Are Car Seats Ruining the Birth Rate?

JD Vance accidentally stumbled upon the biggest problem with pronatalism

In case you recently heard that JD Vance blamed car seats for lowering the birth rate and thought to yourself, This is probably like that couch sex hoax, let me assure you that he did actually say this, during a March 2023 congressional hearing.

But hold up before you make fun of him (at least for this.) He’s not entirely wrong.

I’m no fan of JD Vance, but he has a tendency to say things that are technically kind-of correct, but in the weirdest way possible. Take, for example, his bizarre ramblings about how people with no children should pay more in taxes than people with children. He was basically just describing the child tax credit, which most people think is a good thing, but phrasing it in an obnoxious, punitive way that turned everyone off.

This is what he actually said about car seats and the birth rate:

American families aren't having enough children. I think there's evidence that some of the things that we're doing to parents is driving down the number of children that American families are having. In particular, there's evidence that the car seat rules that we've imposed, which of course I want kids to drive in car seats, have driven down the number of babies born in this country by over 100,000. So as we think about how to make kids safe here, I think we should do it in a way that's accommodating to American families, and I encourage your organization to do that.

I feel like the car seat thing sounds really obscure and random to someone who doesn’t have kids, but as someone who has kids, he’s kind of cooking here. In fact, I feel like he probably went on this rant right after dealing with some car seat related fiasco with his two young children.

I have two kids, both of whom travel in gigantic, heavy car seats, but that’s expected because they’re little. But parents today are expected to keep our kids in car seats longer than ever before. I met a mom who has children in elementary school who said that the size and inconvenience of her kids’ car seats means they rarely fly as a family, even though they can afford to. I have no childhood memories of being in a car seat (I’m sure I was at some point, but not for long enough for it to be part of my memory) whereas now, children as old as ten or twelve are recommended to be in booster seats. I am part of a car seat safety group on Facebook which includes moms posting photos of their clearly pubescent children still in booster seats, asking if the straps are correctly aligned. Car seats also have to be rear-facing as long as possible, which can make things very unpleasant for a child who gets carsick, or for large four-year-olds who wind up folded into their cramped carseat like a quesadilla. And to top it off, if your child throws up in a car seat, you can’t clean it because any kind of soap destroys the integrity of the material and you basically have to buy a new one or somehow remove all the vomit with a “lightly damp towel.” When I told my mom about this, she confirmed this just wasn’t the world that existed when she was parenting young children.

But these rules don’t exist just to annoy parents, or to give your local Facebook Mom Scold something to feel high and mighty about (although let me be clear: they also accomplish both of those things.) They exist because they keep kids safer. Take a look at the below chart, which would be even more striking if it focused on per capita (there are more children in the US today than in 1975, making the decrease in overall vehicle accident fatalies more significant.)

Edit: I have since discovered the source of JD Vance’s hypothesis, and like I said before, he’s not entirely wrong. Feel free to check that study out and draw your own conclusions.

So if you’re a pronatalist like JD Vance, you’re struck in a pretty difficult spot (and it’s why he probably shouldn’t have said anything.) If a law exists to keep kids from dying, and it actually accomplishes that goal, is it really worth attacking, even if it has the unintended second order effect of fewer children being born? The death of a child is significantly worse than a child simply never being conceived (and in the case of carseat rules preventing births, it only makes sense in the context of parents not wanting to deal with the stress of buying a new car to accommodate a third car seat, not childless people forgoing children altogether over the fear of having to buy a car seat at all.)

But I’ll take that one step further, because this doesn’t stop at car seats. Perhaps accidentally, JD Vance stumbled upon the biggest challenge for pronatalism.