To the extent Democrats see falling fertility as a problem at all (many Democrats such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) doesn’t believe in having children at all), they often claim more women would have children if the government only provided benefits needed to support mothers in the workplace.
Their preferred agenda often includes paid parental leave, government-run child care centers, and government-run preschool. If Republicans would only agree to invest in this “care economy,” Democrats argue, women would happily have more children.
If only that were true. The Financial Times has a story Monday out of Finland in which, despite having all the liberal family policies Democrats want, including an outright annual cash payment for every child’s family through the age of 17, birth rates are falling, fast.
“The strange thing with fertility is nobody really knows what’s going on,” Family Federation of Finland research director Anna Rotkirch told the outlet. “The policy responses are untried because it’s a new situation. It’s not primarily driven by economics or family policies. It’s something cultural, psychological, biological, cognitive.”
“Until recently, fertility decline was driven by families having fewer children than their parents and grandparents,” the outlet went on to report. “Now the key dynamic is childlessness. In Finland, three-quarters of the recent decline in fertility is attributable to people who have no children.”
And just who are these people who are having no children?
“Nearly 40 per cent of Finnish men with low education are now childless at the age of 45 (and probably for life): a ‘huge’ proportion,” the outlet reported. “Most have no partners. Men are as likely as women to say they want children, but are more likely to be childless.”
So, the problem isn’t that men and women don’t want children. It’s that a larger proportion of men are being cut out of marriage and family life altogether.
Something very similar is happening here in the United States, too. As Patrick Brown noted in National Review, much of the birth dearth here can also be attributed to fewer people getting married and people waiting longer to get married.
“Among married women, fertility rates have remained largely stable over the past two or three decades — the number of births per 1,000 married women (age 15–44) was 83.6 in 2021, lower than in recent years but not historically low. If Americans were getting married at the rates of prior generations, it would make the decline in the overall birth rate less steep,” Brown wrote.
“Imagine if everything else had stayed the same — the number of women in their reproductive prime, the fertility rates of married and unmarried women, the economic picture — but instead of continuing their downward slide, marriage rates had stayed at the 2007 level. In this admittedly simplified scenario, the stork would have brought 1.6 million more babies to our shores over the past decade and a half,” Brown calculated.
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1.6 million is a lot of babies!
If our nation’s leaders are concerned about our nation’s falling birthrates, and they should be, then instead of focusing on making it easier for mothers to work full-time, they should focus on making it easier for young people to get and stay married.