The Fertility Crisis is About High Standards

And that's not entirely a bad thing

As a liberal, I struggle to write about the “fertility crisis” because like many things, it’s become needlessly politicized. In fact, I once tweeted about it in a fairly neutral way, postulating the reasons for it instead of catastrophizing about it, and was told that I shouldn’t even be talking about it because it would be playing into right-wing agendas, and that we had “more pressing issues” to deal with, like an ongoing pandemic.

I have to be honest, the “more pressing issues” argument holds no water for me. We always have more pressing issues to deal with, and following that statement to its logical conclusion, it means that we should exclusively post about those issues. This means, naturally, that nobody should be posting amazing stuff like this:

Sexy cunt-serving genderswapped AI Kim Jong Un aside, everyone knows that “you can’t post about this because there are more serious issues going on right now” just means that for some reason, the person is triggered or upset about the fact that you’re talking about this topic. And I think that on the left, while many of us are unapologetically pro-family (We want universal healthcare! We want paid parental leave! We want our kids to be safer in our communities!) there are others on the left who view anything pro-family as inherently reactionary. It’s an understandable mistake to make, given that a lot of right-wing accounts on Twitter spend all their time posting stuff like this:

It doesn’t even matter if I consider the declining birth rate to be serious or important, because that’s not the point. I’m just writing about why it’s happening. It’s up to you to determine if you care about it.

Anyway, I think the majority of the fertility crisis can be boiled down to higher expectations—not only financial expectations. Expectations of the type of parent you want to be, expectations for how safe and comfortable you want your kids to be, and the biggest obstacle of all: expectations for who you want to marry.

So let’s tackle the marriage part first. If you want kids, you usually have to find someone with whom to have them. For most of history, this person was not necessarily the love of your life. Maybe some people were in love, but it wasn’t seen as a requirement. The idea of dating multiple people for multiple years or breaking off relationships because there wasn’t a perfect alignment of values or chemistry, was not done. You picked some guy (or girl) who lived within horse distance, and married them within a few months of meeting. They didn’t have to be that good looking; of course it was ideal if they were. I’m sure there were exceptions, but the idea of not being sure if you were going to propose to your “girlfriend of eight years” because you still needed to “find yourself” and “see what else is out there” was not something that was done even in our grandparents’ time. People married their college or high school boyfriends and girlfriends. Before that, people married someone who lived around their area, maybe someone who frequented their religious institution, and before that, people married their cousins.

We have increased expectations for partners. Being able to move anywhere in the country we want and having access to dating apps allows us to be pickier. Being reasonably okay to hang out with, not hideous, being capable of performing some kind of labor, and not being a second-degree relative are no longer the criteria most people have for a partner. Plus, even if someone meets the superficial requirements, relationships can break up months or years later for other reasons.

Before people place the blame on women here for wanting a 6’5” Chad who makes $700K a year, men are equally responsible.