My grandmother was a good Catholic who didn’t go to college and had eight children. Her oldest child went to college and had one child, me. Your own family probably fits this pattern. In a decline that correlates with education and secularism, and is concentrated in the Global North, women across the world are having about half the number of children they had only fifty years ago.
However strange it may sound to characterize the post-Roe present as overflowing with reproductive choice, the mainstream center-left tends to agree with the far right that this choice is a new phenomenon, and that our predecessors were spared the existential dilemma. As Dutch philosopher Mara van der Lugt writes in Begetting: What Does it Mean to Create a Child?, “Traditionally, and biologically, having children was not something that is decided upon, but something that occurs.” Likewise, in What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman assert that until fairly recently, having children was “not, as it is steadily becoming today, one possible path to take among several equally legitimate ones.” It was “just what people did.”
Books like these emphasize free choice by foregrounding a modern could-be parent (who happens to be the author, but might as well be the reader) struggling to make this incredibly consequential, and individual, decision, in the face of a society that would make that choice for her. Against her culture’s repository of inherited givens and traditional foreclosures, freedom is when she discovers, for herself, what that right choice is. Yet what happens to “society” when it becomes the name of this “modern” problem? What if the problem isn’t new? What if it isn’t a problem at all?
Books like these imply or outright state that the birthrate is falling because of a new epidemic of chosen childlessness. But the data doesn’t show us that; what it shows is that people have far fewer children, one or two instead of eight. (Meanwhile the sharp decline in teen pregnancy alone accounts for half the drop in the United States’ general fertility.) Opinion columnists and reactionary politicians habitually infer rampant childlessness from the declining number of total births, but the modern childless woman (and debates about “parents” are mainly talking about women) remains the same kind of statistical outlier she has always been.
As recently as 2016, the percentage of U.S. women between ages 40 and 44 who had borne a child was 86 percent—higher than it’s been since the mid-1990s and down only from 90 percent in 1976, a time when only about 10 percent of women earned a bachelor’s degree. The rate fell as low as 80 percent in 2006, but these are still strikingly high numbers. Direct comparisons to the past are tricky, but it’s telling that in 1870, for example, only 84 percent of married American white women had borne a child, compared to 93 percent in 1835. (Imagine the panicked op-eds! Of course, among enslaved women, for whom reproduction was truly compulsory, the number was about 97 percent.) If we remember that perhaps 1 in 10 American women today struggle with infertility, it seems hard to imagine it could be much higher (at least in a reproductively free society).