Live-and-let-live has always been part of the American ethos, but in recent decades, this laissez-faire individualism has become a prime directive in elite ethics.
This is one reason the United States didn’t start wrestling with the baby bust until the past couple of years, a decade after Europe started facing the reality of low and falling birth rates.
If people aren’t having children, that’s their choice, the thinking went. It’s logical in a way: The point of the sexual revolution was to disentangle love, sex, marriage, and baby-making. The point of the pill was to end the idea of parenting, likewise marriage, as the natural thing that most grown-ups just do. Becoming a parent became a lifestyle choice instead.
The result was a culture that believes, as writer Stephanie Murray describes it, “children are a personal choice and therefore a personal problem. Have as many as you want — just make sure they don’t bother the rest of us.”
We’re not supposed to favor family over nonfamily: If you offer parental leave, shouldn’t you offer puppy leave? If Congress creates a child tax credit, shouldn’t it create a doggy tax credit?
We’re not supposed to care if nobody else is having children. Parents aren’t even supposed to ask their grown kids if and when they’re planning to become parents themselves.
We’re not even supposed to wonder about anyone’s family but our own.
“Can we please stop,” the feminist columnists would insist last decade, “in research schematics and at the Thanksgiving table — wondering about women’s wombs? They made a choice, thank you.”
But that autonomy-worshipping breed of feminism, in which even praising or supporting family counts as The Handmaid’s Tale, is fading away. It’s no longer tenable to argue that the baby bust doesn’t affect us or to portray our demographic collapse as a simple matter of women finally getting what they want.
Women want babies but feel it’s not within reach — men even more so. Places with fewer and fewer children become sadder. When fewer adults are parents, our culture is less hopeful.
Schools are closing. Playgrounds are emptying out. It turns out that what other people do affects us.
That may be why a majority of the public, in a reversal from last year, now say the baby bust is bad.
“What type of impact do you think it would have on our country if fewer people chose to have children in the future?” asked the Pew Research Center, as if the birth rate hadn’t already fallen by 25% in 18 years.
Last year, 47% said having fewer children and fewer parents was bad, 20% said it was good, and 31% said it was neither — the old live-and-let-live answer.
This year, a full 53% of Americans said it’s a bad thing if adults aren’t becoming parents, while the “Who cares?” answer fell to 26%.
A world with fewer children is a sadder world, and we’re starting to realize it — hopefully before it’s too late.