When Babies Disappear (What to Expect When No One's Expecting)

Five years ago, on a quiet, leisurely Thursday night, my husband and I sat at the dining room table with a yellow notepad, discussing when we should start having kids.

"See, here's how it works," he said, drawing a graph. "With a dog, you put in a medium amount of work, and you get a medium amount of reward. If you were to, say, purchase a lion, you'd put in a lot of work, but you'd get pretty much no reward - and you might even get eaten. Horrible deal." He paused, drawing a straight line that hit each point directly between the axes. "See? With a kid, you put in a ton of work, but you also get a huge reward for years to come. It's a great deal!"

That was three kids ago, and I can assure you that the "ton of work" part is true. The "huge reward," happily, is also true. Children are a source of great joy, and, as a bonus, often hilarious. This is especially useful to remember when the preschooler gives you pinkeye, the toddler flushes your contact lenses down the toilet, and the baby cooks up a habit of happily, inexplicably, all-out yodeling at 4:30 each morning.

What's strange about our dining room child-planning summit, from a historical perspective, is that we considered it at all. "A few generations ago, people weren't stopping to contemplate whether having a child would make them happy," wrote Jennifer Senior in her much-discussed parenting treatise, "All Joy and No Fun," which ran in New York magazine in 2010. "Having children was simply what you did."

But not, apparently, anymore. Around the globe, fertility rates are plummeting. Countries like Japan and Russia teeter on self-imposed fertility cliffs, facing dramatic population shrinkage and the potential collapse of their welfare states. Europe, with stagnant birth rates, isn't far behind -- and, contrary to popular opinion, neither is America, according to Weekly Standard writer Jonathan V. Last. His new book, What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster, documents a remarkable demographic shift: the global baby un-boom.

Last has good timing. A new Pew report shows the traditionally robust American birthrate falling to record lows. Recent data from the Census Bureau and other studies suggest that the world's population, once a source of widespread hand-wringing, could stop growing within our lifetimes. Meanwhile, in its latest annual report, Planned Parenthood cited a record number of abortions: 333,964 in 2011 alone.

The magic fertility number, if you want the population to remain stable, is 2.1 children per woman. Today, the U.S. fertility rate perches at 2.01. Compared to countries like Poland (1.32), Germany (1.36), and Singapore (1.11), that might seem impressive. But as Last points out in What to Expect, America's buoyant fertility may be a statistical mirage.

Break the numbers down demographically, and the trends seem less promising. For college-educated women, for instance, the fertility rate is roughly 1.6. As education goes up, fertility shrinks. Hispanic women, meanwhile, pull far more than their own weight, with an average rate of 2.73. The problem? Their fertility numbers are falling fast as well, and continue to plummet as immigrant women assimilate into the larger U.S. culture.

For certain environmentalists, misanthropes, and frustrated motorists in Los Angeles, less people on the planet might sound appealing. But as Last argues, "Very Bad Things" have historically accompanied depopulation, including disease, war, and economic disaster. In the case of the United States and Western Europe, the latter seems to be the most pressing. In the case of our other global neighbors (China, Iran, or Russia, for instance), the second-to-last may loom equally large.

When people, particularly males, start talking about how other people should have more babies, certain ladies start freaking out. In December, when Ross Douthat published a New York Times column titled "More Babies, Please," shrieking erupted in various corners of the Internet. "Douthat," wrote one outraged Slate.com commentator, "is clearly irritated at his countrymen and especially his countrywomen for their persnickety desire to enjoy life rather than see it as a dutiful trudge to the grave."

Upon reading this, I must admit, I laughed out loud. Perhaps it was because, just moments before, my toddler had taken a giant mouthful of applesauce, coyly turned my way, and sneezed. But perhaps it was also because, in its own way, laced between the paragraphs of hysteria (Overpopulation! Climate change! Women chained barefoot in the kitchen!), this snippet of Internet hyperbole really said it all. What does it mean to "enjoy life"? What is our purpose? Why do we have kids, anyway?

Not so long ago, people had children for simple economic and religious reasons. Some people had children just because everyone else was doing it, or, most obviously, because they lacked reliable birth control. Today, "a thousand evolutions in modern life" -- Last cites education, delayed marriage, the Pill, urbanization, abortion, modern capitalism, insane parenting costs, secularization, and even car seat laws -- have shifted our view of children. For some, Last notes, having children is almost an "act of consumption." For others, it's an "act of self-actualization." For many, it's simply a lifestyle choice. The individual, in short, reigns.

But as we've seen, those reasons aren't enough to inspire multiple babies, probably because having kids isn't exactly a trip to the Four Seasons Bora Bora. It's not even a trip to the grungy Super 8 off the local highway -- there, at least, you can sleep in. To have kids primarily as a "lifestyle choice," in fact, would border on insane, considering it's a lifestyle largely devoid of "me time," leisurely breakfasts, spur-of-the-moment plans that don't involve going to Target, and, as my dad liked to hopelessly request when I was a kid, "peace and quiet."

The best arguments for having children, unfortunately, run opposed to modern, secular American culture. Good reasons to have kids tend to be about delayed gratification, prioritizing family, putting others first, transmitting serious values and beliefs, focusing on something larger than yourself, and understanding the difference between joy and fun. Perhaps this is why, as Last notes, "American pets now outnumber American children by more than four to one." It's also why, if American fertility continues to slide -- and, as the author notes, that's still an "if" at this point -- there's little the government can do.

What to Expect When No One's Expecting discusses potential policy solutions to the global fertility drought. Many are vague, and few are convincing. When it comes to pro-natalist government policy, welfare-state support for parents seems to work a bit; outright bribery, as recently attempted in Singapore, does not. But the main driver of faltering global fertility -- and the reason Last's book is so interesting -- is based on culture, not policy.

The good news is that culture can be engaged and changed. The bad news is that change can be plodding. America still has time to adjust its priorities in terms of marriage, community, and family. Other countries, having already jumped off the fertility cliff, may not have that luxury.

Steven Mosher is an amazing man - I’ve exchanged emails with him over the years - but I think he is wrong in his tax-policy proposals. If they were spherical tax credits in a vacuum, it might work, but in our society, his ideas simply pit segments of the population against one another, when we need to be united against our common enemy, Communism.

Lower taxes for everyone. Reduce spending on everything. Eliminate regulation for everyone. Break government education, government medical care, and the government-employee racket for everyone. Any decision made because it could result in a government benefit fails on its merits. The exercise of free will, worthy of human beings, doesn’t include the question, “Will Daddy ‘Bama give us a cookie?”

FREEDOM! For freedom Christ has set you free, so do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

Every member of a human community has responsibilities to it. Everyone serves the state in some way; it has always and everywhere been thus. Only your unconsidered reflexes and manifest ignorance of history make it seem “red” to you. Likewise, it has always been understood that the poorest of the poor had nothing to contribute but their human fertility, which is nevertheless accepted as valuable and indispensable.

Stupid slogans and smears are really no substitute for thought. Your resistance to facts is making you ridiculous.

“Loretta Lynn, Betty Friedan and Hugh Hefner. That’s quite a killer threesome.”

If I’m not mistaken, Ms. Lynn was a mom by her mid-teens, and a grandmother while still in her thirties. She knows what she be-a-talkin’ about.

But — don’t blame her for the message in her song.

For almost the entire length of human history, women had children because they couldn’t prevent themselves from having children.

By the 1960’s (and the “Griswold v. Connecticut” decision) that changed.

Women now have “the pill”. What “choice” have they made since that option became available?

The only way to reverse the consequences of that choice, is to take “the option” away.

Otherwise, amongst women who have the choice (and the pill) available, too many will make the same choice as is being chosen today (as trends indicate).

I’m not advocating that we do that. But conservatism is being able to see reality for what it is, to understand that reality, and then determine how best to conduct ourselves in view of (or in spite of) it.

That’s the way it is...

I can't speak for others, but I suspect elk is not dissing the occasional persons/couples who are childless for whatever reason, but reacting to the barrage of anti-childbearing crap from the liberal child-rejectors who've controlled the schools, media, and large chunks of both major political parties for the past 45 years.

Completely reasonable, and classified I presume under her "pundits" category. The actual individuals od couples who do not bear children, however, seem to fall into her "bitter feminists metro males and whoever" who want to "skip the work" category.

I reiterate that this attitude towards single people and childless couples is common, and hope I've not trod on a forbidden holy boundary by mentioning it.

Google "childless prejudice" and see who is being judgemental to whom.

Yes, and thank you. Tax-chick just smartened me up on Loretta Lynn's grim early marital history, which sounds like a couple decades of abuse.

However, I am not so sure about the inevitability of having unlimited kids without the Pill, or the inevitability of women desiring to be more-or-less constantly sterile thanks to the Pill's availability.

True, that makes a kind of intuitive sense. But the history of fertility (in the U.S. and other countries where such stats are available) shows that under conditions of "demographic transition" --- which means dropping infant and childhood mortality rates, higher percentage of children reaching adulthood, higher numbers of elders living longer, increased urbanization, and increased female education with consequently bigger career horizons --- women's fertility drops whether or not there are cheap endocrine disruptors available. That means, with or without the availablility of the pill, the patch, the implant, and the shot, i.e. hormonal desexing.

That may make you scratch your head -- I'm certainly scratching mine. But it seems that under conditions of "demographic transition," there is less tolerance for young pregnancy and for young marriage as a response to premarital pregnancy; more women delay marriage until mid-adulthood; and women will have less sex after they have their intended family size. This is true across cultures.

Fertility has dropped massively in many Islamic countries where few "modern contraceptive" methods are readily available.

Moreover, there are situations where contraceptives are available, yet families choose to have more kids. That is what demographer S.L.N. Rao found, e.g. in 1967, 28 percent of "devout" Rhode Island Catholics planned to have five or more children; that year the fertility rate of American Catholic college-educated women was 3.7 -- and this was 7 years after The Pill hit the market (1960).

Catholic fertility dropped rapidly over the next 10 years, but the key seemed to be not the availability of contraceptives devices, but the acceptance of a contraceptive ideology.

For a time, American Mormons were an exception here. While fertility tumbled elsewhere in the U.S. during the "baby bust" of 1965-80, the birth rate actually rose in Mormon-dominated Utah, along with average completed family size.

Again, a matter of ideology --- which is to say, values --- not availability.

Depends on who you mean by "we," I suppose. Childbearing families by definition bear all the chldren: therefore, to say we bear "good" kids and "bad" kids is a tautology. But the fact is --- pay attention, now--- NO KIDS, NO FUTURE. No nation. No nothing.

That's in the long term.

Short term: few kids means demographic structural deformity, i.e. more retirees than entry-level workers. You get the inverted-pyramid shape: every generation having less and less workers to support more and more elders.

You get less young men in the military. Therefore higher reliance on filling those slots with women, and foreign troops. (Our friendly free-world allies, e.g. Afghanistan. Libya. Benghazi. Grim smile.)

Then the euthanasia begins. They needn't even call it that. In the U.K., the NHS killed 137,000 patients last year on their "Liverpool Care Pathway" by the simple expedient of cutting off their nutrition and hydration, and causing their demise via hunger and thirst. Not cruel, though. They were sedated til they stopped breathing. Not cruel at all.

And if only half of them were even told (or their next-of-kin told) that they were being loaded onto the LCP exit ramp --- well, it's oldsters. The U.K. has decided they don't need oldsers. Don't need babies. Don't need Brits, basically.

But life goes on, Inshallah!

I think you missed a key point: in conditions of demographic transition, fertility declines whether there are contraceptives available or not. E.g. U.S. fertility was way lower in 1935 than in 1955, erven though contraceptives were much more available in the 1950's.

(Source: Nat.Center for Health Statistics)

This is also true in Islamic countries where contraception is far less available: 4 of the 10 greatest fertility declines ever recorded in a twenty-year period took place in the Arab world. Google "Nicholas Eberstadt" Muslim fertility decline

Humans went through this once before. When women became aware of the relationship between getting boffed and getting pregnant, they stopped getting boffed.

The women who could make it on their own went off on their own. The ones who needed a man to support them had to put up with sexually satisfying their man if they wanted to get fed, and that naturally led to kids.

Not all that long ago, kids were an economic asset. Whether on the farm or in the family business, they could be put to work doing something productive at a fairly young age. As they got older, the eldest stood to inherit the family farm/business in exchange for supporting his parents as their ability to work faded. It worked out.

In an environment where parents work for somebody else, and it takes 12 to 16 years of increasingly-expensive education before a kid can enter the workforce, kids have lost most of their economic value to their parents.

few kids means demographic structural deformity

Demographic decline isn't a new phenomenon; Imperial Rome is the most famous historical example. However, the structure of today's welfare state, with its growing preponderance of the unproductive elderly, is new. "What do we do about all the indigent octogenarians?" was not a question faced in Rome's later years, but it's a big one for us, when an impressive preponderance of medical costs are expended on people in their last few months of life - and these costs are borne not by the patient and his family, but by a larger pool.

Rome also did not have a large population of non-working potential workers on the dole. The "corn dole" supported the working poor and their dependents, not generation after generation with no concept of work.

Whatever is going to happen in advanced Western societies will be a historical novelty, and it will not be pleasant for the weakest, most "expendable," members of society. A strong familia with religious values will protect its young/old/disabled members, but for the atomized, "state-owned" individual ... ZOT when you can't produce.

I see myself as “Katie Elder” ... Anoreth is John Wayne, Bill is Dean Martin, Tom is that large guy, Pat is the flaky one going to A&M college ... ;-), and the rest of them are extras.

If it comes down to gathering the relations and arming the perimeter, that’s what you do. I may look like a hapless suburbanite, but I’m one generation off the farm, and I can feed a family on beans and greens if I have to.

I agree that reconstituting family solidarity is a good thing. When the “social security” system cut off the elderly from the following generations, that was a true evil which has multiplied unfortunate results. The Hatfields and the McCoys took better care of their families than we do, in many cases.

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