The U.S. has joined other advanced economies in their falling birthrates. Like France, Japan, and South Korea, we now have fewer births than deaths.
There are obvious disadvantages to this: fewer workers, and therefore fewer taxpayers, are being born. In the decades to come, a smaller group of workers will be supporting a larger group of retirees.
This trend is now being reinforced by the current federal policy of preventing immigration and deporting millions of “foreign” workers. Americans already struggle with a shortage of nurses, daycare workers, and electricians.
But America’s falling birthrate also represents an enormous success: fewer births to teenagers and to young women who are the daughters of teenagers. Fewer unintended pregnancies. Fewer births to people who can’t financially take care of their kids. Fewer births to people who must drop out of school after giving birth. And fewer births to unmarried young people—people more likely to end up single mothers, with limited chances for life success for themselves or their kids.
I started my career in 1978 as a volunteer at Planned Parenthood. To this day I see unintended pregnancy as a highly preventable engine of poverty, domestic violence, and personal dislocation. As you probably know, the U.S. is an outlier in the huge size of its teen pregnancy population compared to other developed countries.
At Planned Parenthood, we had many tools to discourage people from this life-changing mistake. The one tool we didn’t have did result in a turning point in U.S. fertility rates: the financial crisis of 2007, when ordinary people lost much of their savings, and unemployment climbed disastrously.
Unmarried teens notwithstanding, conservative politicians across the globe tend to support increased birthrates. They often blame feminism and “selfish” women who put their careers and personal “convenience” ahead of creating families. The Heritage Foundation argues that “when a nation fails to preserve the family, the state soon fails to preserve itself.”
The Trump administration has attempted to increase falling birth rates, discussing expanding access to in vitro fertilization and considering “baby bonuses” to encourage more couples to have kids (insert a snide comment here about Republicans attempting to destroy the Affordable Care Act).
But government’s pregnancy incentives generally don’t work.
Countries that have offered cash baby bonuses — including Canada, Sweden, South Korea and China — generally show either short-lived increases in fertility, or none at all. Slightly more effective are broader social and political changes in childcare, parental leave, and gender-equitable labor policies, all anathema to American policy-makers.
CRIMINALIZING ABORTION
Interestingly, dramatic and cruel restrictions on abortion across America have not led to an increase in fertility. This contradicts a cherished conservative & religious illusion that generations of American women could be forced to have children they didn’t want. It turns out that more contraceptive (and emergency contraceptive) products, combined with a terrible labor market and housing shortage was a practical alternative.
The most dramatic government manipulation of fertility in recent memory, of course, is China’s very strict one-child policy that began in 1979, designed to control then-rapid population growth and limit the birthrate.
Accompanied by an enormous program of neighbor surveillance, it not only created two generations of outlaw couples, but it led to today’s aging population, a shrinking workforce, and a severe gender imbalance (as couples aborted first-born daughters).
In 2021, China made a dramatic shift to a three-child policy, whose results have yet to be seen.
Back in today’s America, there’s an increase in pregnancies of women over 40. The fertility industry is promoting this enthusiastically, encouraging couples to anxiously question their ability to conceive, urging women to freeze their eggs (increasingly covered by insurance), and aggressively marketing IVF and other pregnancy technologies.
We haven’t seen even a fraction of the legal conundrums and angry lawsuits this will inevitably generate.
How a generation of women will deal with the interaction of post-partum and peri-menopausal (and even menopausal) hormonal and psychological changes remains to be seen.