about a future in which too many humans put too great a strain on the planet and its resources.
Plenty of people still make versions of that argument. And you don’t have to agree with them to recognize the unpredictability of our demographic future, especially insofar as the grim economic predictions may not account for factors like the possibility that artificial intelligence will revolutionize the workforce and productivity.
But whatever its implications, the declining fertility rate may be a sign of another problem in American society—namely, a failure to create an environment in which Americans can have the number of kids they want. The best evidence of this problem is in survey data, which consistently shows that most Americans would like at least two children, as they did before.
“I don’t worry about fertility as in, ‘We have got to fix fertility,’” Betsey Stevenson, a University of Michigan economist and former Obama administration official, told me. “I worry that American families are not thriving, and one symptom of that is we can see them having fewer children.”
So what changed? Here’s where the story gets more complicated and ambiguous, and depends a bit on who you ask.
Historically changes in fertility rates correlated with economic, demographic, and scientific shifts: families leaving farms where they needed kids to tend the fields, sanitation and vaccines enabling more people to survive childhood, and so on. More recently, by most reckonings, the big driver has been the new opportunities for women to work outside the home.
That still-ongoing change has provided the potential to get more than a paycheck. It’s also a chance at a different kind of fulfillment for those who want it. But women still shoulder a disproportionate, if slowly declining share of childrearing even as they’ve taken on wage-earning work. And that’s forced more difficult choices about parenting versus work.
“Most women and men today would, ideally, like to have both a fulfilling career and a family,” Matthias Doepke, an economist with positions at Northwestern University and the London School of Economics, told me over email. “Achieving these aspirations is difficult especially for women . . . because of lack of availability of childcare, career expectations that are not family compatible, and social norms in the home and in the workplace that still expect mothers to do most of the childcare, as was the norm in the 1950s and 1960s.”
Doepke was careful to say he was summarizing the “gist” of the latest research and that it was “not a super straightforward issue.” It can be difficult to figure out the precise mechanisms of how these forces interact, and to understand a transformation that’s still unfolding in real time.
To take one example, data shows birth rates for the youngest cohorts have fallen shortly. But that’s at least partly because of a (generally celebrated) decline in unplanned pregnancies among women under 25. Some of those women may be postponing children until they are in stable relationships, at which point the more nurturing, financially secure environment may lead them to have more children rather than fewer.
“I think the jury is really out,” Stevenson said.