Some observers are worried that the ongoing decline will have grim economic consequences in the not-so-distant future. Without enough new babies, the theory goes, America’s demographic makeup will tip further toward older generations, whose members will grow needier and less productive with age. A shrinking workforce could, over time, make this imbalance all the more unsustainable.
Read: American motherhood is on the decline
If the trend holds fast over the next few years, those fears may prove valid, Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a demographer and sociology professor at Bowling Green State University, told me. But, she says, the trends revealed by the new report are more complex than just the declining fertility rate, and it contains some hopeful news as well: The teen birth rate dropped by 7 percent from 2017 to 2018, according to the CDC’s analysis. Meanwhile, the rate for women ages 30 through 34 was virtually unchanged, and their counterparts in their late 30s and early 40s experienced a slight uptick in birth rates, up 1 percent and 2 percent, respectively. Generally speaking, the older a woman is when she has her first child, the better that child’s socioeconomic outcome.
Against this backdrop, Benjamin Guzzo argues, using that 1.73-children-per-woman stat to predict catastrophe doesn’t make sense. The common measure of a country’s fertility rate is known as its total fertility rate, or TFR. The TFR predicts the expected number of children an average American woman will have in her lifetime. Importantly, it isn’t some ongoing tally—rather, it gathers the actual fertility rate of, say, U.S. women in their 40s and extrapolates from that number to assert what the rate for women currently in their 20s will be two decades from now. TFR is a useful metric because it’s simple and enables apples-to-apples comparisons globally, Benjamin Guzzo says. But in a country and an era in which more and more women are delaying motherhood, she argues, TFR is an estimate that is bound to be skewed.
That’s especially true because, by and large, the rate at which American women of childbearing age express an interest in starting a family hasn’t changed much in the past decade, suggests research presented at a recent meeting of demographers. Nor have notions of the ideal number of children in a family. Meanwhile, a growing body of research challenges traditional assumptions about the risk factors of so-called geriatric pregnancies. Women, Benjamin Guzzo notes, have long had children in their 40s—it’s just that, in the past, they were often having their third or fourth kid.
While some of this apparently declining fertility rate may be attributable to delay, notably, a woman’s decision to delay a baby does increase the likelihood that she won’t end up ever having one. “We need to be changing how we talk about this from mostly a story about delayed births to, increasingly, a story about births that these women are simply never going to have,” Lyman Stone, a researcher at the Institute for Family Studies, told me in an email.
Read: The bad news about the reduction in teen pregnancies
Whatever’s going on, people decide not to have children, or to delay having them, for all sorts of reasons, not always because they’re not interested. For instance, a 2018 study surveying healthy, egg-freezing women in the United States and Israel on their motivations found that “lack of a partner” was the primary driving force. Specifically, the study participants pointed to a “massive undersupply” of men who are university-educated and committed to fidelity, marriage, and/or parenthood.
Other would-be parents are likely putting off kids because of insufficient resources, or a sense that their environment is too unpredictable. “Economic instability and unaffordable care could be factors for people deciding to have children later in life, or not at all,” said Josie Kalipeni, the policy director of the caregiving advocacy organization Caring Across Generations, in an email. Numerous studies have attributed the growing desire to delay motherhood to financial stressors: economic uncertainty and overwhelming student debt, for example, or job instability and limited access to health insurance. Meanwhile, anecdotal evidence suggests that societal problems such as climate change—which may eventually affect some women’s ability to procreate—could discourage some prospective parents from becoming parents after all.
All of which is to say: The record-low fertility rate likely isn’t a sign that the United States’ younger generations are rejecting having children. Rather, the way Benjamin Guzzo and many other observers see it, it’s a sign that the country isn’t providing the support Americans feel they need in order to have children.
————————————————
And here’s a letter to the editor from a friend in response to the above:
I understand the author is seeking to assuage fears being reported about our country’s declining fertility rate but I strongly object to both this professed fear and the need to mitigate it. Grim economic consequences because people aren’t populating fast enough to become working drones? It’s hard not to laugh at the absurdity of such a thought when everything indicates the opposite is actually the cause for grim writing on the wall. If humans don’t change our global industrial economic model, and soon, human civilization will be collapsing in our lifetimes. And we’re taking just about everything else out the door with us! This Great Extinction Event we’re experiencing is begging human civilization to live differently—breed less, consume less, harm less. This should be the mantra guiding us all right now.
I’m one of many U.S. child-free women who opted out of child-bearing and -rearing intentionally—not only because I wanted to spend my professional years serving others not of my own making, but also because our world’s burgeoning and exponentially increasing human population is well past sustainability. I actually considered the personal act of bringing a child into the world immoral, given the state of affairs of our current world and the ecological crisis that is mounting. In short, I concur with one of the author’s theories: dropping fertility rates do in part reflect women like myself who are looking at climate doom & gloom and choosing not to procreate. For Earth’s sake, I’m just grateful I’m not alone.
Exposing the Big Game 