Make More Babies! Last January, an anti-abortion diaper company called EveryLife paid for a giant billboard message in in Times Square, featuring  this slogan in giant letters along with a quote from Elon Musk: “Having Children is Saving the World.” Last July, thanks to J.D. Vance’s now-famous jibe about “childless cat ladies,” low fertility rates in the U.S. became an election issue.

Well, sort of.  The Republican vice-presidential candidate has been trying to convince the electorate that the Democratic Party is “Anti-Family and Anti-Kid,” a claim almost as preposterous as the notion that Haitian immigrants in Ohio have been cooking and eating family pets. While Vance proposed a big boost to the Child Tax Credit to $5,000 per child, he hasn’t provided details and didn’t show up for a Senate vote on a more modest expansion.

The Child Tax Credit was boosted by a Biden administration initiative to $3,000 per child ages 6-17 and $3,600 for children under 6, and also made refundable for low-income families who pay less in taxes than the credits offer (about 25% of all children in the U.S.). This legislation significantly reduced levels of child poverty. However, the legislation that passed Congress included a sunset clause, and these extra benefits expired at the end of 2021. As a result, child poverty bounced back up in 2022.

Even the most generous Child Tax Credit is far lower than the average cost of childcare for families who need to pay for it, estimated at about $11,582 in 2023. Recently asked about the high cost of child care and what he would do about it, J.D. Vance replied, “Maybe Grandma and Grandpa wants to help out a little bit more.”  The ever-more practical Donald Trump assured the electorate that his tariff policies would solve the problem, presumably because they would raise so much money.

Republicans may be fumbling this issue simply due to their hallowed principles. As Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) put it two years ago, “I’ve never really felt it was society’s responsibility to take care of other people’s children.” A recent article in the Wall Street Journal puts a finer point on it, noting that making support for parents “palatable to GOP lawmakers means recasting these policies to encourage a more limited set of births, those to married, working parents.”

Most journalists—not just those writing for the Wall Street Journal—continue to use the word “working” only to refer to paid employment, ignoring the reality that time and money put into raising the next generation (not just “having” them) provide significant benefits for both employers and taxpayers, as well as parents and children themselves. Below-replacement fertility, or fewer than 2.1 expected lifetime births per woman, means that each successive cohort of births will be smaller than the last (the number is slightly above 2 because not all children live to the age at which they will reproduce).

One direct result of this demographic trend is a growth in the relative share of the elderly retired population with significant care needs relative to the size of the employed population. Child care will become less pressing, elder care more so.

If birth rates remain below replacement for many decades, the size of the population dwindles, eventually going to zero. About one-half the world’s population now lives in countries with below-replacement fertility, and in some countries, including China and Japan, the total population has already begun to decline.

In the short run, population decline can be advantageous, helping slow the degradation of the global environment and climate, an immediate threat to children already alive today that vehement pro-natalists like Elon Musk and J.D. Vance completely ignore.

In the long run, however, we will eventually need to start replacing ourselves, and growing recognition of this demographic fact is prompting policy changes in two starkly different directions—providing more public support for family care versus revoking women’s reproductive rights in a scenario similar to the one Margaret Atwood depicts in The Handmaid’s Tale.

I say this because Donald Trump’s recent public statements seem to place him squarely within that perverse dystopian world.

Which way will we go here in the U.S.? Not yet entirely clear, since many states now deny access to abortion even in the case of rape or threat to the mother’s life.  The state of Texas has recently sued for access to the medical records of women seeking out-of-state abortions.

Because declining fertility rates can be interpreted as a kind of implicit strike against the growing private costs and risks of raising children, they could strengthen the case for pro-family, pro-care policies that are not necessarily pro-natalist.

I plan to do more out-loud thinking about this possibility in future posts.

The cover picture is designed by Nancy Folbre
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