Last week, an article in The New York Times caused a stir on the political left: “White House Assesses Ways to Persuade Women to Have More Children.” The report revealed that “pronatalists” in and around the Trump administration, hoping to encourage higher marriage and birth rates, were weighing policies such as a $5,000 “baby bonus” for new mothers, Fulbright scholarships specifically for people who are married or have children, and educating women on menstrual cycles in order to maximize the chances of conceiving a child. The reactions online ranged from earnest rebuttals to dismissive snark.
There were the predictable references to The Handmaid’s Tale. Some took issue with the perceived coercion (“Why is letting women decide so hard for you guys?” asked Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin) or sexism (“This is the kind of policy you write if you see women as little more than baby-factories,” wrote Illinois Representative Sean Casten). And plenty of others called out Republican hypocrisy on family support and countered with better pro-family policies. “This isn’t complicated,” tweeted Democratic House whip Representative Katherine Clark. “1) Affordable child care. 2) Paid family leave. 3) Stop trying to slash health care for women and kids.” In other words, these right-wingers are acting like the Tim Robinson character in a hot dog costume who crashed his hot dog car into a building: We’re all trying to find the guy who did this!
While it may be satisfying to dunk on conservatives, the left needs a better answer to the right’s pronatalism. Low birth rates pose a threat to nearly every liberal goal—from visions of social equality to policies, including universal childcare and early education, paid family and caregiver leave, and universal health care, that were cited in the wake of the Times article. This is not a uniquely American problem. According to the United Nations, two-thirds of the world’s population lives in countries now on depopulation curves—and this includes countries like Finland and Sweden with the generous welfare policies that Democrats envy. So waving away conservatives as hypocritical sexists simply won’t cut it anymore.
This is a fraught topic, so let me begin with a few caveats. First, much of the decline in birth rates over the past half-century is attributable to positive factors, perhaps none more important than increases in the agency and education of girls and women. Second, much of the “pronatalist” movement is infected by fringe voices who spout ideas riddled with racist, sexist, and fascist overtones. Third, no one—particularly no woman—should ever be shamed for choosing not to have children.
But that does not mean that we on the left should be celebrating, or even encouraging, lower birth rates. As demographer Philip Longman, then of the left-leaning think tank New America, argued in 2004, “Population growth underlies our modern concept of freedom.” By this, Longman meant that there is nearly no social or economic system that doesn’t have an underlying assumption of increasing or at least stable numbers of children. If those systems start to break down, that opens the door for an authoritarian or retrograde agenda, particularly around women’s rights.
Indeed, declining birth rates—particularly when combined, as in the United States, with a rapidly growing and longer-lived senior population—are associated with any number of negative societal consequences. There is naturally more strain on the social safety net and social insurance programs as the ratio of workers to retirees shifts. People have to work longer, and there can be pressure to raise the age of retirement. The electorate becomes an entrenched gerontocracy, with seniors holding yet more outsize political power. The economy and innovation slows down. Public school systems and institutions of higher education face fiscal crises as they take in fewer enrollees yet maintain high maintenance costs. Community infrastructure like roads and sewers becomes more difficult to maintain as tax bases shrink.
In the broadest sense, it becomes more difficult for a society to invest in the future—fighting climate change, bolstering education, developing groundbreaking new technologies and medicines, making sociopolitical progress—because it is forced to spend dwindling resources patching up fraying social, economic, and physical infrastructure. There is also a moral dimension to unrealized family formation, the persistent gap between the number of children that people report wanting to have and the number of children they end up having. As The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig has posited, “The idea that people ought to be supported in welcoming however many children they want is both pronatalist and, to the degree that it helps women manifest the lives they imagine for themselves, arguably feminist.”
The message, however, isn’t getting through. Even back in the mid-2000s, Longman’s work got a chilly reception. The left has long been heavily influenced by Paul R. Ehrlich’s problematic work The Population Bomb, which argued that overpopulation would lead to mass famine and environmental degradation and advocated for governments taking drastic steps to limit population growth. It sounds logical that, as climate change accelerates, having few children will make the planet more sustainable. Unfortunately, this doesn’t hold up to scrutiny: Global depopulation will reliably cause more reactionary politics and geopolitical instability, neither of which is conducive to the kind of ambitious international climate policy that’s needed to stave off this existential threat. Nor is immigration a long-term solution, though it can certainly help: There are simply too many countries with low birth rates, and even sub-Saharan Africa, where absolute birth rates remain high, is seeing major declines. If the trend lines continue, we are only a few generations away from essentially the entire world being below the demographic “replacement rate.”
The fact is, we don’t fully know why birth rates are declining everywhere. “The usual suspects—economic development, cultural liberalization, and feminism—are ultimately inadequate,” the sociologist Alice Evans, who does globally comparative research on gender issues, wrote last year. “Here’s my strict analytical test for any theory: It must explain both the global collapse and local variation. Country-specific studies, while valuable, often miss the bigger picture. The Economist recently blamed England’s falling fertility on housing prices and delayed motherhood. But how does that explain similar nose-dives in rural Guatemala?”
Some of the best theories (though, again, there’s hardly a consensus) point to a decline in coupling up and changing attitudes toward how children fit in modern life. In the United States, the birth rate among married couples has remained relatively stable. However, both in the U.S. and globally, there has been a substantial drop in marriages and dating relationships, as well as in people even seeking long-term romantic connections. In the U.S. in 1990, 64 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds were married or cohabitating; that figure is now barely above 50 percent. That’s no doubt due in part to an epidemic of loneliness and social disconnection, which is exacerbated—or in many cases fueled—by smartphones, social media, and on-demand content.
So what could a positive Democratic response to declining birth rates look like? It would be far more than just a progressive-flavored pronatalism. (Even the term itself is off-puttingly clinical, emphasizing the mere production of babies while leaving out mother and family.) The organizing principle, instead, should be creating the enabling conditions for everyone to form the flourishing families they desire. That absolutely includes strong paid family leave, accessible childcare options, and affordable health care, alongside abundant family-size housing, meaningful and good-paying jobs, and direct cash support like a large refundable child tax credit and, yes, even a baby bonus. It also means addressing human connection, an agenda that could range from commonsense restrictions on social media for minors to creating vibrant “third spaces” and community infrastructure, to hosting more spiritually laden conversations on what it means to pursue the good life amid a hyperconsumerist and individualistic culture.
What liberals shouldn’t do is let their fury at Republicans blind them to what is a growing national—indeed global—crisis. It is not enough to simply scoff at right-wing attempts to engineer higher birth rates or at the rank inadequacy of a one-time $5,000 check—not when so many Americans are unable to form the families they desire, and not when the consequences of low birth rates are so damaging to social progress. The Democrats are far better positioned than Republicans to claim the mantle of the party of parents, to emphasize an inclusive vision of family values, and make a nonjudgmental yet affirmative case for having children that rests on a foundation of broad economic prosperity. In both figurative and literal ways, the future of America may well rest on whether Democrats can embrace this as a core value.
