Is this progress, or just an excuse to promote socialism by appealing to Americans' concerns about rapidly declining birth rates?
I vote for the latter, because the "solution" The New York Times is promoting has been tried and failed.
Across the developed world, birth rates have dropped faster than a comet speeding through Earth's atmosphere. Most Western and Asian countries now have birth rates well below replacement levels--some so low that within a few generations, there will be few people left. Taiwan, for instance, has a birth rate of just over one child for every two people. The United States has one of the higher birth rates in the Western world, but that is driven mostly by immigrants whose pattern of reproduction has not yet reached the levels of people born in developed countries.
In response, governments in developed countries are scrambling to encourage women to have children, providing tax incentives, free child care, and outright payments for each child born. None of these seems to be working.
So what does The New York Times suggest as a solution to America's problem? More of the same.
Yet another NYT piece w/ the “bold idea” of imitating the Nordics (& their progressive family policies) to address our fertility problems.
— Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) June 16, 2025
There’s only one problem with this bold idea.👇🏼 pic.twitter.com/Tp4Z23wB8F
America has made parenting unusually, needlessly hard. Child care and rent are unaffordable; medical care, even when subsidized, is a nightmare of red tape; family leave is too short and too rare; everyone feels overextended and underachieving.
As the climate activists Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli have observed, the United States “is already an anti-natalist country in everything but name.” Instead of trying to persuade women to churn out huge broods under punishing circumstances, America’s leaders should start by making it easier to have whatever number of kids women choose to have. In the process, they just might find that women want to have more.
It's a nice-sounding idea on its face, especially if you are inclined already to expand government services and control over the family. If you want more kids, the best way to do that is to socialize the raising of kids. Replace mothers with social workers, provide moral education in the schools, and encourage women to have children and hand them over to the Motherland.
The problem, we are told, is the Patriarchy. Because of course it is. The heternormative settler-colonialist capitalist patriarchy is always to blame.
So what do America’s women actually need? Or to put it another way, is there a way to be natalist without also being patriarchal?
First, some facts about American women. A growing share of them are single; by one estimate, more than half of non-college-educated women born in the mid-90s will be single when they’re 45. Among women of reproductive age, a vast majority work. Women are increasingly having children in later years. And despite women’s growing earning power, they still do the lion’s share of housework, even when their husbands are unemployed.
But fewer women are marrying, at least in part because they’re having trouble finding appealing men. In addition to the partnering problem, many women report financial concerns as a major obstacle to having kids (or having more kids).
Helping heterosexual women have children, then, will require tackling toxic gender dynamics before and within marriage, and committing real, ongoing financial support — not a one-time “push present” that women I’ve spoken to, from across the political spectrum, find downright offensive as an incentive to have a child.
If only we could replace fathers and mothers with the state, turning women into mere "birthing persons" and not caregivers, moral teachers, educators, and all the other roles parents play in children's lives, women might consent to becoming pregnant.
South Korea and Hungary are Taking Steps to Fight The Global Population Collapse https://t.co/irqdhrclK4
— LifeNews.com (@LifeNewsHQ) March 12, 2025
Except...none of that is true. The experiment has been tried, especially in Nordic countries and some places in Asia, and it turns out that as feminism has exploded in popularity and women have exchanged the pleasures of motherhood with the pursuit of power, prestige, and wealth, birth rates have continued to plummet.
Kinda telling the one high-income country with above replacement in the world went unmentioned in this NYT story: https://t.co/fu6vwDIe39
— Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) June 16, 2025
It's not really an issue of economics, but a crisis driven by a shift in what people think gives meaning to life. As I have written before, there has been a lot of active propaganda being pushed out about the glories of people choosing NOT to have kids--propaganda being pushed by exactly the same people who are now suggesting socialist solutions to the problem of declining birth rates.
For decades, leftist activists have been promoting the idea of a massive population decline as a positive good. The idea is that human beings are overrunning the Earth and destroying Gaia, so the solution is to rapidly reverse the population "explosion" and instead seek a population decline, with a stabilization around half a billion people.
THE FAR-RIGHT SCANDALOUSLY WANTS MORE BABIES BORN
— Sunny (@sunnyright) April 28, 2024
oh the president's brother is in business with the people murdering jews
Perfect, @politico. No notes. pic.twitter.com/o5Kw4TevGf
The US government has subsidized a massive birth control and abortion agenda, up to and including forced sterilization in third world countries, and applauded China's one-child policy that is now causing a crisis in China.
The WEF's Jane Goodall believes the world would be a better place if the human population was reduced by 93%, down to 500 million people. pic.twitter.com/QEWWt0SqqD
— Red Pill Dispenser (@redpilldispensr) March 9, 2025
Now, as it becomes clear that our welfare states will collapse without population growth--social insurance programs require steadily increasing populations to fund pension programs--a growing sense of alarm permeates governments. This is one of many reasons why open borders has become a left-wing agenda. Importing third-world population surpluses into Western countries is a temporary solution to the crisis.
If you promote consumption as the highest goal in life, and/or encourage people to externalize their moral impulses into political activism rather than passing on your values to the next generation, this is the result.
I don't pretend to have the answer to Western birth rate declines. It seems that there is a relationship between increasing wealth and declining birth rates that is driven by multiple factors.
But I do know that expanding socialism is not the answer. That's not a conclusion driven by my ideological bias. It's in the data. State policies do not seem to work.
