What if people simply DO NOT WANT to have kids?

what then?!

Since last writing, I’ve figured out how to relax: it turns out that my favorite convalescent activity is brooding about stuff that people say on the internet. This is a good sickbed occupation because it’s not quite as demanding as reading a real book, but it’s about 15% more intellectually engaging than watching reality TV (although…feel free to invite me to bombard you with theories about how The Bachelor/Bachelorette franchise tries but fails to rehabilitate the marriage plot in a world that no longer accommodates or materially supports such narratives, a thesis that is in some ways fortuitously relevant to the topic of today’s rant). Today, I am angry about children and the Discourse about whether people should have them.

Children! Everyone loves them! Everywhere I look, it seems, I’m inundated with hand-wringing about the decline in birth rates! It’s a crisis! It’s a catastrophe! The decline in birth rates is evidence of despair about the state of the world! The decline in birth rates is a referendum on the DIRE STATE OF OUR SOCIETY!!!! etc. etc. etc.

A recent New York Times article, “Why Are So Many Americans Choosing Not to Have Children?,” seems representative of much of the dreaded Discourse. The article seems to assume the existence of a familiar binary. The subhead reads, “It’s probably not selfishness, experts say. Even young adults who want children see an increasing number of obstacles.” Apparently, these are two poles of human possibility: either (A) people (read: women) are not choosing to have children because they are hedonists who cannot fathom abandoning their carefree lifestyles to devote themselves to something fulfilling and substantive (for an especially unsavory version of this view, see J.D. Vance’s infamous “childless cat ladies” remarks), or (B) people (read: women) would love to have children but face too many material hurdles to realize their dreams.

The New York Times article quotes a handful of experts who think that the less offensive option, (B), is right. I was disappointed to see a thinker I usually admire endorsing some version of (A).

I believe that it is generally poor form to hold people responsible for their Tweets—who can tell if anyone really means the things they dash off on there? I certainly didn’t when I used the platform, and I don’t think it encourages people to heed their best intellectual instincts, to put it mildly—so I don’t mean to incite anyone to harass Harper, whose writing I’ve often enjoyed. But….whom exactly is he talking about? Is there any evidence that there is a significant number of people (not just one or two people at the philosophy department cocktail party that one time two years ago) who don’t want kids because they don’t want to be “tied down” or they regard “the ability to have fun” as “the highest good”? I know we’re doing vibes-based analysis here, but I’m getting different vibes.

The issue, I think, is that the dichotomy taken for granted in the NYT article and so much of the broader conversation is simply specious. There are more than two possible explanations for ever-increasing childlessness. Perhaps people don’t want to have kids, not because they want to rave all night or sip fancy coffee unmolested, and not because they don’t have the resources to support the children they pine for, but because they genuinely and truly want to do other things—not hedonistic, trivial things like traveling to Dubai, but serious and meaningful things that are quite demanding and absorbing, like teaching children math or performing life-saving surgeries. And of course, I would be remiss if I failed to note that the people chided for not having kids are almost always women (see, again, Vance’s remarks), who were only nominally granted the resources and the social permission to pursue meaningful projects outside of motherhood ~50ish years ago anyway and who in reality have never really enjoyed such means or resources.

Here is a loud statement of the obvious caveat: yes, it is true that America has woefully few public resources for would-be parents, and yes, that is lamentable, and yes, I’m sure that some of the people who don’t have children would make a different choice if we lived under a more humane political order. Yes, yes, and yes. But if material obstacles explained the trend, shouldn’t we expect to see at least somewhat more robust birth rates in countries that not only provide support for parents but provide incentives for procreation? And yet birth rates are lower than ever in, e.g. Korea and Hungary. If I were still in grad school, here is where I might mutter something beneath my breath about the perils of Marxist analysis unaccompanied by feminist insights.

I’m not a sociologist (My husband is), so I can’t do a causal analysis of what’s driving the decline in birth rates in most developed countries. I don’t know, and I’m not going to go out into the world to do “field work” to find out. (For what it’s worth, most of the other people popping off about this on the internet aren’t out there doing statistics, either.) But from the comforts of my sick/bed arm chair, I feel brazenly qualified to ask: what if we at least considered the very glaring possibility that the decline in birth rates may be an expression of female agency? That it may reflect the widespread adoption of alternative—but non-hedonistic—values? That people may want to express commitments to others and to their communities in different ways? That there are many ways to contribute to society and express faith in the future besides having kids?

Why are we all apparently assuming that the appropriate or baseline birth rate was the one that existed in the [unspecified but implicitly golden era in the past], anyway? (I’m setting aside policy considerations about the economic pitfalls of failing to replenish the population, which are real: I’m just focusing on the moral panic about declining birth rates, and there is plenty of the latter unaccompanied by the former.) This is pretty much the first time in history that women have some semblance of control over their reproductive trajectories, that they are in a position to act on some of their long-standing preferences. Is it really so surprising that they are not choosing to have children?

Feminism is relevant here, but not in the way that J.D. Vance et al. think. It’s relevant not because much (or any?) feminist writing celebrates forgoing motherhood to join the jet set but because feminist innovations are responsible, in large part, for providing women with (some of) the material means to control their reproductive fates and (some measure of) social license to pursue other paths. (Obviously, post Dobbs, the situation is looking ever grimmer.)

Since we’re in the business of trading anecdotes and appealing to vibes, the explanation I’ve proffered squares with my experience, limited and blinkered as it is. Take the case of my good friend, E, who doesn’t want to have children. She isn’t representative, of course, but neither are the child-haters that Harper has met at faculty parties, and both of us would have to become statisticians in order to figure out what a representative sample even is. This good friend of mine is a passionate public defender in a small city that she loves. It’s not that she craves accolades or prestige, or that she anticipates climbing up the career ladder of national politics (she doesn’t want to leave the small city that she loves), or that she wants to go to the coffee shop in peace (she likes children). It’s that she cares about her community enough to want to devote herself entirely to improving it. It’s that she’s most passionate about reforming the criminal justice system, and that she has the ability to do what she loves because women can….do things now.

Of course, it is possible to be a public defender and a mother, and it would certainly be easier to pursue both paths simultaneously in a society with better public provisions for childcare. But the reality is that time, attention, and energy are limited, and even in a socialist utopia, there would be some people who want to be so devoted to one thing that they can’t also spare time for another.

A constant complaint about the birth rate debacle is that childless people are somehow evincing despair about the future. But my friend shows that this needn’t be so. Is her commitment to improving her community not an expression of faith in its future? Are artists creating work that generations decades hence will presumably admire and puzzle over not expressing faith in the future? There are so many ways to express faith in the future that aren’t limited to performing a fairly private activity within the confines of the home. I’m not knocking having kids, of course, but you have to have a pretty myopic understanding of what optimism about future looks like to think it can only or should primarily consist in doing something pretty asocial.

Writing, after all, is a bet on the future. Now, you all just have to keep having kids so there’s someone hundreds of years from now to write a dissertation about my eventual opus.