This Is the Fertility Election. And Both Sides Are Getting It Wrong. (2024)

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris may have been a barrier-breaking prosecutor, a U.S. senator, and the first female vice president. But, although she’s a beloved stepmom, she does not have biological kids of her own, a fact her opponents have raised to cast doubt on her presidential fitness. This is a bizarre inverting of the longtime hand-wringing over whether female politicians with children could adequately do the job—but then again, we’re in the middle of a strange election where the politics of fertility are all but taking over.

Elsewhere in the news cycle, Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance has repeatedly railed against “childless cat ladies” and said parents should have more votes than people without children; he has also supported extreme abortion bans, including those that criminalize the procedure for rape victims and pregnant children. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has been very open about how his own two children were brought into being with the help of fertility medicine, and his interest in improving paid family and medical leave. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has five children (with three different women), and has made clear he did little to none of the actual child-rearing.

The divide is stark: Democrats (and feminists) continue to push for the kind of pro-family policies that are standard among our economic peer nations (paid parental leave, affordable child care) while Republicans (and conservatives) across the country work to ban abortion. They talk about how much they love babies, and then undercut Democratic efforts to actually support mothers and infants.

That partisan split might be a decades-old one, but it is seeing a new, grimly ironic manifestation in the broader culture. For example, some self-styled “trad wives” (and some who live the lifestyle but don’t adopt the moniker) enjoy lucrative careers of pretending not to work for pay—but they do work for pay, by putting that precise supposedly traditional lifestyle and their many children on social media. Conservative male influencers emphasize the necessity of male dominance and feminine submission, including women who will submit to having as many babies as a man desires and aren’t abortion-having feminist careerists. Meanwhile, those supposedly concerned for the nation’s future and the familial prospects of millennials and now zoomers are (at best) still asking “Why aren’t you people having kids??” and (at worst) sharing their own half-baked theories about generational selfishness. The childless millennials and Gen Zers in question defer to a series of answers that, while accurate diagnoses of policy failures, are now such ubiquitous explanations for complex life decisions that they have morphed into generational tropes more than accurate explanations: the world is burning, everything is terrible, we have six-figure student loan debt, child care is unaffordable, the rent is too damn high.

It is true that birth rates have declined significantly in the U.S.—although ours remain higher than those in many other Western and wealthy nations. But the reasons why fewer Americans are having children, and the ways in which we should think about it, are complex and myriad. Instead of grappling with these diverse and interconnected incentives, childbearing decisions have been flattened down into partisan talking points. From the right: that women have become too selfish, too career-obsessed, and too unconcerned with the future of the nation to have as many babies as they should, which is fueling family breakdown, a masculinity crisis, and demographic decline (that birth rates are lower among white women than Black, brown, and immigrant women generally goes unsaid but is nevertheless a particular point of consternation). The message from the left is more materialist: families don’t have enough support; young people are too broke; the direness of our collective climate future has made millennials hesitant to bring new life into a dying world; if potential parents had the scaffolding of paid leave, affordable child care, affordable housing, and great health care, they’d be making different choices.

In other words, for the right, it’s culture and the inevitable doom brought on by feminism. For the left, it’s money and policy.

Both sides are on to something. But neither gets it totally right.

The decision to have children is partly material, yes. But it is more existential than anything else. For all of human history, people have chosen to have children—desired children and borne them intentionally—even in appalling conditions, even knowing that significant numbers of those children would not survive, even knowing that many of those children may be consigned to miserable and difficult lives. Children, as journalist Christine Emba wrote recently in the Atlantic, are often had (especially in larger numbers) because the people having them derive meaning from the very act of bringing children into the world.

Just as childbearing is meaning-making, so is the inverse: Not having children, or having fewer, can be an expression of women’s unprecedented abilities to find meaning and purpose outside of motherhood.

Liberals are right that social and economic conditions impact birth rates—except that any fair reading of the data suggests that the countries with the highest birth rates tend to be poor: The poorest nations have three times the birth rate of the richest ones; in the U.S. specifically, women whose incomes put them below the poverty line have birth rates more than 1.5 times higher than women who live well above it. Dipping fertility rates go hand in hand with industrialization, better health and health care, longer lifespans, and greater personal freedoms, a pattern that has borne out for centuries. As women in the U.S. have seen a rapid expansion of educational and economic opportunities, birth rates have fallen—it seems relevant here to point out that the most significant drop in American birth rates in the past several decades has come because far fewer tweens and teens are getting pregnant accidentally. Globally and domestically, continued high birth rates have stayed tied to religiosity, poverty, higher infant mortality rates, shorter life expectancies, lack of economic opportunity, and low rates of education and basic rights for women.

This is not a coincidence. Women have historically not been able to lead rich intellectual, professional, and social lives without being born wealthy or tied to a man. For most women, for most of history, there have been few paths to social respect, life purpose, and adulthood outside of motherhood, and few paths to financial stability outside of a male partner.

In many places, that’s still true. Years ago I reported a story from Niger, the country with the world’s highest birth rate, on why so many women chose to have sizable families. Lack of contraception access was a real barrier. But overwhelmingly, the women and girls I talked to (and many were girls who were also wives and mothers) said that they wanted large numbers of children because of religious obligation, and because each child represented an opportunity to escape poverty—one might be a doctor or a truck driver, and if you have 10 kids instead of three, that’s 10 chances that one kid succeeds. And also: Fertility was highly socially valued; more children meant more community respect, a higher chance that a husband remained faithful, and more status in a family with plural marriage; and children offered young mothers a chance to break from the drudgery and intense physical labor of everyday life and engage in play and acts of love and caregiving. In that context, I probably would have also made the rational choice to have lots of babies.

For American women whose lives are defined by the kind of low-income work that pays the bills but doesn’t promise much in the way of greater meaning or pleasure, children are less a potential disruption—what, exactly, is being disrupted if your future feels stagnant?—and more a source of much-needed joy and potential. Sure, it comes with a slog of housework, but caring for children can also offer spaces for creativity, authority, curiosity, novelty, social connection, esteem, and the all-important sense that one is engaged in a project bigger than oneself that will live beyond oneself—what men have historically thought of as legacy.

For American women whose jobs are more meaning-based, or who by virtue of education and income can choose to live in places where they are surrounded by likeminded peers with unending opportunities to socialize and play, the meaning-hole (or, let’s be honest, boredom-hole) that has so often been filled by children may open up later in life—or not at all. Conservatives like J.D. Vance have cast this as an empty way of living. But Vance has unapologetically sought recognition, influence, and legacy outside of child-rearing himself, from writing a bestselling memoir to running for office. More women than ever now live as many men long have: Working in jobs that feel important and offer them a sense of authority and impact; pursuing creative projects; testing out a variety of potential romantic partners; folding into a social web in which connections are made by virtue of shared interests rather than physical proximity and life stage; exploring the world and engaging in novel experiences.

These new paths, and the extended young adulthoods they open up, also contribute to women being choosier about male partners (financial independence doesn’t hurt either). For these growing numbers of fortunate women, having several children may sound nice in theory, but there is probably a reason that so many don’t follow through in practice. By surveying American women in their teens and 20s about their reproductive goals, researchers have concluded that women want more kids than they actually go on to have. But that’s hardly the best way to measure the kind of desires that are imagined and acted upon (or not) over the course of several decades. In practice—in a life in which women have to actually repeatedly make the yes-or-no choice to have children rather than opining about some far-away imagined future—a lot of women seem to look around at their lives and say something more complicated than “I can’t afford this.” Many don’t seem to want it—or at least don’t want families the size their grandparents had.

Money is of course a factor, and no doubt there are plenty of families whose lack of an additional child is tied to a lack of resources to comfortably support that child. But many of these same families could do what generations of people have always done, which is make it work, even if it means struggling and sometimes suffering. That more parents refuse this suffering—refuse to give up the things about their lives that they love, refuse to make their children suffer—is, in my view, a sign of great progress and responsibility, not to mention feminist awakening. After all, “making it work” has historically depended on tremendous female sacrifice, and women today seem to have less of an appetite that. Indeed, growing political divides between young men and young women also seem to reflect profoundly different views on family and gender roles. Women are increasingly reticent to pair up or reproduce with men who don’t see them as equals and will saddle them with more of the work of child-rearing. Despite how it is framed on the internet, this is less a problem with picky women than undesirable men.

That doesn’t mean that policymakers should give up on supporting families. When it comes to increasing the number of children women have, better family policies really do seem to make a difference around the edges, helping to sustain birth rates or tick them up a few fractions of a point. But what these policies actually seem better suited for is increasing gender equality, giving women more opportunities, easing strain on workers, increasing economic output, and narrowing various inequalities between wealthier families and poorer ones. These are all important goals—more important, in my view, than raising birth rates. Democrats should talk about them in those terms: Not as tools to make more babies, but as highly effective ways to make life better for all of us.

Republicans should be more honest about their aims as well. There are some family policies that have shown incredible success in rapidly increasing birth rates—and they have mostly been found in harshly misogynistic authoritarian nations. Perhaps most notable is dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu’s overtly pronatalist Romania, which banned abortion and contraception, mandated gynecological exams to enforce this, jailed abortion providers and women who terminated pregnancies, and cultivated networks of snitches and spies to rat out anyone not following the rules. Birth rates under Ceauşescu did initially shoot up, at least until women inevitably figured out how to get around the system. But maternal mortality also skyrocketed to the highest in Europe and thousands of children wound up in Dickensian orphanages, where endemic abuse and neglect left many dead and many more suffering from serious physical and mental problems. This is not a cost most sane or decent people want to pay for more babies.

When it comes to raising birth rates, the hard truth may be that there just isn’t a set of policy solutions that will make most American women go from having one or two children in their 20s and 30s to having three or four or more beginning in their teen years—or at least, there isn’t a set of policy solutions that aren’t terrifyingly cruel, invasive, and deadly. Democrats also shouldn’t accept the right-wing narrative that children are the only path to a worthwhile or meaningful life. They should instead tell Americans that the progressive vision for a pro-family nation means giving every person the greatest freedom possible to pursue the family they want to have. For a large majority of American women, that means being able to prevent unwanted pregnancies, welcome wanted ones, and raise healthy children while working, without feeling stretched beyond the brink. What Democrats are really selling are more opportunities for adults to build the families they want—and as a result, healthier, happier, and more stable families. This is a much more resonant message than defining pro-family politics as banning abortion and disparaging single women. It also has the benefit of being what most Americans actually want.