Everyone wants an enjoyable, affordable lifeIn April, the government released data showing that the American fertility rate declined again in 2025. There’s been a nearly continuous drop in the fertility rate since 2007. Though the factors driving this decline are complicated, the most likely culprit is the significant fall in teen births. The birthrate has increased for women in their 30s and 40s over the past two decades, and some have theorized that this increase in later births may ultimately lead to a fertility plateau, rather than a continued decline. You’d think that on balance, this would be a call for celebration. But some conservatives have implied that, actually, teens should be having babies. And they go further, pinning blame for declining fertility rates on women forced out of the home and into high-powered jobs. This logic is broken, but the assumptions that undergird it — that women’s career ambitions are somehow perverse, and also that mothers alone determine the size of a family — are worth disassembling. Katie Miller, a conservative podcaster and the wife of President Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, posted on X about the precipitous decline in teen pregnancy since 2007, decrying the use of birth control and declaring that “Our biological destiny is to have babies — not slave behind desks chasing careers while our civilization dies.” As The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi pointed out in April, Miller is not the only one. Dr. Marc Siegel, a Fox News senior medical analyst, said that “we still have 3.6 million births a year, but the problem is teens and young adults,” whose fertility rates have dropped quite a bit. As many others have noted, Miller did not have her first child until she was 29 and continued to work in high-powered jobs after she became a mother, but she’s never let bald hypocrisy get in the way of a good culture war. Miller also blamed feminism for pushing women into the workplace on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show in March. The journalist Jill Filipovic wryly observed, “these two women are having this conversation at their jobs.” Miller is not the only one blaming so-called girl bosses for the decline in America’s fertility rate. In Family Matters, a newsletter on family policy, Patrick T. Brown rounded up a bunch of conservative writers who are freaking out about women who “traded family for boardrooms,” thus destroying the country’s prospects. The term “girl boss” can be imprecise, but for the sake of this entire argument, let’s describe girl bosses as college-educated women who are highly ambitious about their careers. And though Brown is also a conservative, he disagrees strongly with Miller and her compatriots. There’s been an increase in births by college-educated mothers, while births by women without high school diplomas have decreased and women with college educations are more likely to be working than those with less education. In these endless, exhausting arguments about how women have probably ruined everything by having aspirations outside of marriage and family, there’s barely any discussion about what men want, or how their desires around work and family may also have changed in the past 50 years. Few people of any gender want to be slaves to the office, and for younger workers, flexible schedules and paid time off are particularly coveted benefits. So I wonder: What if part of the decline in fertility is because some men don’t want to be boy bosses who have it all anymore? What if men are limiting themselves to one or two children, instead of two or three, because they want to have more manageable, enjoyable lives, rather than so many mouths to feed that they can never stop working? What if they also desire spouses with careers, so that all of the pressure of supporting the family in an uncertain labor market doesn’t fall solely on them? Last year, I clocked the trend that millennial men were spending more time with their children than previous generations did. A new analysis from the American Institute for Boys and Men furthers this trend by showing that the gender gap in work and domestic labor among couples is closing. Ariel Binder looked at data from the American Time Use Survey and found that after the Covid-19 pandemic, husbands reduced their paid work time and increased their housework time. What this suggests to me is that many fathers see themselves as part of a team. Given that parenting has become much more time-intensive, dads want to play bigger roles in their own homes. Because they are becoming more intimately aware of their children’s needs, perhaps they also don’t want more offspring than they can support monetarily or emotionally. The dynamic of more housework and less paid work was more pronounced among college-educated men and men with young children. Binder notes that this is a reversal of previous trends, where for decades, women increased working hours and reduced time spent on housework, but men’s behavior remained fairly static. The average age of first births for men has risen over time, just as it has for women. From 2011 to 2022, the average paternal age for all births was 31.5. Vasectomies are on the rise. Why isn’t anyone out here telling men that male contraception is evil and men’s biological job is to get out of the boardroom and make children, too? Still, I’m not completely dismissive of the idea that Americans may be having fewer babies than they want to be having — though I’m not sure if calling them “underbabied,” as Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, did earlier this month, is the term of art I’d use. It is a personal tragedy for anyone who wants to have children and doesn’t get to become a parent. But the key here is want. The fertility rate has fallen across the globe, and there isn’t one single explanation. Years of reporting on the issue have shown me it’s some mixture of more education, which delays fertility, more widespread global uptake of contraception over time, and the fact that it’s more socially acceptable to be childless, so fewer people are pressured into compulsory parenthood. None of these things are bad! While a graying population and a lower birthrate provide a different set of economic and social problems that we urgently need to address, lashing out at girl bosses isn’t going to fix anything. But even Katie Miller secretly knows that: Last weekend, she posted that “Nurse practitioners rank among the highest for number of children per woman,” and that the demand for those roles, which generally require between two and four years of graduate school, is great for family formation. Maybe, instead of yelling at young men and women for making the wrong choices, we should be listening to them talk about how they want to live, and try to figure out the kind of society that would best support them. End Notes
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