Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the supreme court has many conservatives thinking about Roe v. Wade. A reversal of the decision is, for a number of reasons, unlikely. But the prospect has already sparked considerable commentary on the downstream effects such an outcome might have.
Partisans on both sides have fixed on the socio-economic legacy of Roe. Proponents typically hail the increased educational and economic attainments for women that followed in the decades after the court created a constitutional right to abortion, while opponents often point to the demographic baby bust. Both sides ought to keep in mind that correlation does not equal causation. And conservatives, in particular, ought to understand that while there may be many good reasons—practical, legal, and moral—to overturn Roe, such action is unlikely to have much of an impact on America’s demographic challenges.
Americans are currently reproducing at levels well below (1.76 children per woman in 2017) the replacement rate (2.1 children per woman). In the mid-1970s some 40 percent of women had 4 or more children over the course of their lives; today only 14 percent of women have 4 or more kids. Massive, sustained immigration has kept the population of America growing, but has only exacerbated the problem of population aging. Because as fertility rates decline, the average age of the population increases, which leads to all sorts of bad outcomes for societies which rely on the state to care for senior citizens.
Conservatives have long thought that doing away with Roe would help change this demographic picture. It sounds so simple: Fewer abortions, more children, higher fertility rate, lower average age. But it’s not clear that reversing Roe would actually turn back the demographic clock.
Why are Americans having fewer babies?
For the second straight year U.S. fertility rates have dropped to new historic lows. After the recession, demographers repeatedly expressed confidence that births would rise again with the economy. That hasn’t happened. Some of the factors are external. But some are internal.
In a recent survey published in the New York Times, young adults who said they didn’t plan to have children listed reasons why—as expected external factors such as careers, affordability, and finding a partner all ranked high. But, a third said they either wanted more time for leisure or simply didn’t “desire” to have kids. The survey results are consistent with research suggesting that those who delay parenting tend to place greater value on leisure.
At a recent playdate with my own kids, a young mother confessed that having another child, would make it harder to travel. She’s not wrong. But is that a good reason? On the one hand, who can blame overworked parents for not eagerly diving into the added responsibility of another child? No matter how you slice the data, research consistently reveals that children increase stress. But on the other hand, there’s a strong long-term case to be made for more life.
“Children may be a long-term investment in happiness,” according to Mikko Myrskyla, a demographic researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Studies indicate that the early stresses of child rearing (young children are needy when finances are tight) typically dissipate over time. In the long run, children (and especially grandchildren) tend to be—as an objective, sociological matter—immense sources of joy. And, not to be overlooked, sources of support in old age. Like saving for retirement, investing for future gains from parenting requires deferred gratification. But, given the dearth of young people penny-pinching for retirement, it’s no surprise that this isn’t the rising generation’s strong suit.
Smells Like Millennial Spirit
On the surface, Millennials appear to be bundles of communitarian impulses. More than any generation, Millennials say it’s “very important” to volunteer; they claim to care about the environment, animals, and, more or less, any and all causes. An astounding 71 percent of men between the ages 18 and 34 have dogs and 48 percent have cats. For women in that age cohort, the numbers are 62 percent and 35 percent. Millennials even trade pay for more time off work, and they are known as socially conscious consumers. Sam Tanenhaus dubbed the Millennials “Generation Nice” (others have called them “Generation We”). Tanenhaus argues that their “habits and tastes look less like narcissism than communalism. And [their] highest value isn’t self-promotion, but its opposite, empathy—an open-minded and -hearted connection to others.” And yet this veil of laudatory social benevolence may mask a subtler kind of selfishness looming in the background of made-for-social-media service project selfies.
Don’t get me wrong. Supporting prosocial causes is admirable. And every generation complains about the kids following them. But when scholars have dug into the data they find that while Millennials claim to value volunteering, they remain the least likely generation to show up and actually volunteer. And, while Millennials care about the environment, according to research by Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and author of Generation Me, they are less likely than Boomers and GenXers “to say they did things in their daily lives to conserve energy and help the environment.” They are also less likely to say, “they thought about social problems” or engaged in “a political campaign.”
Not all is gloom, of course. Beyond just their preternatural grasp of technology, there are reasons for optimism about the future generation’s ability to tackle some of society’s most entrenched challenges. Twenge points to genuinely laudable qualities of the rising generation, like their embrace of tolerance and equality. But as scholar Christian Smith writes: “The idea that today’s emerging adults are as a generation leading a new wave of renewed civic-mindedness and political involvement is sheer fiction.”
Student loans and arrested careers have undoubtedly caused Millennials to postpone marriage and parenting. But, as survey results show, at least some emerging adults are simply experiencing a waning desire for children and a waxing appetite for leisure, careers, social status, or all of the above. There may also be a kind of childless contagion taking place—less family formation begets less family formation. If one’s friends don’t marry or have children, it’s less comfortable, socially, to start a family. Younger Americans are swapping Robert Browning’s line—grow old along with me—for something like grow old alone and free.
Children as a choice
Although abortion and birth control have made childbearing a choice, human agents are still doing the choosing (or lack thereof). The sobering number of abortions performed since 1973 (more than 50 million) has had an effect on America’s overall population size. According to Wellesley College economist Phillip Levine, Roe initially created a sharp reduction in fertility rates. But Roe’s lingering impact on fertility is more complex.
Abortion rates, for example, are now at their lowest levels since legalization (from 16.3 per 1,000 women in 1973 to 14.6 in 2014) and yet the birth rate continues to drop. In his book, Sex and Consequences: Abortion, Public Policy, and the Economics of Fertility, Levine explains that while legalizing abortion reduced fertility in the short-term, over time its wide availability likely catalyzed more sexual activity and less contraception. Abortion in this sense has functioned as a twisted form of insurance against the consequences of carefree cavorting.
But as birth rates and abortion rates fall in tandem, affordable birth control is a common denominator. A 2013 CDC report revealed that 99.1 percent of “sexually experienced women” in their reproductive years used some form of contraception. But birth control alone can’t cause declining birth rates. There’s still human volition. American women, after all, still say that they want 2.7 children. This is where, we’re told, external economic conditions factor in, acting as a barrier for women (and men) seeking to achieve their reproductive goals. But this doesn’t explain why birth rates in 2017 were even lower than they were in 2009, despite much stronger economic conditions.
This isn’t to say that money and the cradle aren’t connected. They are, but in the opposite way: a national increase in wealth generally correlates with a decline in fertility rates.
As Guillaume Vandenbroucke, a researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, put it: “In general, poor countries tend to have higher levels of fertility than rich countries.” Specifically, “women tend to give birth to no fewer than three children in countries where GDP per capita is below $1,000 per year. In countries where GDP per capita is above $10,000 per year, women tend to give birth to no more than two children.” Note, again, that this is correlation, not causation. Because at the macro-level, national wealth is really just a proxy indicator for other fertility drivers, including education and urbanization.
However, at the individual family level, financial increases can result in higher fertility. Joe Price, a professor of economics at Brigham Young University, points to two recent studies showing that “when families have more money, they have more children.” But the relationship of fertility and money is nuanced even at the micro-level.
Here’s how it works: Families coming across extra cash may use the money to have another child if, say, they were already saving for a baby in the first place. In these scenarios, individuals act in a similar fashion to citizens taking advantage of government incentives, such as tax rebates for electric and hybrid cars, or the “cash for clunkers” program. (In cash for clunkers, Congress made federal funds available to entice more automobile purchases during the recession. What actually happened was that people who were already planning to buy a car took advantage of the deal, and people who weren’t planning to buy a car largely stayed out of the market. The program was criticized by economists and academics for counterintuitively reducing overall spending on automobiles since buyers ended up purchasing smaller, less expensive vehicles—which were incentivized by the initiative—rather than the larger, more expensive cars they would have otherwise purchased.)
A Contraceptive Culture
Money and other economic conditions certainly impact birth rates. But the choice still lies with individual actors. Some of whom prefer to simply not act. University of Chicago economist Erik Hurst has found that young “lower-skilled men” are actually “less likely to work, less likely to marry, and more likely to live with parents or close relatives.” Much of their leisure time is spent on video games. The telling part is that they report high levels of happiness. Not all childless individuals, of course, are lazy gamers living in their parent’s basement. The 2015 essay collection, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, cleverly appropriates the classic charges against those who don’t have children. Many who are childless face undeserved stigma. The volume points out that there are many legitimate reasons why individuals may not marry or have kids.
Undertaking the responsibility to raise children requires short-term self-denial for gains down the road. It may even require, heaven forbid, periodically sacrificing personal hobbies. Scholar Katherine Fusco recently cast a critical eye toward the portrayal of an artistic mother, Annie, in Ari Aster’s much-discussed horror film Hereditary. À la Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Hereditary follows the ghastly demise of a cursed family; but Fusco’s review mostly focuses on the film’s protagonist, whose artistic craft is making miniatures. “The persistent interruption of Annie’s work by her family,” Fusco writes in the Atlantic, “impl[ies] there’s a world outside of the studio, and outside of herself, to which Annie should be attending—an idea that’s all too common in literature and pop culture about creative moms.” She continues: “By linking Annie’s craft directly to the eventual dissolution of her family, Hereditary suggests that art is something better set aside when the baby comes.”
While a separate essay might address the fact that Fusco’s shock here is about the film’s subtle social commentary and not about its disturbingly graphic horror-genre contents, she does have a point—mothers deserve more help and less judgement. Today women still carry a greater share of household labor than men. Fusco is on to something. But excessive hand wringing about parents having to put aside art projects (or golf games or Instagram habits) to embrace parenting may itself be symptomatic of a culture that tends toward demographic decline.
In a moment of (strictly secular) epiphany at the Woodstock Writers Festival in 2012, writer Kurt Andersen explained that the political, cultural, and social “sea change of the late ’60s” didn’t actually contradict America’s free-market posture. “For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won.” He continues: “People on the political right have blamed the late ’60s for what they loathe about contemporary life—anything-goes sexuality, cultural coarseness, multiculturalism. And people on the left buy into that, seeing only the ’60s legacies of freedom that they define as progress. But what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same libertarian coin minted around 1967. Thanks to the ’60s, we are all shamelessly selfish.”
He may be right.
Over two-thirds of Americans, according to a Pew study, use the term “selfish” to describe their compatriots. While Americans have strong philanthropic and voluntaristic streaks, researchers have found that, in fact, independence rather than interdependence tends to motivate us. Survey work conducted by the American Psychological Association also found that “upper class individuals exhibited greater self-oriented feelings of pride and contentment, as well as greater amusement.” Lower income individuals, “exhibited more other-oriented feelings of compassion and love, as well as awe.”
Despite having less means, this latter groups is having more children. Kathy Edin’s important work on low-income mothers, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage, makes a strong case that low-income women are highly child-centric and find their greatest meaning in their children. (One wonders if a substantial increase in income would lead them to find meaning elsewhere). Americans (wealthy or otherwise) are not irredeemably selfish; nor is family-life inevitably at odds with individual self-interest or attaining social status. But it might be time to start taking stock of a growing “you do you” solipsism that bestows contentment upon both the basement-dwelling gamer and the self-actualizing materialist with yoga mat in tow.
Marriage and Children Triumphant
Achieving a demographic U-turn will require viewing children as a worthy goal that is in each individual’s best interest (and also in the interest of society). Marriage and family must once again pervade American life. This kind of paradigm shift goes beyond pulling policy levers. France, with perhaps the most robust suite of pro-reproduction policies, did for a season succeed in boosting its demographics, becoming one of Europe’s most fertile nations. But, even with their strong constellation of generous family benefits, the country still had 17,000 fewer births in 2017 than it did in 2016, and the nation’s birth rate (1.88 children per woman) is still below replacement.
Neither will supreme court rulings (for all their symbolic, legal and moral value) prompt an about-face on fertility. Carrots and sticks will do little if people care more about leisure and fulfilling other personal desires than family formation. Only a culture that champions marriage and child-rearing as an essential good and a long-term investment—rather than a mere lifestyle choice (best taken in small doses)—will motivate individuals to once again place parenthood above pets, PlayStations, and paychecks.
There are, admittedly, some positive developments associated with declining birth rates, including less teenage pregnancies and greater progress for women. Society should not retreat from these advancements. When it comes to increasing childbearing, individuals need not abandon prudence, good sense, and respect for women’s health and personal agency. But, prudence and good sense demand that a nation seek answers when its birth rate dives below the level of replacement .
Given the right conditions, positive cultural change can occur, especially if larger institutions—government, corporations, and Hollywood—don’t actively work against it. If schools teach the social science behind the well-documented effects of family stability and healthy relationships, it may only take a generation before young people are better equipped to cultivate and sustain the kinds of marriages and future families that are in their long-term interests. Religion can also play a role in encouraging marriage and children, inspiring followers to seek a transcendent, greater good for themselves and others.
In the United States, Utah is known for its above average birth rates and two-parent households. The state’s strong marriage culture, according to economist Raj Chetty, is at least one reason Utah has achieved some of the highest rates of upward mobility in the nation. It’s no secret that more than half of Utah’s population belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which emphasizes marriage and children as part of its teachings. Addressing a group of young people at Brigham Young University last year, Elder Quentin L. Cook, a member of the faith’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, asked those in the audience born third or later in their families to stand. He then said, “you would not have been born, even in the United States, if the current trends applied.”
It’s not just Utah’s predominant faith that’s encouraging family formation. Facing a decline in birth rates in the eastern European nation Georgia, Patriarch Ilya, the spiritual leader of the Georgian Orthodox Church, announced in 2007 that he would personally perform the baptism for any third child (as well as any additional child) born to an Orthodox family. Georgia (which had been in demographic decline) has seen a bump in births and mass baptisms (which are performed four times a year).
In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy artfully contrasts the titular protagonist’s soul-sapping love affair with the marriage of Levin and Kitty. Whereas Anna’s reckless pursuit of personal pleasure, status and passion ends in tragedy, the work-a-day lifestyle of husbandry and fidelity between Levin and Kitty becomes a union suffused with faith, industry and new life.
Family life bestows bounties that are harvested in no other way. Policies and supreme court precedent can help remove some barriers to family formation, but to truly foster higher fertility rates and strong parenting the nation must once again crown marriage and child-rearing as humanity’s highest work and life’s greatest long-term reward. Such a change will require millions of hard but positive individual choices—the kind that elevate us toward something greater.
In the beginning, Genesis tells us, Eve and Adam faced the decision of whether to live in a personal paradise without progress or to gain god-like wisdom but suffer the strains and stresses of a mortal life. They chose the better part.
