Family Policy is Steaming Toward A Demographic Iceberg, Part I

There’s still time to avoid the trap of ignoring a changing context

Note: It’s a tricky balance between writing bigger-picture think pieces and responding to the chaotic whirlwind that is the new administration. So if you want my take on the federal funding freeze debacle, I wrote a piece for Early Learning Nation / The 74, and I encourage you to give it a read.

There is a huge, slow change that is inexorably heading toward all of humanity. Its tendrils will affect nearly every aspect of family policy and society writ large–it’s really more of a context than a specific challenge–yet few are paying attention. Among those who are, the issue is becoming a wedge: one camp sees it as an entirely new epoch, the other isn’t entirely convinced it’s bad, or if it is, that it requires much action.

I’m not talking about climate change; I’m talking about demographic change.

There is a lot to be said about demographic change–which is primarily marked by aging and longer-lived populations combined with rapidly declining birth rates–and the challenges it poses. I’ve written some on this before, concluding that nearly every societal goal one might hold will be impacted, usually negatively. This is most definitely true for family policy goals! Today I mainly want to talk, as someone on the ideological left, about why demographic change — especially the birth rate component — has become so polarizing, why many seem slow to care or react¹, and how we might take a more productive angle of approach that could actually enhance U.S. family policy. I posit three explanations for the ambivalence:

1. Concepts of overpopulation and its resultant environmental damage are deeply embedded in the progressive worldview

2. Questions of birth rates in the 2020s immediately and understandably evoke questions of reproductive rights and gender equity

3. The language around demographic change is awful, and the political right Is. Not. Helping.

By the way, I’m not the only left-leaner to note this polarization: Ezra Klein wrote recently in his New York Times column that “Fears of falling global fertility are to many on the right what climate change is to the left: the master problem of the age, the slow-moving crisis that is even now destabilizing societies…I wish that worry over falling global fertility was not quite so right-wing-coded.” (We’ll get back to the rest of Klein’s assertion in Part II.)

You may be thinking that this polarization is a new post-Dobbs phenomenon, but it actually tracks back much earlier. In his excellent essay The Heresy of Decline, policy writer Paul Constance recounts the tale of Philip Longman, a demographer who in 2004 wrote a book called The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity And What To Do About It²:

At the time, Longman was a fellow at the New America Foundation, a left-of-center think tank in Washington, where he was researching the impact of aging on entitlement programs. When he and his late wife were unable to conceive a child, Longman began to study fertility trends. The Empty Cradle, the result of that study, synthesized decades of research showing that in many rich countries, fertility rates were so low that they threatened to create a self-reinforcing cycle of depopulation that would be extremely difficult to reverse. He cited the work of numerous demographers and economists who warned that such a cycle could be profoundly destabilizing.

In a recent interview, Longman said that the book received a chilly reception from progressive organizations and media outlets, who saw it as a veiled attack on gender equality, reproductive rights, and the sustainability goals of Paul R. Ehrlich (author of The Population Bomb) and other environmentalists.

Reactions from conservatives were somewhat warmer. Longman was invited to speak by Focus on the Family and other religious organizations, as well as by governments in Russia, Japan and Poland that wanted his advice on increasing birthrates. But when parts of his book began to be selectively cited by people with nationalist and far-right agendas, Longman decided to step away and move on to other research topics.

So what’s going on here?

The Lasting Fallout of The Population Bomb

It’s difficult to overstate how much Paul Ehrlich’s ideas in The Population Bomb got into the waters of the progressive movement and Democratic establishment. For those unfamiliar, Ehrlich is a Stanford biologist who, writing in 1968, made predictions–since proven to be massively incorrect–that an endlessly growing population would consume so many of Earth’s resources that millions would die in the resulting famines. The book ended up selling millions of copies and, per Smithsonian Magazine, “would become one of the most influential books of the 20th century.”

Subtle!

The book also caused enormous amounts of suffering. Ehrlich explicitly called for forced sterilization and for limiting the number of children that women could have. He was particularly influential in the Indian government’s decision to forcibly sterilize millions of its citizens; Ehrlich wrote, “When we suggested sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children…[the United States] should have volunteered logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments. We should have sent doctors to aid in the program by setting up centers for training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies. Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause.”

As the writer Scott Alexander has explained, “Ehrlich’s supporters included President Lyndon Johnson, who told the Prime Minister of India that US foreign aid was conditional on India sterilizing lots of people. The broader Democratic Party and environmentalist movement were completely on board.” Indeed, despite the horrific results of his proposals and the fact we’ve known for decades now there is no such ‘bomb,’ Ehrlich remains a member in good standing of the intellectual left: Alexander goes on to note that Ehrlich, “won the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Prize in 1990, the Crafoord Prize that same year, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012. He was recently interviewed on 60 Minutes about the importance of sustainability; the mass sterilization campaign never came up. He is about as honored and beloved as it’s possible for a public intellectual to get.”

I bring all this up not to bash a 92-year-old man in the twilight of his life. I bring it up because you can start to see how much the left has to unlearn about its “priors” on population. If children are primarily seen as a consumer of scarce planetary resources, then surely as a matter of public policy a smaller population is a good thing. We still see a version of this thinking today, but around climate change rather than food: what are the ethics of bringing into the world a child who will generate carbon emissions into an already-oversaturated atmosphere?

The reality is that underpopulation may pose as much of a threat to humanity’s well-being–and, in turn, the planet’s, if it causes wars or restricts nations’ ability to fight climate change because they’re busy dealing with social, economic, or political upheaval–as overpopulation. Setting aside all the valid philosophical arguments around the broader value of children, as Philip Longman wrote back in 2004, “population growth underlies our modern concept of freedom” because nearly every social, economic, and political system has population growth (or at least stability) baked in as an assumption.

Of course, even if you can un-Population Bomb-pill yourself, there’s still a problem when it comes to worrying about birth rates: one very quickly runs into a question of choice.

Babies and Reproductive Rights

A society with declining fertility rates that turns to subjugating women and forcing them to bear children is literally the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale. As Margaret Atwood’s Offred writes, “There is no such thing as a sterile man anymore, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that’s the law.”

The Handmaid’s Tale, of course, has become a–if not the–cultural touchstone for anti-MAGA resistance when it comes to reproductive rights. There is a reason that women in Handmaid garb could be found at nearly every pro-choice rally since 2016. A Guardian article in 2018 asserted that the outfit “has emerged as one of the most powerful current feminist symbols of protest, in a subversive inversion of its association with the oppression of women.”

So the conversation around what low birth rate presage for women’s rights was already fraught, and then along came Dobbs v. Jackson and the COVID-19 pandemic. The fall of Roe supercharged fears around women’s rights and brought about the actual loss of rights in many states, while the pandemic put a harsh spotlight on the uneven care burdens that women carry. These facts can make concerns about low birth rates bring up a bitter laugh: what did you think was going to happen?

Consider a review that feminist writer Moira Donegan penned of What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice, a 2024 book by liberal philosophers Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman. In a New York Times interview, Berg summarized her perspective thusly:

It’s easy to dismiss declining birthrates as the kind of thing that conservatives who are worried about family values or the national population should worry about. But I think that there is something here that liberals and progressives should care about and, in fact, worry about.

Increasingly, young people from progressive and liberal circles are finding it harder to navigate the question of whether or not to have children, one of the most important personal decisions they’re going to be making in their lives, and one of great ethical and political significance.

We see the gap between the number of children that people say they want and the number that they actually have steadily increasing. But I found that the question of children has become the kind of thing that people are more and more uncomfortable thinking about personally and discussing socially.

This situation is exacerbated by a political climate in which having children becomes increasingly coded as conservative and reactionary. So people are finding themselves paralyzed by indecision. That, for me, is the problem. That’s what I’m hoping to address and alleviate.

Donegan is having none of it. She retorts:

The authors [Berg and Wiseman] portray a hostile, anti-baby left as a counterpoint to the ineffable value of human life, the importance of sacrifice in building character, and the fundamental supremacy of procreation over other pursuits like career, art, friendship, or ideas. After all, they ask, “How would ideas endure without anyone to examine, share, and transmit them?”

Such facile platitudes do not address women’s real concerns about motherhood. Since the pandemic there have been a number of robust investigations into the excessive demands of motherhood on women’s time and money: the New York Times’s package on pandemic motherhood, memorably titled “The Primal Scream”; the data-driven reporting of writers like Jessica Grose; and the vast empirical study conducted by University of Wisconsin sociologist Jessica Calarco in her recent book Holding It Together. Berg and Wiseman largely bypass these discussions and do not make a case for policy reforms that would make it easier to have babies. They seem to believe that material conditions are largely irrelevant to women’s reluctance to have children. The real problem, they assert, is the fact that millennial women do not want babies enough. Their inquiry is into women’s wrong desires rather than their constrained opportunities…

…Liberal pro-natalists like Berg and Wiseman often complain that millennial mothers are too whiny about the difficulties of parenthood. But shouldn’t alleviating those difficulties be a central pro-natalist concern? It is conspicuous that Berg and Wiseman, like most pro-natalists, focus almost all their attention on childless women and the supposed necessity of convincing them to give birth. They have remarkably little to say about what happens after those babies arrive. Maybe they take issue with mothers who speak frankly about the difficulty of their own lives simply because such testimonies are not helping the PR effort. The pro-natalist goal, after all, is not to make mothers happier. It is merely to make them more numerous.

One challenge that neither Berg & Wiseman nor Donegan fully reckon with is that none of these explanations do a great job explaining why birth rates are plummeting across the entire world, from the most family-friendly and gender equitable nations to the most oppressive female rights-restrictive nations.

Yet herein lies the last piece of the puzzle, to my eyes: the language in use gives off what kids these days might call the ick.

Language Matters

If we were making a leaderboard of words around demographic change that suck, near the top would surely be “natal” and its cousin “pronatal.”

“Natal” is such a clinical and sterile term. The most frequent usage in common parlance I can think of is that pregnant women take “prenatal vitamins.” To Donegan’s point, the word actually removes the mother from the equation except insofar as she is the vessel for the baby. Indeed, while I know good-faith thinkers who would describe themselves as pronatalists simply because they see future threats to society or want people to have their desired family size, the whole brand has a very means-to-an-end feel. Last year, Politico reported on “Natalcon” (again, ew!), a now-annual conference that is some bizarre grafting of pronatalism and far-right-ness:

NatalCon’s emphasis on childbirth notwithstanding, there are very few women in the cavernous conference room of the LINE Hotel. The mostly male audience includes people of all ages, many of whom are childless themselves...over the course of the conference, the seemingly novel arguments for having children fade and give way to a different set of concerns. Throughout the day, speakers and participants hint at the other aspects of modern life that worried them about future generations in the U.S. and other parts of the West: divorce, gender integration, “wokeness,” declining genetic “quality.”… This conference suggests there’s a simple way around the problem of majority rule: breeding a new majority—one that looks and sounds just like them.

Relatedly, the language around those who don’t have children can get rough–we don’t even have a great definitional word, as childless or childfree both can carry unwanted connotations.³ (Marriage also gets quickly implicated, as there is a strong connection between marriages and births, and we all know how easy it is to talk about why someone isn’t getting married!) The euphemistic phrases are far worse: as I wrote recently about a pair of conservative scholars’ attempt to define those without children or a spouse as “kinless”⁴:

To their credit, [Alysse] ElHage and [Brad] Wilcox concede that “there is a fine line between becoming more marriage friendly as a society and (wrongly) making our single friends and family feel less valuable because they are alone.” However, this feels more like pity than an acknowledgment that those who are single and childless can live richly meaningful lives and contribute immensely to a healthy society. Others have trampled over that line, whether [Vice President] J.D. Vance’s now infamous “childless cat ladies” quip or Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s barb that “the childless are the ones that are destroying the country.”

There’s a bigger problem here, too, which is that demographic change is defined by more than just births. If you think about a given nation and what its population age makeup will look like in the future, there are three factors at play (holding immigration/emigration at zero for these purposes): the number of births, the number of deaths, and how many people are in different age bands. Thus, a hypothetical nation that has a low birth rate but also a low life expectancy (let’s say everyone follows the plot of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode and commits ritual suicide upon turning 60) will face a very different set of challenges–and on a very different timeline–than a nation with a low birth rate, high life expectancy and young median population age, or a nation with a low birth rate, high life expectancy and high median population age.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau; note the rapid jump between 2020 and 2040–that’s the Boomers, and that’s the transition we’re living out right now.

All of this nuance gets collapsed when we just talk about babies. America is a low birth rate, high life expectancy, high median age nation (our median age is currently around 39). It’s true that with immigration figured in, the U.S. is not projected to hit “peak” population until around 2080.⁵ Yet we are about to go through a shocking amount of graying: at the turn of the millennium, slightly more than one in 10 Americans was over the age of 65; by 2040, it will be more than one in five, with much smaller birth cohorts coming behind.⁶ Some of the story behind those numbers is good–I’m glad American adults are living longer! (And hey, what other age band would we get our presidents from? [/sarcasm])–but descriptively, those are the contours of our new demographic context. We need better ways to talk about the big picture and to prepare for predictable consequences.

In Part II of this series, I’m going to offer some thoughts of how we might do just that–and how taking demographic change seriously might actually open new doors for progressive family policy goals.

1. This is painting with an over-broad brush, of course. For instance, Caring Across Generations, a group founded by stalwart labor activists Ai-Jen Poo and Sarita Gupta, has been doing work on connecting the dots between child care and senior care since 2011.

2. Longman deserves some sort of award for prescience: reports put out these days on demographic change largely mirror the observations he was making over 20 years ago.

3. So, too, with “fertility.” There is a technical reason that demographers use “fertility rate” instead of “birth rate”: as terms of art, the fertility rate refers to the number of live births per 1,000 women of reproductive age, while the birth rate refers to the number of live births per 1,000 members of a given population. That means that if you have two populations with different age structures (that is, within those 1,000 members, there are relatively more or relatively fewer women of childbearing age), the birth rate might look different despite women in those populations having the same average number of children. So demographers prefer measures of fertility under that definition. Ok, fine. But in lay terms, “fertility” is a creepy-sounding adjective to apply to women. It conjures up Atwood-ian images of women’s value being attached to their literal ability to conceive and/or bear children. After all, infertility is a commonly-understood concept yet that’s not at all what the “fertility rate” refers to.

4. The poor language around children can cut both ways. As Stephanie H. Murray recently wrote in The Atlantic, we’re OK with people disparaging the presence of children in a way that we would never allow for basically any other population subgroup.

5. For what it’s worth, these types of peak population projections (worldwide) keep being revised earlier.

6. Relative to 2007, the most recent U.S. domestic birth peak, around 650,000 fewer babies are currently born in the country each year (~3.67 million vs. ~4.32 million).