Storks Don't Take Orders From the State

Fertility, and all the individual choice it entails, may be too big for even the most powerful governments to control.

First, a note: I’m on Bluesky as @enbrown.bsky.social and testing the waters (airspace?) there a little. Also been playing around some with Substack notes. Both show promise! (Much more so than Mastodon? As much as I wanted to be enthusiastic about that.) So let’s connect there if you’re so inclined.

Fertility rates are falling around the world, which has spawned a lot of public policy designed to get people to have more children and a lot of speculation and panic about the whys, hows, and what-it-all-means behind the decline. I took a deep dive into this subject for Reason June issue (all props to our art director, Joanna Andreasson, for the attention-grabbing cover above).

The piece explores the failure of pro-natalist policies to raise fertility rates and the inadequacy of popular left and right explanations for what’s driving it. Again and again, data doesn’t match up with popular explanations—like the idea that the U.S. could get people to have more babies if only the government subsidized childcare or mandated more generous parental leave policies. Or the belief that millennial men and women have simply been rejecting parenthood altogether. Or even the notion that women’s workforce participation is the main factor behind fertility rate declines.

That’s what’s facinating about this topic: poke basically any pet narrative about why people are having fewer children or what we can do about it and … it falls apart.

There’s also a lot that gets left out of this discussion, like the fact that a lot of the things depressing fertility rates are actually good things in and of themselves. For instance, in the U.S., we’ve seen a drastic reduction in teen pregnancy rates.

I could go on and on, but I’ll try and let the article—which you can read here—speak for itself. I have a feeling, however, that this is a subject I’ll be coming back to in other forms (maybe here) sometime soon, somehow.

P.S. If you’d like to get the gist of the article without actually reading it, I will first give you a stern look and some sad puppy-dog eyes and then point you to my recent conversations on “The Remnant” podcast with Jonah Goldberg and Think with Krys Boyd.

P.P.S. A Twitter thread of mine inspire this lovely article in The Washington Post: “13 parents share the best reasons to have children.” It also spawned some debate with colleagues about whether parenting really does “need better PR,” as I suggested, or whether we’ve hit a good equilibrium between rosy portrayals and people opening up about how difficult it can be. Thoughts?