Elizabeth Bruenig, a successful married mother of two, covered the Natal Conference in Austin, Texas for the Atlantic last month, which, she correctly notes, was largely devoid of voices from the left.
“Liberals seem almost uniformly unwilling to address the subject of population decline whatsoever,” Bruenig writes, “a stance that warrants reconsideration.”
Liberal unwillingness to address population decline is not quite as uniform as Bruenig suggests, a topic we will return to shortly, but Bruenig does offer two explanations for why liberals don’t like to talk about the subject, both of which contain some truth.
First, Bruenig claims that some Democrats believe that any acknowledgment that having children is good “requires conceding that not having children is bad.” Second, Bruenig argues that worrying about birth rates is a conservative-branded issue, and that this drives otherwise sympathetic liberals away from the issue.
I think that both of these explanations are a start but don’t go far enough. Not only are Democrats averse to conceding that not having children is bad, they actually believe not having children is good!
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), for example, has famously questioned whether it is even ethical to have children because of the role Democrats believe children play in making climate change worse.
And then there is the gender equity issue. As much as Democrats wish it were not true, the biological reality is that women still bear most of the cost when a couple has a child. Women are the only ones capable of giving birth, and they have a natural advantage in the provision of infant care (as do all other female mammals).
This means that childbearing will always involve a pause in a woman’s professional life, and as Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin’s research has shown, it is these pauses which are the cause of the gender pay gap. As a result, every time a woman pauses her career to have a child, she is betraying the sisterhood. And liberal women judge her for it.
In short, the Democratic Party is inherently anti-baby because it values female professional success above motherhood.
But don’t trust me. Just ask Dr. Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, the authors of What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice. As they recently wrote in the New York Times, “For progressives, waiting to have children has also become a kind of ethical imperative. Gender equality and female empowerment demand that women’s self-advancement not be sacrificed on the altar of motherhood.”
You can see this slavish devotion to gender equity in what little response the Democratic Party has had to the population crisis.
After the National Center for Health Statistics released its annual report on fertility showing that the percentage of women who gave birth in 2023 fell to an all-time low, President Joe Biden’s White House Council of Economic Advisors released an issue brief admitting that falling fertility “creates significant headwinds to economic growth, the fiscal sustainability of public benefit programs, and the trend of continuous improvements in living standards.”
But instead of trying to address the falling birthrate by trying to increase births, the Biden administration instead called for government programs to increase the labor force participation rate, the thinking being that we can afford to have fewer people if the more of the people we do have are working. Specifically, the Biden administration called for increased childcare spending so that mothers could go back to work faster after they had a child.
There are two huge problems with this approach. First, as I explained here, the increase in output caused by subsidizing child care is an accounting fiction.
But more importantly, most mothers of young children do not want to work full-time.
According to the Pew Research Center, 53% of married women with children under 18 would prefer to work part-time, and another 23% would prefer not to have a job outside the home at all. Just 23% want a full-time job.
FULL LIST OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS, ACTIONS, AND PROCLAMATIONS TRUMP HAS MADE AS PRESIDENT
The Democratic Party’s approach to falling fertility is to force those 77% of mothers who do not want to work full time back into a job they don’t want when they would rather spend more time with their family.
Unfortunately, Bruenig fails to even mention the true clause of declining birth rates: the decline of marriage. It is simple math: the younger women are when they get married, the more children they have. And married women have almost double the number of children single women do. If, like Bruenig, you believe “humanity ought to persist on this Earth,” then your No. 1 priority should be helping young men and women get and stay married.