Is It Too Risky to Have Babies?

Reasons Behind the Plummeting Birthrate

Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

Women aren’t pumping out enough babies. The birthrate is below the replacement rate in countries across the world. It’s not a good situation. A society can’t survive with too many old people playing MahJong in the Villages and not enough young people producing wealth. The declining childbirth rate is already impacting colleges and public education.

With the rising costs of housing, persistent student loan debt, and heavy childcare costs, it’s no wonder that couples are postponing babies indefinitely. Many say they cannot afford to have children.

Conservative groups are proposing ideas to encourage women to have more babies. But their ideas are laughably insufficient. You can’t put a down payment on a half-million-dollar house in the Jersey suburbs with a $5,000 “cash bonus” after childbirth. To maintain an acceptable quality of life in a society with fewer resources, young people are making the rational decision to forgo children.

Couples know that the costs of raising children would make their lives much less comfortable. One parent might need to downsize their career to care for their children, in a world where the school year doesn’t correspond to the work hours. To get access to better schools, they would need to move to a more expensive community. Children — the greedy beasts — need food and clothing.

Expenses are steep for typical children, but typical kids aren’t guaranteed. As we know, making children is a crap shoot. A genetic roll of the dice. Children with disabilities come with a much higher price tag.

Last week, I met a woman with a six-year-old son who had autism and Down syndrome. Her boy got lead poisoning because he puts everything in his mouth. She had Medicaid, which most doctors refuse to accept. So, she travelled an hour to meet with a doctor, who gave her the correct diagnoses of autism and Down Syndrome. She needed that script to get therapy for her child. She still had to make about twenty phone calls to find a therapy company that accepts Medicaid. The school puts him in one of those basement classrooms, where they dump all the toughest cases.

That woman’s life is going to be very tough for decades.

RFK Jr. recently said that autism was an epidemic that ruined people’s lives. While many advocates pushed back against these negative depictions of autism, others with children with profound needs cheered him on. They posted pictures and told stories about the trauma involved with caring for this extreme group.

One woman showed an X-ray of her arm that needed a steel plate, because her son had broken her arm too many times. Another dad showed a picture of his son’s bedroom wall that no longer had any Sheetrock; his son had torn the walls down to the studs.

Some children cannot live in a family home, but there is nowhere else for them to go. The government shut down the institutions in the 1970s instead of fixing them. Until the children turn 18 or 21 (depending on the state), families rely on schools and insurance companies to provide them with some relief. Good luck with that.

In addition to the financial burden, young people are also worried about taking on the risks of parenthood. And their worries are rational. Raising children with disabilities is a lot to manage without the support of an extended family or a supportive community.

For parenthood to become less of a risk and financial burden, the government has to redirect resources from the Villages in Florida to daycare centers, preschools, and pediatricians. Maybe change can come from the philanthropic world, but that seems unlikely because the rich people are too busy taking rockets into space.

What will the world look like with a much diminished human population?

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