A Left Response to the Birth Rate Crisis
The Right uses falling birth rates to pose as defenders of family and future against demographic suicide. The Left can’t keep declining to comment. Instead, we should reframe the conversation to emphasize security and freedom over scarcity and coercion.
It is not that difficult for the Left to speak about falling birth rates in a way that avoids the traps set for us by the reactionary right. (Hyoung Chang / the Denver Post)
In late June, the Atlantic ran an article titled “The Birth-Rate Crisis Isn’t as Bad as You’ve Heard — It’s Worse.” It posited that global fertility decline is happening much faster than official projections suggest. If the decline is not reversed, the article warned, the whole world will face profound economic challenges and “a smaller, sadder, poorer future.” While not all analysts believe that falling birth rates spell this level of economic catastrophe, enough do to mainstream the concern.
In the United States, where the birth rate has fallen in the last two decades from a healthy 2.1 per woman to a sub-replacement-level 1.6, the Right has already established a near-monopoly on the discourse. And they’re wasting no opportunity to use the issue to advance their reactionary agenda, proffering declining birth rates as evidence of cultural decadence and feminist overreach.
From J. D. Vance’s jabs at “childless cat ladies” to Elon Musk’s personal insemination mission, conservatives are positioning themselves as the defenders of family and future against a society committing demographic suicide under the Left’s nihilistic influence. Having dubbed himself the “fertilization president,” Donald Trump is reportedly considering an array of childbearing incentives, from the welcome but insufficient (a $5,000 “baby bonus” for new mothers) to the jarring and ominous (a National Medal of Motherhood awarded to women who have six or more children).
The Left’s response has been to largely avoid the issue, and for understandable reasons. When conservatives wax apocalyptic about the birth rate crisis, they make little effort to conceal their eagerness to chastise women, led astray by feminists, for entertaining aspirations and identities beyond motherhood. Nor do they take pains to disentangle their concern about low birth rates from their paranoid fantasies about waning racial, national, and civilizational dominance.
Meanwhile, they compulsively punch left, using birth rate decline to slam “cultural Marxists” for scrambling time-tested and exquisitely calibrated hierarchies in the name of progress. The chickens of egalitarian social experimentation, the Right is impatient to say, are coming home to roost.
Given all this white noise in the fertility conversation, leftists are naturally inclined to abstain. If this is what raising the birth rate is all about, we don’t want anything to do with it. But beyond the potentially significant macroeconomic and social policy implications, there are several political reasons to reconsider our neglect.
First, we need to break the cycle of negative polarization in American politics. It’s not only that opinion is sharply and automatically divided on partisan lines; worse, parties now take full custody of entire issues. The result is that two hostile camps are living in their own hermetically sealed realities, with entirely separate spheres of concern. (The Right doesn’t have an alternative environmental politics, for example, but rather an anti-environmental politics consisting primarily of disdain for the issue.) As consensus reality has broken down, opportunities to change minds have become increasingly scarce. A refusal to even develop talking points in response to the Right’s pet issues only serves to further entrench a reactionary worldview in half the American population, which has zero political upside for the Left.
Second, the topic has real potential to graduate from being a fringe political trend and develop mass appeal. This is because macro-level birth rates are adjacent to a very intimate, micro-level anxiety: people’s fear that they won’t be able to have the number of kids they want. According to a new report from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), this anxiety is more common than we might assume, both internationally and in the United States. Large numbers of people around the world want to have more children but for various reasons find it infeasible or unwise.
If declining birth rates strictly reflected a lack of desire to have children, perhaps we could write them off as an acceptable cost of personal freedom and close the book. Instead, it appears declining birth rates are partly evidence of frustrated hopes, not just fulfilled ones — which means the conversation has the potential to be maximally politically charged. We can either let the Right describe the source of that frustration in their preferred terms, or we can compete for explanatory opportunities.
The American left reliably defends the right to avoid and terminate unwanted pregnancies. This position is popular, and we would defend it on feminist grounds even if it weren’t. Still, it’s not the only type of family-planning freedom people appear to want more of. Restricting our vision of family planning to the ability to have fewer children in a time when many people wish they could have more children is insufficient. Abortion and contraception can’t be our entire contribution to this fever-pitch discussion on an issue of great consequence in people’s intimate lives.
Fortunately for us, it is not really that difficult to speak about falling birth rates in a way that avoids the traps set for us by the reactionary right. We can develop a compelling and competitive politics of our own, making the case that our policies are the best way to ensure that everyone can build the family they want.
Baby Blues
The Right often argues or implies that declining birth rates are culturally driven, caused particularly by the erosion of traditional gender roles and conservative family values. Because declining birth rates have potentially dire consequences, this creates a perfect pretext to advance their cultural agenda. Women and men have lost a sense of their natural place in society, the thinking goes, and if we don’t restore it — by resanctifying heterosexual procreative marriage, reviving traditional gender roles, rethinking women’s workforce participation, banning abortion, and so on — everything will go up in flames.
It’s tempting to take the bait. If the loosening of gender norms and women’s enhanced personal freedoms are the root causes of declining birth rates, we might say, then so what? Nobody promised that progress would come without trade-offs. The problem with this is that now we’re talking about trade-offs, conceding while minimizing feminism’s harms to civilization. Thankfully, reality is far more complex than the Right’s Sodom and Gomorrah story — and offers better political opportunities.
The Right’s argument operates according to what the UNFPA report, The Real Fertility Crisis, calls a “fertility fallacy”: the assumption that people have lost interest in having kids. The evidence does not support that assumption. The authors ambitiously surveyed people in fourteen countries representing 37 percent of the world’s population about their fertility experiences. What they found should fundamentally reframe how we understand this topic. Their main finding is that the experience of wanting children but being unable to fulfill that desire is strikingly common — so widespread that it must be understood as a significant factor in falling birth rates.
One telling metric illustrates the scope of this phenomenon: when survey respondents over age fifty were asked whether they had achieved their ideal number of children, only 38 percent worldwide said yes. Meanwhile, 31 percent reported that they had fewer children than they wanted — nearly three times the 12 percent who reported having more than their ideal number of kids. The United States tracked identically to the world averages, except that a slightly higher proportion of Americans (33 percent) reported having fewer children than they considered ideal.
When we consider that these self-reports may be skewed by the common psychological phenomena like post hoc rationalization and choice-supportive bias, where people tend to minimize cognitive dissonance and avoid regret by viewing their own choices and circumstances more favorably than hypothetical alternatives, the true number of people who had fewer children than they wanted could be even higher.
When people of reproductive age were surveyed, the largest share of them could not predict whether they would be able to have their ideal number of children, signaling endemic uncertainty about future prospects. Remarkably, only 18 percent of people worldwide felt confident that they would be able to have their ideal number of children. Of the remainder, the share predicting they would have fewer children than desired was substantially larger than the share predicting they would have more children than desired.
The picture sharpens when the survey drills into the obstacles. The results reveal what leftists have long suspected: the most important barriers, far and away, are economic.
The primary self-reported obstacle to desired fertility was financial limitation, with 39 percent of respondents globally naming it as a reason they couldn’t have kids when they wanted to. The runners-up were unemployment/job insecurity (21 percent) and housing limitations (19 percent) — both essentially extensions of the financial limitation category. All noneconomic concerns trailed these by at least five percentage points, including political concerns (14 percent), lack of a suitable partner (14 percent), and infertility (12 percent).
The American data follows this same overall pattern, with financial limitation topping the list of reasons Americans cite for not having as many kids as desired (38 percent). While there are some interesting deviations from the global situation — such as slightly higher rates of self-reported infertility (16 percent) and lack of a suitable partner (18 percent) — all these other factors still pale in comparison to the primary constraint of economic hardship.
These findings make it clear that there is actually plenty of room for us to maneuver in the birth rate discourse without compromising our values. The situation isn’t strictly a result of freedoms we support; it’s also the result of obstacles we oppose. And given the real frustration and devastation implied by these documented phenomena — the abandoned hopes, the constrained dreams, the chasm between what people want and what they feel they can achieve — we ignore this topic at our political peril.
The Multifactorial Approach
The Left’s best response to the birth rate crisis has two components, both of which position us advantageously against conservative alternatives while advancing our broader political project. The first component is that we must insist on a multifactorial explanation for fertility decline. Contra the Right’s simplification of the issue, many different factors converge to produce declining birth rates. Some need to be staunchly defended, and some desperately need to be fixed. That should be our line.
While we don’t know to what extent, it’s clear that birth rate decline owes partly to hard-won expanded freedoms and measures of social progress that should not be rolled back. These positive factors include expanded access to birth control and abortion, which reduces unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, and women’s integration into the public sphere, which has broken the system of spousal financial dependency in developed democracies and given women sources of self-worth beyond motherhood. Even if these changes have depressed birth rates, they are still defensible on principle and beneficial to society as a whole.
However, other major contributing factors clearly include social problems that the Left wants to fix anyway. Chief among these is the economic dimension. Poverty, precarity, economic inequality, and exploitation are already intolerable to us, because they artificially limit the life prospects of most people on Earth today. The inability to have desired children is yet another of the many profoundly painful and unfair externalities of this particular issue. We should fight for economic equality and abundance for their own sake, perhaps with an extra dose of urgency given the birth rate connection.
The way the multifactorial approach works is that we insist on the complexity of the birth rate issue, and then sift through the causes one by one, evaluating which ones we think should be fixed and which should be left alone, like this: Birth control? Big fan, keep. Economic constraints? Fundamental problem, must address. Women finding meaning outside of motherhood? Love it, don’t touch. Growing inability to find a romantic partner? Bad symptom of broader social fragmentation, should solve.
The Right is trying to force us to choose between gender equality and demographic sustainability. We don’t have to. People around seem to want more kids but find it infeasible to have them — and the main reason they cite, economic scarcity, is already positioned at the core of our politics.
Family-Planning Freedom
The second component of the Left’s ideal response is to assert the bedrock principle of family-planning freedom.
The Right claims to have a single objective in this arena: to increase birth rates and rescue civilization from collapse. Their claim to innocence is specious, not least because they seem uninterested in, for example, funding in vitro fertilization (IVF) when it’s used by same-sex couples and unmarried women who want kids. One Heritage Foundation report included a piece scolding women for “spending a large portion of their most fertile years building their careers” and calling for an end to “high-tech pregnancies” using practices like IVF — suggesting that the objective isn’t strictly “more babies,” as J. D. Vance has put it, but more homogenous family formation. Vance himself wrote the introduction to the report and was the keynote speaker at an event announcing its publication.
But setting aside the Right’s hypocrisy, our own stated goal should not just be “more babies.” Falling birth rates are symptomatic of a broader crisis in family-planning freedom, and our objective is to solve that crisis.
We’re now witnessing a misalignment between people’s desire and people’s ability to actualize their vision for their lives. The Left wants to align actual birth rates with desired reproduction. We aim to bridge the gap between people’s life goals and their outcomes, expanding their sense of agency in their own lives.
This principle of family-planning freedom encompasses both the right to avoid or terminate unwanted pregnancies and the ability to have more kids if you want them. Right now, freedom is curtailed in both directions.
The UNFPA report found that, across the world, 32 percent of respondents said that they or their partner had experienced an unwanted pregnancy, demonstrating the persistent need for expanded contraception and abortion access. Meanwhile, 23 percent reported an inability to have a child at a time when they wanted to, with 40 percent of that category saying they ultimately ended up abandoning the prospect. The overlap is also notable, with 11 percent of people reporting that they had experienced both scenarios at separate points in their lives. Our goal is to eliminate both forms of constraint.
The family-planning freedom framework shifts the birth rate debate onto favorable terrain, positioning the Left as the representatives of choice and the Right as the representatives of coercion. When paired with the multifactorial approach, it raises the possibility that there’s no way out of the fertility crisis without holistic economic change. If the UNFPA report’s findings hold true, then we can make progress on improving birth rates by pursuing a familiar platform: substantially raising minimum wages and strengthening collective bargaining rights, taxing wealth aggressively, establishing universal health care with comprehensive reproductive services, creating universal child allowances and extended paid family leave, building social housing and controlling rents, providing universal childcare, instituting flexible part-time work for parents, and so on.
What could be more attractive than a political vision that pairs economic security with personal autonomy? By contrast, it makes the Right look like what they are: opportunistic reactionaries using this issue to chide women for stepping out of line while doing nothing to remove the real obstacles people face to building the families they want.
The ultimate metric of our success would be transforming that dismal 18 percent confidence rate — the share of people who feel certain they’ll be able to have their ideal number of children — into something approaching universality. If the vast majority of people can look at their economic circumstances and life prospects and feel genuinely confident about their ability to realize their reproductive aspirations, that will be a victory in itself.
This also has the potential to result in demographic sustainability: According to the Institute for Family Studies, only 2 percent of Americans think that having no children is ideal. Their choice would be respected in our framework and would not prove problematic to overall population growth, because when Americans are asked what their ideal number of children is, the average is 2.7 — well above replacement level.
The Left should be ready to respond to the birth rate question. And it’s hardly a chore: we should look forward to the opportunity to discuss how our preexisting platform will make it easier for people to have the families and lives they want. We strive to be associated with freedom and plenty. On this issue, if we come at it from the right angle, we actually can be.