The Answer to the Birth Rate Decline: Do My Favorite Thing

With the fertility crisis, the means is the end.

Heads up that this article links to a lot of my other articles, so if you’re new here, feel free to take your time clicking on everything!

Photo by Jimmy Conover on Unsplash

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I’ve written about the birth rate before. I’ve even proposed solutions for what I believe might help, such as building more housing in large cities and making cities feel safer and more welcoming to families. I’ve also pointed out strategies that clearly don’t help, like making the standards for a good parent impossibly high while also yelling at people for not having more kids.

While I still believe all of that, I have to wonder if sometimes I (and anyone else who writes about the birth rate) is using it as a convenient excuse to shoehorn their favorite policy ideas. Whether the birth rate was an issue or not, I still want more housing built in large cities. I also want urban public transit to feel safe for everyone, and I think excessive parent-shaming is bad. These are all things I already happened to believe were good or bad, and they map very nicely onto the birth rate.

But how much of the declining birth rate would be “solved” by changing these things? In America, maybe a little, but it probably wouldn’t be enough to reverse the pretty stark trend of a shrinking population. At best, it would enable married couples who already want kids to have the number they want (something I think is good!) but that wouldn’t change the entire country—most married couples don’t want four or five kids, they want two (maybe three.) I went over that here. And it certainly wouldn’t change the worldwide birth rate decline—whatever is happening to shrink the population in America is also happening across Europe and Asia, among other places. Even India, now the world’s most populous country, is falling below replacement rates. It sounds nice to talk about building more housing in San Francisco, but that’s not going to change what’s happening in India.

Increasingly, I’m starting to think that “pronatalism,” at this point, is more about harm reduction than actually reversing a trend, unless technological solutions are implemented, such as artificial wombs or AI to perform more jobs and care for the elderly. But moreover, from “kids are too expensive” to “women have too many rights,” it feels like the birth rate conversation is more about justifying things you already want to see happen, and less about actually reversing the trend. The birth rate issue is merely a convenient cover for shoehorning your favorite topic. The end doesn’t justify the means—the means is the end.