New Yorker writer Emma Green’s latest piece, “The Case for Having Lots of Kids” (9/24/24), dives into the right’s election flashpoint that there is something seriously wrong with Americans—especially women—not having enough children. In an interview with Catholic University political economist Catherine Pakaluk, Green disregards a mountain of evidence showing that economic factors play into low birth rates, instead feeding us a narrative that the problem is women’s irreligious collective soul.
When discussing declining birth rates and the choice to go childless, people often look to the underlying economic factors. And why not, as many studies show the impact economic trends have on life choices. The Washington Post (11/3/23) said in a lengthy piece:
Hammered by the Great Recession, soaring student debt, precarious gig employment, skyrocketing home prices and the Covid-19 crisis, millennials probably faced more economic headwinds in their childbearing years than any other generation. And, as sociologist Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina, told us, it puts them behind on everything you’re supposed to line up before you have kids.
New York Times (7/31/24): “The absence of policies that support working families — like paid maternity leave and stable child care — may also be leading couples to believe they’re not prepared to be parents.”
Similarly, the New York Times (7/31/24) reported that research “indicates that larger societal factors,” including “rising childcare costs, increasingly expensive housing and slipping optimism about the future” have created the feeling that it is “more untenable to raise children in the United States.”
And a review of Birth Strike by former Labor Notes editor Jenny Brown (Review of Radical Political Economics, 8/13/20) explained how women have withheld their reproductive labor in order to force an end to restrictions on reproductive freedom, and instead enact “paid parental leave, affordable childcare and family allowances that would lead women to choose to have more children.”
To underscore that last point, remember this sad fact: The United States is one of only six countries on earth that doesn’t have national paid job leave for new mothers (New York Times, 10/25/21).
The National Bureau of Economic Research (Digest, 2/1/12) said that “rising home values have a negative impact on birth rates,” as they represent “the largest component of the cost of raising a child: larger than food, childcare or education.” And housing prices have certainly been increasing since the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis.
When Pew Research (7/25/24) asked childless people under 50 who are unlikely to have children about their choices, 44% said “they want to focus on other things, such as their career or interests,” 38% cited “concerns about the state of the world, other than the environment,” and 36% said “they can’t afford to raise a child.”
‘True damage of the birth dearth’
The New Yorker (9/24/24) makes the case for lots of kids: “For these women, giving up their individual freedom by having kids led them to a deeper sense of purpose and joy.”
“The Case for Having Lots of Kids” lets us know that we’re all wrong, and we should disregard the economic data. It lets Pakaluk, who Green slyly admits published her latest book with a house “known for its rightward bent,” guide the narrative into religious moralism. (The publisher, Regnery, is known for a catalog full of climate denial, Islamophobia, transphobia and conspiracy tomes like Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules—FAIR.org, 12/16/22.)
A “mother of eight children and the stepmother of six,” Pakaluk interviewed religious mothers with many children for her latest book, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, to explore how we can address declining birth rates in America. The message of Green’s glowing, one-sided piece on Pakaluk is that the issue of declining birth rates is not economic, but a spiritual rot in contemporary society:
She argues that the true damage of the birth dearth is not economic disaster but a distortion of our culture and politics. She, and many of her subjects, see a country hobbled by relentless individualism: people turning inward, pursuing their own happiness and success instead of investing in others. “Maybe what ails us is not our freedom per se, but something we mistake for freedom—being detached from family obligations, which are actually the demands that save us from egoism and despair,” she writes.
It’s no wonder that Pakaluk doesn’t want to answer declining birth rates with more investment in education, childcare and family services, as she co-authored Can a Catholic Be a Socialist? (The Answer Is No—Here’s Why), seemingly a counterpunch to the long history of Catholic economic radicalism, from James Connolly to Dorothy Day.
‘God, not subsidies’
Pew (7/25/24) found that young people have a wide variety of strong reasons for not wanting to have children.
But Green reports a far more religious reactionary side of Pakaluk: We simply need to destroy our democratic ideals of separation of church and state, so that the clerics can whip the population back to baby-making. Green writes:
Pakaluk clearly thinks that, as a culture, it is good to encourage young women to have families. The problem is how. She is skeptical of the kinds of family policies that progressives and pro-family conservatives advocate, such as increases to the child tax credit or baby bonuses from the government. To Pakaluk, these proposals ignore the fundamental reasons that people have kids, and they also downplay the trade-offs involved….
Her suggestion? Religion. “Make it easier for churches and religious communities to run schools, succor families and aid the needs of human life,” she writes. Her subjects describe their trust in God as one of their primary motivations for having a kid, and then another and another. “People will lay down their comforts, dreams and selves for God, not for subsidies,” Pakaluk argues. To this end, she favors ending government restrictions on religious groups, particularly when it comes to education. “If the state can’t save the American family,” she writes, “it can give religion a freer rein to try.”
There is no explanation from Green as to why economic incentives like universal pre-school, increased parental leave and affordable housing won’t change the birth rate, nor is there any evidence offered that religiosity will change society for the better. It is just tossed into the discourse, saying women—somehow men who choose not to have children are absent from the discussion—are going to need to change their ways for society’s sake.
I have spent a lot of time with people of all genders who have chosen not to have children. It’s easy to write off non-breeders as self-indulgent hedonists who’d rather use their time and money for partying and travel, but these people are rare. Mostly, I hear from people who are disabled and have trouble taking care of themselves, let alone others. High-intensity careers can pressure white collar workers to sacrifice personal ambitions, including mate-seeking and family.
I meet people with mental illness who fear passing on their ailment. Others feel real economic constraints—wages not keeping up with rising costs. There are many who simply aren’t finding the right partner. And, yes, there are people who look around at a world full of war, climate collapse and economic insecurity, and feel nothing but discouragement.
Not enough white babies?
Politico (4/28/24): “Throughout the conference, anxieties over the drop in birth rates…gave way to fears that certain populations were out-breeding their betters.”
Obviously, Pakaluk is entitled to her opinion. But the problem here is Green, writing for a prestigious liberal magazine, airing this view without any scrutiny or inquiry into the issue of childlessness in America.
Worse, she opens up this one-sided story by acknowledging the backlash to Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s complaint about “childless cat ladies” (NPR, 7/29/24). Vance is a part of a general attack on Democrats who don’t have their own biological children, especially Vice President Kamala Harris (Politico, 9/18/24). In other words, Green explicitly placed this in an election context, using the supposedly liberal New Yorker to run propaganda for the cultural right, just a little more than a month before Election Day.
And Green never questions why the birth rate is such a hot topic with someone like Vance to begin with. Yes, there are fears that lower fertility has negative economic consequences (CNBC, 3/22/24)—but little acknowledgement that wealthy countries can easily compensate for a shrinking workforce with, for example, fewer restrictions on immigration.
There is plenty of reporting on how right-wing natalism can be a response to racial and cultural demographic shifts (Arizona Mirror, 5/13/22; ACME, 6/27/23; Politico, 4/28/24). Green’s own colleague Margaret Talbot made the connection (New Yorker, 8/5/24). It’s hard not to see that worrying we won’t have enough people and at the same time worry that too many people are coming only makes sense if you think some people are better than others.
It simply can’t be ignored that one of Donald Trump’s biggest cheerleaders, billionaire Elon Musk, is obsessed with increasing birth rates (Bloomberg, 6/21/24), and at the same time has also promoted the white nationalist crackpot Great Replacement Theory (Rolling Stone, 1/5/24). Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson (Poynter, 1/29/24) was wrong when he claimed, “In August 2023, illegal immigration outpaced American births”—but the juxtaposition gives the game away.
Is Green simply ignorant of all this, or did she leave it out in order to let Pakaluk’s culturally conservative view of parenthood go unsullied by the racist context? It’s hard to tell.
De-economizing hot-button issues
Emma Green (New Yorker, 12/28/22), asserting that a masking advocate’s “talk about empire-building and capital accumulation” was “a key component of Marxist economic theory,” suggested that members of a pro-mask group were “communists.”
Green may be a familiar name to FAIR readers: I previously wrote (FAIR.org, 1/10/23) about how her coverage (New Yorker, 12/28/22) of the People’s CDC, and the group’s concerns that the Covid pandemic wasn’t being taken seriously enough, rested on red- baiting, ignorance of the history of eugenics and playing down the disease’s impacts. I also noted that this wasn’t her first offense when it came to shoddy Covid reporting (e.g., Atlantic, 5/4/21).
Her coverage, while not in the extremist galaxy of pandemic denialism, fit into the broader context of corporate media downplaying the pandemic in order to roll back progressive social democratic reforms enacted during the emergency.
Once again, here she is to tell us to stop looking at a hot-button political issue through a lens that could take us to taxing the rich to increase social services. Instead, view the issue as a de-economized cultural feud—one that puts the liberal New Yorker on the side of the right.
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By Ari Paul
Ari Paul has reported for the Nation, the Guardian, the Forward, the Brooklyn Rail, Vice News, In These Times, Jacobin and many other outlets.