America, like the rest of the developed world, is facing a baby shortage, and the inevitable reckoning has begun. Last year, The New York Times asked, “Why Are So Many Americans Choosing to Not Have Children?” More recently, The Atlantic warned of the consequences of the “baby bust” for the Democratic Party. The article talked as if the reality is still coming, but falling fertility has been happening for a while now. The real problems it poses for our future are no longer deniable.
Why Western fertility is falling, however, is a source of controversy. The most popular theory is that affluent and educated women in the West no longer want children because they are career-oriented feminists. In this way of thinking, women reject motherhood because they believe that academic and professional achievement is not merely better than, but wholly incompatible with having a family.
This view, that the traditional family is a kind of slavery that oppresses women, has long been promoted by feminist authors, beginning with Simone de Beauvoir in her book The Second Sex. Her ideas are still repeated and reinforced by loud voices online boasting about their “childfree” lives full of disposable income, travel, and self-indulgence. Polling data, however, suggests that most American women don’t feel this way about marriage or childbearing. In fact, they are more likely than men, on average, to say that they intend to have several children.
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According to demographer Lyman Stone, utilizing data from the 2022-2023 National Survey of Family Growth, 50% of childless women say they intend to have kids, while just 32% of childless men say the same. Women surveyed also gave a higher intended number of children than the men did.
If women truly are more pro-natal than men, are unwilling men to blame for holding them back from the families they intend? Not exactly, and here we find a quirk of human nature, and therefore of polling.
Though women’s intentions appear to be more pro-natal, men were more likely to say they desire to have children. For example, a Pew Research poll found that 57% of young men without children wanted them someday, compared with just 45% of women. There is a key difference, suggested Stone, between “wants” and “intentions,” and men and women, for whatever reason, answer questions differently based on that language:
[Intention] isn’t the same thing as desires, but it is a nice way to get at what’s going on under the hood in people’s brains as they think about these questions. … [A]lthough men claim to want more kids, when push comes to shove, women are more determined to actually have kids.
That explanation at least meshes with well-established findings that American women are falling well short of their ideal number of children. According to the Institute for Family Studies, on average, an American woman will have 1.6 births in her lifetime, and the share of women who will never give birth is on the rise. And yet, a majority of young women continue to say they would like a family, and their ideal number of children is just over two, a number that, surprisingly, hasn’t changed in decades.
So yes, Americans are having fewer children but still hope for them. Perhaps this means that many have not so much believed the anti-natalist ideas about children, but the ones about having children, namely the relational and financial fictions about happiness, success, and wealth. The proudly childfree who live for the moment and spend all their time and money on themselves may be loud on social media, but do not represent Americans in general.
The resilience of created reality, including persistent maternal and paternal instincts, should also be noted. It is true that many who want families are having a much harder time forming them than in years past, but family is still integral to what most people mean when they talk about “the good life.” This should inform and shape the task of shepherding young men and women into adulthood and should include strategies to make matrimony and parenthood easier.
To encourage these things — whether at home, in Congress, or from the pulpit — is still to work with the grain of reality, drawing people toward the end for which male and female, and sex itself, were created. Biology and reality are on the side of marriage and babies. To encourage pro-family intentions and ideals is to make reality great again.
Originally published at BreakPoint.
John Stonestreet serves as president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He’s a sought-after author and speaker on areas of faith and culture, theology, worldview, education and apologetics.
Shane Morris is a senior writer at the Colson Center, where he has been the resident Calvinist and millennial, home-school grad since 2010, and an intern under Chuck Colson. He writes BreakPoint commentaries and columns. Shane has also written for The Federalist, The Christian Post, and Summit Ministries, and he blogs regularly for Patheos Evangelical as Troubler of Israel.
