The White House is reportedly putting together a menu of policies designed to reverse the decades-long decline in U.S. births.
This is hardly news, given all of the public comments administration officials have made about low fertility. It puts the U.S. on track with a growing swath of pronatalist governments around the world who are frustrated that their version of an ideal population eludes them, year after year. The new policies could end up providing some welcome financial support for families, but there’s a near certainty that they won’t result in the birth rates the administration desires.
That’s because there’s a harsh truth none of these governments have yet grasped: Governments do not control whether or how many children people have. They always played at most a supporting role, even when fertility rates were high, and their ability to raise the rates in a low-fertility world is limited.
The stubborn belief that an ideal population is possible with just the right mix of policies is doing more than simply frustrating policymakers — it’s putting reproductive rights at risk, lowering fertility rates, and wasting time and money better spent adjusting to the new reality of an aging world.
Powerful people hyperfixating on births is nothing new. In post-World World II Asia, for example, leaders looking to rebuild their war-torn countries believed the key to a better future was a population ideal in size, age structure and ethnic composition. Worried about too many mouths to feed, they put all their efforts into policies that would turn down fertility rates — work they’re scrambling to undo today.
But countries that didn’t enact such policies also saw birth rates fall, meaning that, to a great extent, these declines were inevitable as contraception and abortion became ubiquitous, education improved, and preferences about family size shifted. Governments may have sped things up, but they weren’t the puppet masters of population.
And one thing is certain: coercion wasn’t necessary. Take the natural experiment of mainland China versus Taiwan.
Sure, China’s One-Child Policy played a role in lowering births. But neighboring Taiwan, with no such coercive policy, saw even more dramatic declines, becoming one of the few countries in the world to see a fertility rate below one child per woman, an unprecedented level in Western contexts. In fact, China was the last country in the region to see fertility fall below replacement level. Chinese individuals and couples began to limit their own family sizes before the One Child Policy and have continued to do so since it was discontinued, much to the government’s chagrin. It turns out that cultural and economic factors have a strong influence over marriage and birth trends.
Governments are facing that head on as they now try to raise birth rates through policy. I was recently on a radio show where one LA caller said she and her partner would want $50,000 from the government to start a family. Most countries don’t come close to that. Hungary’s policies are more lucrative than most, but the fertility rate there is still lower than that in the U.S., and Hungarian births this year are already down compared to last year.
Does all this mean the government should just be on standby? Absolutely not — there’s a tremendous role for government in setting the normative and policy environment conducive for population changes. That’s why getting governments to address these issues in the right way matters.
When leaders are convinced that lower fertility rates are in the country’s best interest, they can initiate or accelerate progress by making family planning available, expanding education, and improving economic opportunities, particularly for women. When they’re convinced otherwise, they can shut it all down.
Just look at Tanzania, where former president John Magufuli, convinced that the country needed more babies to be prosperous, told people to stop using birth control. Today, Tanzania has one of the highest fertility rates in the world, at 4.8 children per woman on average.
Or look at the opposite end of the spectrum, South Korea, where leaders mandated parental leave as an antidote to the tremendous inequality in care work between women and men, which they believe is part of what’s driving the country’s record-low births. The problem was they couldn’t make people use it. As a result, only 22 percent of mothers and 5 percent of fathers take leave after a birth. Norms clearly matter.
Yet even in egalitarian Sweden, where it’s taboo for dads to skip parental leave, the fertility rate is just 1.5 children per woman — lower than in the U.S., which has no law requiring paid parental leave (and less cultural pressure on dads to take time off).
Governments shouldn’t expect full control over population, but they need not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Helping families have adequate resources is still a good thing. While cash bonuses, for example, aren’t enough to seal the deal for young and fertile couples, extra cash can help households make it from one paycheck to the next, and give parents more resources to invest in the one or two children they do have.
Governments are not the only actors who can help here. There’s clearly a role for the private sector in making working environments conducive for parenting and for civil society, too, in creating supportive communities for all ages to flourish.
Getting bureaucrats to have realistic expectations about their role in the bedroom is crucial, as we are at a pivotal moment where obsession with turning the dial on population puts contraceptive access and reproductive rights at risk. This era of population alarm is a direct echo of the overpopulation panic of the 1960s and ‘70s. That one too often resulted in a curtailing of individual rights to meet population targets through forced sterilizations and other coercive means. It’s true that births went up in U.S. counties where abortion was most restricted, but there is a steep price to pay in higher maternal mortality and poverty.
Elites in low-fertility societies who are panicked about the economic effects of population aging have been pursuing a strategy of asking women to birth more, work more and care more — policies so contradictory that the approach is doomed to fail and leave women even worse off. Pushing women into the workforce, particularly mothers, without attendant structures to help them with care responsibilities just trades one problem for another.
Women shouldn’t have to choose between working, caregiving and reproductive autonomy, but that’s exactly what will happen until policymakers start focusing on resilience instead of population targets.
Jennifer D. Sciubba, Ph.D., is president and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C., and the author of “8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World.” She discusses low fertility and its implications in her 2023 TED Talk, “The Truth About Human Population Decline,” and on “The Ezra Klein Show”in March 2024. Sciubba is the author of the forthcoming book, “Toxic Demography: Ideology and the Politics of Population.”