Capitalism is built on contracts. Its early intellectual champions argued that voluntary exchanges grow the economy and make people rich, and that becoming rich is a worthy endeavor redounding to the benefit of all. The enlightened, self-interested capitalist subject freely enters into contractual relationships to exchange labor for wages or goods for profit. This arrangement incentivizes everyone to work, innovate, and create — accumulating wealth that benefits individuals and driving progress that benefits society as a whole. As Adam Smith wrote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”

But in a world where all social relations are viewed as contracts between self-interested parties seeking to increase their own advantage, starting a family makes no sense. Having a kid is always an expensive, sometimes exhausting, usually time-consuming, minimum-eighteen-year commitment to another human being you’ve never met. In an ever-accelerating economy offering little security, wherein even basic needs like housing and decent health care aren’t guaranteed, entering into a two-decade legal bond to care for and support a child requires an incredible leap of faith.

Legal contracts can be abrogated, debts repudiated, spouses divorced, and bonds of kinship and friendship ignored or dissolved. But in most countries child abandonment remains a criminal offense, in recognition of the exclusivity of the parent-child bond and the particular vulnerability of children to harm from neglect. The decision to have a child confers legally enforceable responsibilities on parents no matter how much their own personal circumstances might change. In Germany, where I am currently based, Section 221 of the criminal code punishes a parent who abandons a child with one to ten years of imprisonment.

To have a child is thus to enter into a uniquely indissoluble contract, perhaps among the last of its kind under capitalism. In an economic system predicated on the right to freely enter and exit relationships based on their perceived benefit at any given moment, one that rewards self-interested maneuvering and competition, having a child introduces a singular element of risk and constraint.

It’s not surprising, then, that fewer young people volunteer for parenthood. Nor is it hard to understand the prevalence of regret. When a 2016 YouGov poll poll asked 2,045 German parents whether, if they could revisit the choice, they would prefer to live their lives without children, one in five respondents said yes. Much of this sentiment stemmed from a perceived lack of support for families with young children: 64 percent of parents reported insufficient childcare in Germany. When asked if they believed they would have had more professional success without children, 20 percent of fathers and 44 percent of mothers agreed.

In the United States, the majority of people under fifty who say they’re unlikely to have children report that a major reason is that they “just don’t want to.” That number is considerably higher for female than male respondents. As for why they don’t want to, respondents indicated a fear that parenthood, and particularly motherhood, would overturn their lives.

This is not a delusional fear. Parenthood can subsume every personal dream or aspiration under a constantly shifting but ever-present imperative to do everything to ensure your children’s success. Under capitalism, parenting is a contact sport: any benefit or privilege that someone else wins for their own child is often one you have lost for your own. In other words, as a parent you will not be able to opt out of competition — you will only be competing under the unique constraint of an unbreakable contract, like fighting with one hand behind your back. Many people, and especially women on whom the lion’s share of the burden and blame still falls, don’t find this prospect particularly attractive.

Although fertility rates grow and shrink in response to a wide variety of factors, the recent rapid decline in baby making has occurred in an era where global capitalism has triumphed and few alternatives challenge its hegemony. To understand the impact of free-market competition on fertility, it’s instructive to look back to the past, and to what social scientists call “natural experiments.” Here, the division of Germany after World War II into two separate states with opposite economic systems is illustrative.

After 1945, the two defeated German states took almost opposite paths in their drive toward rapid repopulation. West German leaders believed that traditional monogamous nuclear families with a rigid breadwinner-homemaker division of labor would increase birth rates. By shackling women to the “children, kitchen, and church,” leaders hoped to rebuild their capitalist economy by ensuring that all necessary reproductive labor remained safely in the private sphere. In the East, authorities decided to socialize as much of women’s traditional work as possible. This required the establishment of a variety of new institutions to support mothers with young children, and freed young women to pursue educational opportunities and professional training for roles in the formal economy.

In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), becoming a mother, even at an early age, did not foreclose other life opportunities, due to consistent state and community support. The East German government endeavored to create a new set of social ideals wherein the role of the “mother” was not an all-encompassing identity but just one aspect of a woman’s personhood, and one that did not make her economically dependent on a man. In a typical case of schismogenesis, the more traditional motherhood was lionized in the West, the more nontraditional paths to motherhood proliferated in the East.

Although both governments encouraged women to become mothers, East German women had access to first-trimester abortion starting in 1972 as well as easy access to reliable hormonal birth control subsidized by the state. Excellent sex education prevented unwanted pregnancies. When women chose to become mothers, they enjoyed generous job-protected maternity leaves followed by guaranteed places in decent-quality crèches and kindergartens. Since East German women held full-time jobs and earned their own independent incomes, they were less economically dependent on their partners and could embrace motherhood without getting married. A loose network of grandmothers, aunts, older sisters, neighbors, colleagues, and friends all pitched in to support a new mother in addition to the formal benefits she received from the state.

As a result, East German women had a far higher rate of single motherhood than those in the West. Since it was completely normal for a mother of young children to have her own career, no snide accusations of being a “Rabenmutter” (literally “raven mother,” which means “neglectful mother” in German) haunted those who returned to work after a year at home.

More importantly, becoming a mother wasn’t really considered a big deal, just a normal part of life to be embraced with as much grace and good humor as possible. Although East German women often labored under the infamous double burden where domestic concerns weighed disproportionately heavily on their shoulders, motherhood was an almost universal experience, with earlier ages of first births and a much lower rate of childlessness. Despite women’s education and high labor-force participation, and despite the easy access to abortion, sex education, and birth control, the lifetime fertility of East German women remained slightly higher than that of women in the West until reunification.

After reunification, the East German birth rate plummeted as women launched what was called a “womb strike” against the sudden economic upheavals that largely dismantled the East German industrial base. In the immediate aftermath of 1990, the total fertility rate (TFR) fell by 60 percent to a historic low of 0.8 in 1992 (where 2.1 is the rate needed for basic population replacement). With unemployment skyrocketing, the new leaders of reunified Germany assumed that East German women would happily retreat into the joys of motherhood if freed from the socialist compulsion to work. Instead, East German women migrated westward in search of new professional opportunities in a capitalist economy hostile to working mothers. They overcame the social expectation that women with young children should stay home by not having any.

When the physician Ursula von der Leyen became the German Minister of Family Affairs in 2006, she said, “The question is not whether women will work. They will work. The question is whether they will have kids.”

By 2008, the East German birth rate had rebounded to match the relatively low West German TFR of 1.4, yet with fascinating underlying differences in the pattern of fertility. A 2010 paper in the Journal of Population Economics found that East Germans were still more likely to hold “far more egalitarian or nontraditional gender-role attitudes than their western counterparts,” and that this was causally related to the emancipatory goals and policies of their shared socialist past.

Even more than thirty-five years after reunification, significant differences persist in the fertility patterns of East and West Germans. Low fertility in the East is explained by most women having just one child. Low fertility in the West is characterized by some women having multiple children, while a significant percentage have none. Educated women in the East still find it easier to combine work and motherhood compared to those in the West, who feel they must sacrifice their family aspirations for the sake of their careers.

The researchers Uwe Jirjahn and Cornelia Struewing found that these differences have less to do with economic factors or the relative availability of childcare than with differing cultural ideals about the preconditions for motherhood. Most significantly, single women in East Germany were more likely to give birth to a child without a partner. This finding held for both planned and unplanned pregnancies. Despite the ready availability of abortion, East German women felt less compelled to have a stable partnership before having a baby. And if they got pregnant by mistake, the economic consequences were simply not as dire as those in the West.

The 2022 German microcensus further explained the differences in East and West rates of childlessness. The microcensus measured the completed fertility of women born between 1973 and 1977 by highest vocational qualification attained. For women without a vocational qualification, the rate of childlessness is the same, about 13 percent, in East and West Germany, and 14 percent in the three city-states of Berlin, Hamburg, and Bremen. Among East German women with a nonacademic vocational qualification, only 15 percent were childless (excluding Berlin), compared with 22 percent of West German women (excluding Hamburg and Bremen). For potential mothers with an academic vocational qualification, 17 percent of East German women remained childless, compared to 23 percent of West German women. In the three big cities (two wholly in the West and one historically divided between East and West), the rate of childlessness among women with a nonacademic vocational qualification was 27 percent and 29 percent for women with an academic qualification — meaning that almost a third of working urban women remained childless.

When I shared my research earlier this year with an East German colleague who, like me, has a daughter in her early twenties, she seemed unsurprised that the childlessness rate would be so much lower in the former East.

“A child was never a tragedy in the East. It still isn’t,” she said in English. “The mothers of my daughter’s West German friends always tell them, ‘Sure, you can have sex if you want to, but whatever you do don’t get pregnant.’ Getting pregnant would be a disaster for them. An East German mom will tell her daughter, ‘Sure, have sex if you want to.’ We never say the second part. Our daughters know what they’re doing, and if they get pregnant, so what? We’ll manage it. But for a West German mom, this is a catastrophe. It’s so embarrassing. For us, it’s no big deal. We know we can manage it together.”

For those raised in the former East, a young woman’s life path was not irreparably altered by the birth of a child because motherhood was considered a cooperative rather than a competitive endeavor. Before 1989, the contractual mindset that characterizes capitalist social relations was diminished by the robust social safety net provided for mothers. Moms weren’t expected to be and do everything for their children. Not just because they had reliable childcare, but because socialist policies guaranteed a minimum standard of living for all children, whether they had perfect parents or not. As I have argued elsewhere, the responsibilities of motherhood were lighter because they were shared. Families could emerge from incentives other than self-interest.

In the end, all of the arguments about falling fertility rates are also arguments about the incompatibility of capitalist ideals of self-interest and personal wealth accumulation with any altruistic endeavor that requires a long-term commitment. Where the pursuit of profits trumps all other considerations, shrinking birth rates are merely the collateral damage, a negative externality of the technologies and individualistic attitudes that encourage people to maximize utility and burnish their personal brands. Even the momfluencers on social media are making money from their public celebration of the joys of motherhood. The kids are merely props in their profit-generating enterprise.

In societies where personal value is linked to earning capacity, where compensation rates are determined by the fickle fluctuations of supply and demand, workers with primary care responsibilities will always be disadvantaged. In our brutally unequal economy, where the most attractive potential employees are the least encumbered, having a kid is tantamount to shackling oneself to an anvil when everyone around you is calibrating their jetpack.

To paraphrase Adam Smith: “It is not from the benevolence of the tradwives that we expect our babies, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” Is it really such a shock that there is a decline in fertility under capitalism?