A Positive View On Falling Fertility

Having our three children worked out well for my wife and me. So has our marriage of forty years. So, for a long time, too long, I thoughtlessly assumed that everyone should be married and have children. I wrote about the overdue recognition of my biases in my essay A Much Needed Adjustment To My Factory Settings On Marriage and Children (link in footnote below). ¹

Recently, I’ve been reading about America’s declining fertility rate. I’ve been angered by the presumption of many that falling fertility represents a collective moral failure of our liberal society and an individual moral failure of those who are childless from choice or circumstance.

It’s unseemly and rude to make these sweeping judgments about a matter so personal and individualistic. While declining fertility may be an economic problem, it’s a failure of intelligence not to recognize that the positive aspect of the fertility decline is increased choice and increased liberty.

Ross Douthat, Moral Scold

In his NYT opinion column this week titled “The Liberal Order Can’t Heal Itself,” Ross Douthat writes that falling fertility is “a shadow over everything.” Douthat blames falling fertility on “political liberalism push[ing] the envelope on individual liberties (around drugs and gambling and suicide, as well as sex and sexual identity).”

Despite or because of increased wealth and technological progress, Douthat believes we now live in a society that is “seemingly unhappier, more despairing, more addicted, more deranged.” ²

When Douthat writes about the “liberal order,” he means the political and economic systems of democracy and capitalism that have propelled the West forward for the past 80 years.

When Douthat and others reference the falling fertility rate, they mean the Total Fertility Rate. The TFR predicts how many children will be born to women based on current observed birth rates by age group. For the United States, the TFR stands at around 1.6, which is less than the 2.1 required to keep a population stable. That’s down from about 3.5 in the 1950’s baby boom. But it’s not unprecedented. The U.S. had a TFR of under 2.0 for much of the 1970’s. ³

Douthat is not far removed from either J.D. Vance saying that the childless “hate normal Americans for choosing family over…ridiculous status games” or from a newscaster saying this:

“They [the childless] just want to pursue pleasure and drinking all night and going to Beyoncé concerts. It’s this pursuit of self-pleasure in replace [sic] of fulfillment and having a family.” ⁴

This alleged cultural problem is a symptomatic one. Douthat, Vance, and others contend that people who choose to have no or fewer babies are being selfish. That it’s a sign of individualism run amok demonstrating the weakness of our society.

The even more insidious criticism of the childless, however, takes place in private conversations.

Laura Kennedy

, one of my favorite Substack writers and friends writes:

“Sometimes people – interestingly, almost always women who are older than I am – ask me whether I’m aware that I don’t have forever to have a baby. To these women I say this: “We’ve just met, and this is a dinner party. I’m unbelievably uncomfortable right now. Could you just pass the salad please?” ⁵

Falling fertility could be an economic problem

It’s important to distinguish between falling fertility as an economic worry and a cultural worry, because they are two very different things.

The economic problem is that a sustained TFR below replacement will eventually lead to a population of too few working age people supporting too many retirees who are living longer.

The excellent Penn Wharton Budget Model Center forecasts that while the US population will continue to grow in overall size through 2060, the economically important ratio of workers-to-retirees will fall from today’s 3.0 to 2.0. ⁶

The idea is that workers (defined as ages 25-64) must support retirees (65+). The worry is that the 2 to 1 ratio will be far too low for a healthy economy because two workers won’t produce enough or pay enough into the system to support social security, Medicare, and all the services required to sustain each elderly person.

Beware of muti-decade models

The Penn Wharton demographic model measures a forty-year period. It’s only as good as its assumptions, which hold current trends constant. Recall that circa 1970, there were predictions of a massive population “bomb,” which would lead to mass starvation. Things change.

The Total Fertility Rate has fluctuated in the past and will continue to fluctuate. It’s possible, for example, that today’s rate is misleadingly low as more women will have children later in life than in the past. Or that medical technology will significantly increase desired fertility.

Or perhaps our definitions of what is working age (25-64) and what is retiree age (65+) will need to be adjusted as more sixty somethings and seventy somethings live longer and healthier lives and continue working. (And why can’t we put those 19-24 year-olds to work!)

However, the number that’s most susceptible to change is immigration, which is an available solution to the economic consequences of a long term TFR below the 2.1 replacement level.

Immigration as a solution

It’s true that our current administration is extremely hostile to immigrants and immigration and is seeking to deport people as fast as it can. But administrations change and so do policies. American immigration has historically alternated between welcoming and closed, meting pot and nativism. And when we welcome immigrants they come.

In its base case, The Penn Wharton Model assumes that the net annual increases in legal, younger immigrants will be stable at about 500,000 per year. For context, America’s population is about 340 million. If the number of younger legal immigrants could be increased by about one million per year, the model predicts that the ratio of workers-to-retirees could be held constant at today’s 3 to 1 with no other changes to the model.

That doesn’t seem impossible or implausible to me. An extra million workers a year is an increase in our population of less than 0.5%.

However, Ross Douthat dismisses immigration as a solution. Without offering an alternative, he writes:

“…post-Cold War liberalism doesn’t know how to manage the internal divisions of aging societies with large immigrant populations. The liberal prescription is a normative exhortation — natives shouldn’t be bigoted and migrants should assimilate to our values, whenever we figure out what those are — that has failed so far in all its forms, center-left and center-right and “woke.” ⁷

He’s dead wrong. In fact, the “normative exhortation” Douthat describes as having “failed” is 300 years of American history and growth. As for his uncertainty about America’s aspirational values, here’s a reminder: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Immigrants are America. All of us. Yes, we have suffered from bigotry but we have a country that is not based on blood and soil or religious identification. We have had huge waves of immigration throughout American history and those populations have contributed to the American culture and assimilated. We are a melting pot now and will always be.

I reject Douthat’s dark pessimism as well as his surrender to the current moment.

Falling fertility rates are a sign of greater choice, greater intentionality

Fertility is likely falling because of cultural shifts in individual priorities. The bottom line is that people are being more intentional about whether and when to have children. Having children is a huge commitment and more intentionality and more thoughtfulness are good things. So is the ability to choose different priorities.

Our culture has changed for the better. Women have greater career opportunities. It’s no longer a given that women will prioritize having babies over having a career or choose marriage over being single at the sacrifice of their marital standards.

Part of the fertility decline is due to smaller families. Children are expensive in terms of time and resources, and from my own observation and various surveys, parenting has become far more intensive over the past four decades.

Some of that intensity is due to increased worry about children’s future in what’s perceived as a more precarious and competitive economic environment. However, some of the added intensity is due to viewing the role of being a parent as a greater priority than in the past.⁸ Both factors would lead to limiting family size, and being intentional about family size is a good thing.

Melissa Kearney, a professor and author focused on family and fertility, published a paper a few months ago that is a model of clarity, comprehensiveness, and intellectual humility. After reviewing all the available research, this is her conclusion:

“Our read of the evidence leads us to conclude that the decline in fertility across the industrialized world––including both the rise in childlessness and the reduction in [the number of children in families]––is less a reflection of specific economic costs or policies, but rather a widespread reprioritization of the role in parenthood in people’s adult lives.” ⁹

Kearney, a parent and a big fan of marriage, concludes that government incentives can make having children a better experience but they can’t induce the fertility rate needle to move very much higher. Plenty of governments have tried and have failed. ¹⁰

Better angels

America’s fertility rate is the result of millions of individual decisions. Politicians, writers, newscasters, busybodies at dinner parties, and every one of us ought to stop moralizing and show grace to our fellow Americans making these very personal and sometimes anguished decisions.

I’d rather appeal to our better angels than accept that we as a society are no longer capable of grace. I don’t know if decency will come if we expect it, but I know it will not come if we give up on it.

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Question for the comments: What did I get right and what did I get wrong?

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Watch the first minute!

1.

2. The Liberal Order Can’t Heal Itself; 12/2/25

3. Data from FRED: Federal Reserve Bank Of St. Louis:

4. Why Are So Many Americans Choosing Not To Have Children

5. The Window Closes

6. From Penn Wharton Budget Center: U.S. Demographic Projections

7. The Liberal Order Can’t Heal Itself; 12/2/25

8. NBER paper: Parenthood and Well-Being and from The Economist: Parents now spend twice as much time with their children as 50 years ago.

9. NBER paper: Why Is Fertility So Low In High Income Countries

10. See NBER paper in Footnote 9 above.

Countries have been more successful in lowering fertility. China’s one child policy from 1980 to 2016 decreased its birth rate.

In 1804, the Napoleonic Code changed inheritance laws so that estates had to be left equally to sons and daughters. Demographers believe that this was a key cause of the drop in France’s fertility rate relative to other European countries. Parents did not want to divide their land among many children.