Why women are no longer having babies

Now that we are in women’s history month, and with Friday being International Women’s Day, there is an increasing flood of articles about women in society.  Almost all of them “get it”, but the getting it seems to be in frame with the patriarchal system we live in, and therefore don’t seem to get it at all.

A case in point.  My favourite newspaper, the Financial Times, ran an opinion piece in the FTWeekend over 24/25 February.  It is a well written article, and is titled, “The Troubling Decline in the Global Fertility Rate.”  I would have written this post directly back to the FT, but it is too long to ever be published, and I didn’t fancy being the silent falling tree in the forest that nobody has ever heard.

The diagnosis in the article and its prescriptions are good if you accept the fundamental premise behind it.  I will parse the article and respond as if we were having a conversation, as there is much to take issue with.

By the end of this century, almost every country in the world could have a shrinking population…we need to be prepared for a drop in younger workers.

The explosion in the population on earth is one of the greatest challenges the planet faces.  We have placed all faith in our ability to innovate our way out of the impact we are having on the natural world, but it cannot happen fast enough, particularly when so many of us continue to deny our impact and do nothing to change our behaviour to lessen our footprint.  

Implied in the statement is also the thought that the current state of the world—late stage capitalism, war, environmental degradation, decreasing opportunity for rising generations, the widening gap between rich and poor, stalled productivity growth—is worth preserving, is a system and a set up that we should actually want.

Some authorities estimate that the truly sustainable level of humanity is 20% of what it is now.  Imagine how much cleaner the air would be.  Scientists have now labelled our short-lived geological time era as the Anthropocene.  Humanity has had a more profound impact on the natural world, on mass extinction, than ice ages.

People are living longer due to advances in healthcare and a decline in poverty, but they are also having fewer babies.  The global fertility rate has halved to 2.3 over the past 50 years, just above the replacement rate of 2.1, where the population replaces itself from generation to generation.  But in most developed economies the fertility rate is well below 2.1.

This is a welcome and gentle way to step back from the brink, although we are doing our best to accelerate things with war, a symptom of overcrowding and wanting to play in someone else’s back yard.

The upshot is a fall in the working-age population across the developed world [fewer workers], which will bring significant social, economic, and political costs if left unaddressed.

Cynical me considers the author’s perspective of wanting a younger generation’s taxes to pay for the current retiring generations medical and pension benefits.  The entire concept and system of social security and universal healthcare are predicated on a tax base which grows faster than the expenses required to run the system.  For those countries, eg the UK, which have state medical support, or most nations with a social security system, the stresses are beyond evident.  Spiralling debt levels are symptomatic of societies that simply don’t want to face the future.

Some blame a dystopian outlook among millennials and Gen Z [for a drop in fertility] or [fears about raising children with climate change].  While a child-free life has gained appeal among some, the vast majority of under 30-s in American who don’t have children still want them.

What this fails to point it, is why they still want them, who wants them.  In a recent survey about relationships, significantly more men than women want marriage.  Carlyn Beccia, a woman who writes on the Medium and Substack platforms–give her a read and subscribe, she is fabulous, highlighted a 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that 28% of men compared with just 18% of women say being married is “extremely important or very important for a fulfilling life.”  Additionally, more men want children than women.  A 2024 Pew Research Center Survery found the same for having children, 57% of men and 45% of women want to have children.

The conclusion from these stats is that men want monogamy, marriage and babies more than women.  And herein lies the crux of this article, its unspoken bias.  It is men who care about the declining fertility rate, for it is symbolic of the status quo.

The long-term drop in the fertility rate is mostly the result of positive socio-economic trends.  First, global female labour force participation and education levels have risen over the past century.

Statistically true, but what it leaves out is the deeper truth, that although more women are participating in the workforce, that the playing field is far from even, and the absence of equal access to equivalent pay, and work, continues to hamper.  And what do you think a woman’s reaction might be when she is willing to put in as much or more than a man to her work?  That the system is rigged against her.  Every woman knows that she has to work harder than her male colleagues to get the same treatment or equal pay or equal opportunity, if she gets it at all.

What is also missing from this narrative is that women are taking over higher education.  Student populations at university level and at grad school level are increasingly female, more true the higher you go in academia.  Part of this is surely a female rebellion against the inequality—saying ‘I will have the additional qualifications to ensure I can compete’.  But it is also a rejection of the narrative on which this article is based.  Women are voting with their feet and their brains.  The longer I study, and the more educated I become, the more likely I am going to have children late, or not at all.  Why, because I do it for me.

I think you can see where I am going with this.  The unholy alliance between the Christian Right and the Conservative movement and control over reproductive rights is a naked attempt to subjugate women and own the female body, reproduction itself.

More and more women are waking up.

Second, better welfare systems and lower childhood mortality have reduced the need to have several children for financial security.

This reminds me of inertia—a force which continues to exert itself simply because it exists.  We have children at or above the replacement rate so that we don’t have to think about our future.  But whose financial security are we talking about?  Who had financial security in the first place?  Are we saying that women having financial security means they don’t want to have children anymore?  In other words, the traditional marriage involved a great deal of financial dependence of the woman on the man…in exchange for which, she produced babies, thereby ensuring her own financial security (indeed, the entire cannon of divorce law is based on this principle).

In other words, a man pays a woman to have children, takes away her ability to have her own financial independence.  Again, whose need are we talking about?

In the developing world, fertility rates are still above the “wanted rate”—an estimate of what the fertility rate would be if all unwanted births were avoided—according to data compiled by the World Bank.

The term “wanted rate” is horrifying.  Who came up with that?

In advanced economies couples tend to have fewer children than they want because the hurdles to bringing up children have risen.  Richer and higher-skilled economies come with more parenting costs, as childcare and education requirements are higher.  The opportunity costs of looking after kids, in lost earnings or leisure time, are also greater.

These statements are true on the face of it, but they miss the point.  It is saying that the only reason we don’t have more children is that they are too expensive.  For some parents this may be true.  But this facile answer misses the point.

To have a career is fulfilling.  We say of men, that their measure is what they have achieved, and almost always nod to their professional lives.  Men who retire die afterwards because they lose their purpose.  In other words, work, for many, is fulfilling in ways that are profound, profound enough to become our purpose, our reason for being.  Inextricably linked with how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others.

Women who work are increasingly discovering this.  That it is fulfilling.  Fulfilling in ways that a lifelong commitment to raising a child is not, an occasionally thankless task.  Asking a woman to have children is to ask her to give up on this sense of profound purpose, a purpose which is core to social respect and standing.

Women are increasingly realising that they don’t want this, that they don’t want to give up that ultimate prize.  Who in their right mind would?  And we can say what we like about men participating in child-rearing, and in certain rare cases with stay-at-home fathers, things are reversed.  But these are the exception.  Having children means focussing on them and not focussing on career, and no matter what we want say differently, the burden of child-rearing continues to fall disproportionately on women’s shoulders.  Whether this is biological, hormonal, social, or for some other reason it hardly matters.  What matters is that defining ourselves through what we do, and being recognised for achieving in what we do, is one of the most personally and socially fulfilling ways to exist in society.  Women have caught on to that and have begun to realise that having children has a profound cost that is not factored into any of this discussion.  Indeed, this article misses the whole point.

[Separately, we know that women live longer than men, but often ascribe that to risk-taking behaviour.  What if instead, it is linked to the point above.  Men die when they no longer have purpose in work.  We see this in retirement—how men lose their way when they come out of the workforce.  My question is will this change, lifespan, as women increasingly adopt what has been the traditional male working model?]

The article continues to emphasise the economics of children—that raising them is a financial burden greater than the financial payout of the insurance value of having someone to look after you when you are old—that you are investing in your own safety net by having children…Certainly with the fraying safety net characteristic of the modern world, it seems sensible.  But this is a mug’s game.  The cost profile has changed so dramatically, the future prospects for children have dimmed (we are the first generation in many where our kids and we are having a harder time of it than our parent’s did).  

And then article pivots to solutions.

Populists push “pronatalist” policies, including tax breaks to have kids.  Not only do they warp women’s choices, there is little evidence they work.  Governments and businesses should instead do more to reduce barriers to those who do want children, particularly by making child-rearing a better deal for working parents.  This includes boosting child-care support, removing disincentives to work in the tax system and improving parental leave entitlements.

These “solutions” are all topical, like band-aids, but they don’t address the root issue.  Having children is a lifelong commitment.  Having children means making choices for children and away from the self.  Having children means that the person or people on whose shoulders care falls will not have the same time or energy to devote towards career, the essential sense of achievement, of work, of purpose.

The more that women realise just how fulfilling it is to be financially independent, to be socially and emotionally independent, and to have this incredible, flourishing career, and pride in what you did, and to feel the reverence that all of society is oriented towards allocating, the more we realise what a woman has to give up to have children.  And let’s face it, child-rearing remains a largely thankless task.

Unless we as a society figure out how to address this core imbalance, how to put child-rearing and home making on an equal or more prestigious footing than career, then we don’t stand a chance at solving this “problem”.  Until we address discrimination in the workplace, there will be no chance of resolving this.

An impractical and unworkable solution would be mandated sabbatical for all employees—men, women, with or without children.  Everyone has to take career breaks.  If you level the playing field, then you have a chance of making it no longer an unequal choice.

The article concludes by saying AI and automation will have to pick up the slack.  This is potentially true.  Productivity growth is certainly the best antidote to a shrinking labour force.  But you have to ask yourself, is this where the innovations will lead us?

Think of the democratizing promise of the internet and where we are today, a surveillance society, where our every move is tracked, recorded, parsed.  We have lost the right to be invisible.  Our data is not our own.

The forces of inertia, those that maintain and reinforce the power structures have all it takes to co-opt any innovations which come along and adapt them to themselves.  Do we have faith that AI or automation will be any different?  Of course not.

And that is why every woman must be considering on some level what owning her body means.  Must be considering what do I get for this colossal sense of purpose and fulfilment that I have to give up.  Is it any wonder that so many women are saying ‘no’?  Is it any wonder that so many women also look at a monogamous relationship and ask, ‘why’?  ‘For whose benefit is this’?  And women are right in asking the question.

The patriarchal system tells us that women are the ones who need monogamy, that it is a biological necessity.  The Pew Research Centre findings referred to above point to the lie, as does a previous post of mine [which attracted so much male rage it was beautiful] that women don’t need men—that the ideal biological model is for women to have many partners.  Monogamy is a male-serving concept designed to reinforce the subjugation of women.

What do you think?

P.S.  I write this post as a trans woman who would gladly give up everything and subjugate myself to a man and his success were I able to have children, to have the parts of the female anatomy that medical science can not yet give.  Does that make me a hypocrite.  I don’t think so.  I believe that many trans women would give up everything for that.  Why?  Because my dharma is to simply do my best to be as much of a woman as I can.  Nothing more, nothing less.