Are Fewer Children the Future?

The global decline in fertility is one of the major stories of the twenty-first century—maybe even the major story. It is built into our brains, bones, and infrastructure that we live in a growing and expanding world, with a few older people scattered around and buses of children rolling up to overcrowded schools. This is very much not the world that is being born.The statistics might be familiar, but they are jarring nonetheless. Over the past 50 years, the global fertility rate has fallen from four children per woman to just over two. Whatever is causing this is happening all around the world. In 1960, the average woman in the United States had 3.5 children; in India, Latin America, and the Caribbean, almost six. Today, the number is below two in all of these places.Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty Dey Street Books, 368 pp., $29.99 This decline is having an incalculable effect on global politics. Many of our political debates are, just under the surface, about the fear of population decline. This is transparently the case for, say, Social Security and immigration. The crisis of Social Security comes from the decline of the working-age population; immigration, some argue, is the only realistic mechanism to prop it up. Our debates about education are shaped by the fact that there will be fewer and fewer kids to educate. Over the next 15 years, the number of high school graduates in the United States will fall by 12 percent, creating an enrollment cliff that is just as threatening to higher education as is artificial intelligence.The issue is often veiled because it’s so hard to discuss directly. Any discussion of birth rates and population decline feels a hair’s breadth from fascism—and for good reason. The twentieth century is littered with examples of attempts to use statecraft to engineer populations. Hitler was obsessed with increasing the German population, while Communist China, with its one-child policy, tried to shrink its own. These efforts came at an enormous cost. This was not just an effort from the political extremes either. The eugenics movement, which included many American liberals in its ranks, was just as concerned with shaping the quality and size of populations.The question of fertility cannot be ignored, but we do need new ways to think about it. The discussion has been dominated by conservatives, who either explicitly or implicitly want women to have more babies (you might recall JD Vance’s remarks about “childless cat ladies” as a scourge on the republic). The mandate is a perfect storm for today’s unhinged conservatism: It allows you to complain about professional women and contraception, while also signaling a desire to stock the homeland with racially pure children, undercutting the need for immigration.Progressives tend to respond that the birth rate is downstream from other issues. If people had good jobs and health care, the argument goes, they would be more likely to have children. This is probably not true, and in any case it sidesteps the specific issue of fertility, which has its own shape and importance. The journalist Anna Louie Sussman, in her important new book, is trying to help. Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty looks at the issue from the perspective of reproductive justice. That tradition, rooted in Black feminism, emphasizes three interconnected rights: the right not to have children, the right to have children, and the right to parent those children in safety and dignity. In a world of true reproductive justice, we would be able to have children, if we want them, and to have the number of children that we want. In the wake of the repeal of Roe v. Wade, it is clear how the right not to have children is at risk. But what, Sussman asks, about the right to have them?That choice, she shows, is under assault, too. Through prodigious research and dozens of personal stories from around the globe, Inconceivable shows vividly the difficulties of starting a family in a world that is growing hotter and more unequal. The book makes a compelling and humane case to lower the barriers to having kids for those who want them—although it may overestimate just how many people that would include.“This is a global story about how our reproductive lives have been disfigured by an economic system gone awry,” explains Sussman, a reporter and New York Times Opinion contributing writer. As she travels in the United States as well as South Korea, Poland, and elsewhere, she meets people whose desire to have children has hit some kind of barrier, and she recounts her personal experience, too: The book opens with her trip to Italy to freeze her eggs. These stories, like anything that is bound up with love and money, are complicated. Her book, therefore, covers a lot of ground, from IVF to patriarchy to student debt, but always circles back to the economy, whose punishing rhythms shape every aspect of human fertility.She begins with the challenges of dating. Why, Sussman asks, do many women freeze their eggs, as she did? The myth, and it’s a misogynist one, is that they are so devoted to their jobs that they can’t imagine hitting the pause button to have kids. According to one study, however, a full 82 percent of them did so because they could not find a partner. Some of the challenges in contemporary dating are cultural, and Sussman pays due attention to social media, pornography, dating apps, and all the other technologies that are conspiring against stable, long-term relationships.Sussman insists, though, that the technology is not determinative, and that the throb of economic anxiety is underneath those missed connections. She introduces us to a man named Marwan, whose dating life dried up. He muses that he has not become ugly or less polite. The only thing that changed was that, for good reason, he left a prestigious and high-paying job. Finding a partner has never been just about love, after all. We are not so far from Jane Austen’s world as we think. Men and women alike are looking for partners with secure economic futures—and those, in 2026, are not easy to come by.The specter of downward mobility looms over many of the people Sussman interviews, particularly in the United States. She profiles people whose parents experienced something resembling the American dream: hard work, the purchase of a home, a clutch of kids. All of that feels impossibly distant to Sussman’s subjects. Most of them are relatively privileged and are facing precarity more than they are genuine poverty. Even so, that precarity can be psychologically debilitating. Talia, a grant writer at a nonprofit in California, had to move in with roommates after a breakup. In her mid-thirties, she could not afford to live alone—how is she supposed to afford children? We meet, too, a nurse named Trent in the Dallas area. “If I’m able to get this student loan forgiveness,” he told Sussman, the year after Joe Biden announced his debt forgiveness plan, he and his partner could have a child “probably in the next year.” But if not, it would be several years more.These interviews show the way childbearing is actually discussed in American families: a dialogue that is as much about debt and fear as it is about love and hope. Yet Sussman doesn’t think that immediate economic realities are enough to explain the decrease in fertility. If they were, you would find more children being born in countries with more stable economies; you would also find, in the United States, more children being born in times of relatively good economic data. But you don’t. The American fertility rate continued to decline even as we came out of the 2008 recession.The deeper reasons, Sussman thinks, are psychological. To have a child is to make a bet on the future. How can prospective parents place a bet on the future while still saddled with the debts of their own past? Young people like Talia and Trent don’t simply want to have children—they want to offer their children a life of dignity, with proper housing and nutrition and education. And that, like so much else in 2026, feels far from assured. And the long term is even harder to predict than the next few years. A child born in 2027 would enter the workforce in the mid-2040s, and would be breathing the air of the 2040s, and scrambling to find whatever habitable land remains then. Would any of us, really, wish that on our worst enemy? What about our flesh and blood?Those questions are not really statistical ones, but for those who care to look, the numbers are sobering. An American born in 1940 had about a 90 percent chance of outearning their parents. In the 1980s, it fell to 50 percent. It is, of course, too soon to tell about children born later. But as someone with elementary school children, I can confirm the sense that Sussman heard from her subjects. The true nature of the future economy is unknowable, but the gut instinct of contemporary young people is not. We have reached what Kyla Scanlon, a Gen Z financial writer, calls “the end of predictable progress.”Inconceivable spends a large amount of time exploring fertility treatments. This is necessary for a book focused on the second prong of reproductive justice: Those are the means we have to help people who are having trouble reproducing. Maybe fertility medicine was once a niche area, but no longer. About one in 36 children in the United States is conceived with IVF; in Denmark, one in seven is now born through fertility treatment. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently sparked a conversation about egg freezing, when she posted about embarking on the process of egg retrieval herself. Reproductive justice should mean equal access to such treatments. In fact, of course, access is far from equal. Treatments are astoundingly expensive, and families often pursue them until their accounts run dry. The public purse, in this country, is little help. Medicaid covers contraception but almost never covers infertility treatment—a situation that Sussman thinks is nearly eugenic, sending a message to the underprivileged that the state is more than happy to keep them from reproducing, but not to help them to do so.Access to IVF has in fact been a flash point in recent years. In Alabama, for instance, the state’s Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that frozen embryos are rights-bearing children. This caused a flurry of confusion and led the state’s largest hospital to temporarily suspend IVF services. In that case, the state legislature passed a law granting immunity to health care providers. The situation remains legally murky and shows how quickly a well-established option like IVF can become unavailable. In Poland, where Sussman carried out reporting, a law went into effect in 2015 that restricted IVF treatment to married or cohabiting heterosexual couples. This meant that neither queer couples nor single women, two groups that regularly use the procedure, were eligible. It also meant that women in those categories who had already frozen their eggs and created embryos had them held hostage by the state.Sussman interviews a Polish woman who became caught in the legal and moral morass created by the legislation. She wanted to have children as a single woman, so she froze embryos with her own eggs and a Danish donor’s sperm. Once the law was passed, she was unable to access those embryos. And because of a tissue of laws elsewhere, she was unable to get them out of the country: Spain refused to accept embryos because the sperm donor was not anonymous, as is required there; in Ireland, an agency refused to accept the embryos because a previous baby born from that donor had a birth defect. Eventually, she was able to transport the embryos to Ukraine. The amount of work was staggering and beyond the means of most women. But in this case it was worth it, as it resulted in a happy and healthy child. Such is getting pregnant and giving birth in 2026: the navigation of medical, legal, romantic, and financial minefields.Sussman, too, manages to pick her way through this tangled system herself, and at the book’s end, reveals that she did, in fact, retrieve her frozen eggs and conceive a child through IVF. The baby girl was born, happy and healthy, back in the United States. It’s an ending that reminded me of Children of Men, the great 2006 film, adapted from P.D. James’s novel, about a world in which pregnancy has become, mysteriously, impossible. Inconceivable is something of a journalistic counterpart to the sci-fi spectacle. Both works end with a birth, against the odds, and with all the joy that entails. Life, as another sci-fi franchise puts it, finds a way.The structure of the book inclines us to celebrate each new birth. The fact that someone wanted to have a child and was able to is indeed cause for celebration. Yet it’s easy to confuse an individual wanting to have children with society wanting a higher birth rate. These are very different things, though Sussman sometimes elides them. In the book’s introduction, she declares that she is “not arguing for people to have more or fewer children.” But at the same time she implies throughout that low birth rates are a problem we should fix. The implicit argument of the whole book is that a world of more certainty would be a world of more babies. She refers to “rock-bottom birth rates and the palpable anxiety of a generation of would-be parents,” linking the two and concluding that we should address those anxieties “if we want people to feel stable enough to consider future life.” In a New York Times op-ed last year, she made explicit what is only implicit in Inconceivable: If policymakers could make child-rearing more appealing, it might just “raise the birthrate.”This is an appealing rhetorical move for progressives: accept the call for higher birth rates, while claiming that a more secure and just society is the way to get there. It’s a move that should be rejected. The struggle for reproductive justice and the push to increase birth rates are not the same and are more than likely at cross-purposes. The clear trend in global fertility is that when women have the ability to choose fewer pregnancies, they do; in large part, the decline in birth rates is a result of women around the world having far greater access to contraception and abortion than they did 50 years ago. This is an unqualified victory, and an incomplete one. According to a 2025 U.N. survey, it is still more common, globally, to experience an unintended pregnancy than it is to desire children and be unable to have them. American surveys show that here, too, we do not have a younger generation that is clamoring to raise children. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, Americans under 50 are hesitating to have children for many of the reasons that Sussman describes. But the biggest reason is one that she, for the most part, ignores. They simply do not want them.Right-wing politicians and intellectuals who want to juice the birth rate despite this reluctance know that the path lies through turning back the clock on women’s rights and progress. If women don’t want children, so much the worse for them. Sussman is absolutely not joining that chorus. She is aware of the dangers of natalism. And yet, by accepting the framing that the low birth rate is a problem that might be solved through better policy, she misses the opportunity to reject the premise that the birth rate needs to rise.In any case, there is also little evidence that creating a more equitable world, as she envisions, would encourage more births. After all, the insecurity faced by Americans now is nothing compared to that of, say, settler communities in the nineteenth century West, who had babies by the bushel as crops failed and locusts descended. People in Denmark have, by every measure, more security than Americans do—and yet they have even fewer children.Young people are not stupid. They see what it’s like to raise children. Maybe the issue is not primarily that they lack certainty about what’s coming. Maybe the issue is that they have it.The truth is that we are, whether we like it or not, transitioning into a world that will be demographically different from anything in recorded history. Whatever women say in surveys, they are voting with their bodies for a world with fewer children. We have passed, as the demographers put it, the era of “peak child.” At some point in the next few decades, the population is going to start to shrink. Schools and universities are going to close; pension systems are going to enter a crisis.The task for progressives is to recognize that this is happening, and that it is an inevitable consequence of a necessary and overdue increase in female autonomy. Sussman is right that, in this new world, we should devote enormous resources to ensuring that everyone who wants children is able to have them. Her book shows what this will cost, and shows that it is worth it. But we should also recognize that a commitment to reproductive justice is most likely, at the same time, a commitment to a shrinking and aging global population. This raises a whole host of challenges and opportunities—a smaller world really could be a better one, if we plan for it properly. For the sake of Sussman’s daughter, and my own, I hope we do.