Men Are Delaying Fatherhood To Boyboss

The birth rate discourse refers to "women delaying childbirth," assuming men have zero preference or say in the matter.

Photo by Juliane Liebermann on Unsplash

When people talk about how to raise the birth rate, they focus on the female side of the equation regardless of whether they’re on the left or the right. Those on the right might talk about how women need to stop prioritizing selfish, frivolous things like their made-up email jobs, and do their motherly duty (which includes, of course, never having anyone to help you, lest you destroy your children forever.) Meanwhile, those on the left might say that the birth rate is declining because women are rightfully choosing to have fewer kids—that the amount of kids people were having in 1990 wasn’t women’s choice, but women today have settled on the true preferred number. To them, women have soured off motherhood because of whatever their own pet issue is—climate change, late-stage capitalism, lazy husbands, you name it. But either way, apparently, it’s only a woman’s choice.

The assumption either way is that women are the sole decision makers about procreation. When some pronatalists urge women to have more children, especially married women, presumably they think two things, both of which don’t make a lot of sense: either every married man would be open to five kids if only his wife allowed it, or they think women should disregard the wishes of their husbands and start spermjacking them for the good of the country (so much for being submissive wives!)

Nobody seems to ask, “How many kids do men actually want?” Even when it comes to access to contraception lowering birth rates, how much of that change is women finally freeing themselves from the shackles of nonstop pregnancy versus women and their husbands breathing a sigh of relief that they can have two children instead of six? We assume women of yesteryear were pregnant constantly against their will while their husbands happily enjoyed a brood of ten. But what if both husband and wife really only wanted three, and neither had much of a choice unless they wanted to indefinitely practice abstinence?

Some people might get pedantic and remind me that cisgender men don’t give birth, so it’s not about them. But today, the decision of whether or not a couple has children, how many they have, and when they start trying, is typically made together. This is obviously different from the olden days, when having children was less of a choice at all and just something that happened to most people if they had sex (although like I just said, it’s possible men had opinions then too.) So regardless of who actually gets pregnant, the reality is that the decisions made around having children often involve men—heavily. Why is nobody talking about them?