Can Politicians Make People Want Babies?

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It wasn’t only women without kids who were displeased by Vance’s “childless cat lady” remarks. It was also pro-natalists: people who don’t resort to name-calling but are also worried about the growing number of women choosing not to have children. 

The U.S. fertility rate is at a historic low of 1.6 births per woman, well below replacement level. A recent study shows that it’s Americans having no babies at all—rather than people having fewer babies—who account for over two-thirds of the drop in births between 2012 and 2022. Though the question of why people don’t have children can be sensitive, declining fertility rates pose serious long-term problems—from worker shortages and pension shortfalls to national security. 

Last week—in the midst of cat-lady-gate—Pew published new research examining why young adults say they’re “unlikely” to have kids. Top answers include prioritizing careers and hobbies, insufficient funds, concerns about the state of the world, and climate change. But the number-one reason, particularly among women: they “just don’t want to.” Pew also found that between 2018 and 2023, the share of U.S. adults under 50 who say they are “unlikely to ever have kids” rose 10 percentage points, from 37 percent to 47 percent. 

Should politicians incentivize baby-making for the sake of civilization? Vance thinks so. He has argued for greater tax benefits for those with children and has even suggested that parents should be able to vote on behalf of their children before they turn eighteen.

But incentivizing child-rearing, be it through tax cuts or votes, can go only so far. “Where the drama is,” says Catherine Pakaluk, an economist, mother of eight children and six stepchildren, and the author of Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, “is whether men and women, couples, households, want a child.” 

While she favors “removing obstacles to both marriage and childbearing whenever we find them,” Pakaluk says she’s “skeptical that straightening all those things out will change the fundamental desire that people have to be married and to have children.” Those things, she says, come “from deeper places.”

“If you would like to promote a culture of childbearing,” says Pakaluk, “then you need to focus on. . . what drives people’s desires and expectations for life.”

Madeleine Kearns is an associate editor at The Free Press. Follow her on X @madeleinekearns. Read her piece “Trump Might Regret Picking J.D. Vance.”

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