Our Demographic Disaster Is Here
Recently leading my family of seven (soon to be eight) through the airport for an international flight, it dawned on me how much of a circus we must appear to bystanders. Though my older children are more-or-less trained to follow instructions and minimize complaining, the toddlers wander out of line, sometimes bypassing security, screaming whenever my wife and I attempt to corral them. People stare, whisper, and shake their heads at our “little basketball team.” We are, in a word that is having its political moment, “weird.”
The Democrats are having a field day accusing the Trump-Vance ticket of being “weird,” primarily because of J.D. Vance’s vocal natalist impulses. He has bemoaned the nation’s declining birth rate and criticized unhappy “childless cat ladies.” When asked in a 2021 interview whether abortion should be permitted in cases of incest and rape, Vance replied, “At the end of day, we are talking about an unborn baby…. What kind of society do we want to have? A society that looks at unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded?”
Yet as much as Democrats are hammering Vance over his natalist “weirdness,” the truth is there is a general political consensus that America is undergoing a tremendous crisis when it comes to the family. Kamala Harris’s proposal for an expanded child tax credit up to $6,000 for families with newborns was little more than a ham-handed response to Vance’s earlier call for a $5,000 child tax credit. Her idea to help first-time home buyers by encouraging the construction of three million homes—a plan that even her liberal supporters recognize is entirely unfeasible—seems aimed at young, lower-income families currently priced out by a national housing shortage.
Moreover, just about every corporate media outlet has acknowledged the nation’s birth rate crisis, from CBS, CNN, the Washington Post, and The Economist to the Wall Street Journal and Fox News. The White House says “low fertility” will translate to fewer workers per capita, creating “significant headwinds to economic growth, the fiscal sustainability of public benefit programs, and the trend of continuous improvements in living standards.” Fewer babies, the data quite persuasively shows, is an economic catastrophe coming our way.
But so is deficit spending. And debt equaling 100% of U.S. GDP. And so are entitlement programs that make up about two-thirds of federal spending. Is there any groundswell of American popular opinion demanding our elected officials address these fiscal disasters which loom over the horizon? Are the mandarins of our expert class in the media, academia, or federal bureaucracy exhausting their vocal chords shouting at the electorate about the impending disaster brought about by American fiscal policy? Hardly. We are a people lulled into complacency, propelled by an unfounded belief that things will indefinitely continue as they have previously.
If Americans cannot be persuaded that their nation’s spending habits will eventually impoverish them and make their economy—and national security—more vulnerable to our greatest adversaries, it seems unlikely they’ll be persuaded to have more children for the sake of those national priorities. If I wasn’t a non-contracepting Catholic who has come (much to his surprise) to celebrate and cherish babies, I doubt I’d be heeding the latest warnings of egghead statisticians or economists, let alone clerics or conservative social media influencers trying to make me feel guilty about my childlessness. Consider the immature glee of the DINKs basking in the freedom of voluntary infertility (all you can eat Costco pizza!).
Nevertheless, conservatives must grapple with another uncomfortable truth: the anti-natalist cultural phenomenon is not unique to the Left or the unchurched. When in the company of conservatives (and even Christians), admitting the number of children I have elicits raised eyebrows. “You have how many children?” It’s true, conservatives have more children than liberals, but not by much: as of 2018, conservative women on average have 2.5 children, while liberal women on average have 1.9. Given our nation’s historically low birth rate, it’s safe to speculate that those numbers have dropped on both sides of the aisle.
None of this is to say that political attempts to curb declining fertility shouldn’t be thoughtfully considered and pursued. Some countries (e.g., Hungary, Czechia, and Israel) have had modest success at marginally increasing (or at least stabilizing) their birth rates. Tim Carney’s recent book, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, offers many practical suggestions for policymakers and businesses, from family-friendly urban planning to tax code reform to more generous paid parental leave policies. All of these ideas and more should be implemented to make life easier for American families and encourage the fence-sitters to give having kids a chance. I’m even optimistic enough to think such measures could result in an appreciable, if tempered, “baby bump.”
Yet a “baby boom” seems unlikely given the blatant, if bizarre fact, that Western culture is anti-child in a way that is unprecedented in human history. American Millennials are having fewer children than their parents, and Gen Zers are projected to have even fewer than Millennials. Yes, financial hardship is the most commonly cited explanation for cratering birth rates, but one must square that complaint with the fact that of the countries with the top 30 birth rates, 29 are impoverished African nations, and the other one is Afghanistan. Does anyone really think it’s harder to have children in Appalachia than Angola?
To explain this phenomenon, one must consider two trends beginning in the 1960s that dramatically reshaped American society: women entering the workforce and affordable access to contraception. In 1960, less than 40% of women were in the workforce; today, that number is almost 60%, and more women than men have college degrees. In 1960, the federal government approved a birth control pill; by the end of the decade, more than 80% of married women of childbearing age were using contraception. Careerism and contraception dramatically changed the options and calculus for American women, who felt no longer constrained by their biology or “patriarchal” social mores that dictated an exclusively maternal role in society. Sex became untethered from children, and women became free to pursue careers and romance absent the threat of pregnancy. This is the script of Sex and the City, one of the most influential, descriptive, and prescriptive programs in television history.
It’s also why my soon-to-be family of eight is seen as a spectacle. In a culture that has catechized women to cherish their personal and professional empowerment above all else, the big family seems like drudgery, if not a freak-show, that likely bespeaks some underlying pathological disorder. One or two kids? Sure, every woman has a right to define and express herself through her fertility and participate in creating and nurturing new life—but as long as this doesn’t interfere with her career. But five, six, or ten? That, in the words of Betty Friedan in the best-selling 1963 work The Feminine Mystique, is the way women “forfeited their own existence” and lose “a personal purpose stretching into the future.”
Big families are not for the faint of heart. I know (and have witnessed) that some people conscientiously choose to have offspring for less than noble motives. My hope is that acquiring responsibility for a new life can shake such persons from their deep-seated narcissism and inculcate responsibility and virtue. Sadly, that’s not always the case, including me on my worst days, when I’m tempted to perceive my children more as annoyances to be suffered than gifts to be patiently loved and appreciated.
On better parenting days, I pray that amidst the crumbs of food strewn across carpeted floors or shouting matches over contested toys, observers witness a family that seems at least as happy as them, and perhaps more interesting and fulfilling than whatever program they’ve got streaming on their mobile device.
One promising data point, raised aloft by Carney, is that Americans are having fewer children (below 1.7 per couple) than we actually believe to be the ideal (2.7). Perhaps the more such people witness the smile and laugh of a baby—even the type who cries loudly during an airplane’s descent—the more likely they’ll consider children as a positive good rather than an annoyance. Or perhaps I’m just weird.
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