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Adding to the interminable hand-wringing conversation in these parts around the “fertility crisis” and what to do about it, I’ll submit an interesting Substack piece I stumbled upon today. The author, a woman, makes a reasonably well-articulated case about why women don’t want to have babies, and it amounts to “pregnancy and childbirth are just an absolutely brutal experience for most women, and it’s totally natural and inevitable that they should wish to avoid going through it.” That no amount of cajoling, cultural/media propaganda, government-provided financial incentives, etc. will prevent an intelligent and perceptive woman from noticing this basic fact about biology and doing whatever is in her power to limit her risk of being forced to do something that she’s going to hate.
Now, certainly this author is far from the first woman to make this case, nor even its most effective advocate. However, her piece resonated with me simply because it closely mirrors statements that have been made to me by multiple women in my life whom I respect and value. One of them is my younger sister, who has said explicitly and in no uncertain terms that she will not be having children. She has even discussed with my (aghast and befuddled) mother the possibility of undergoing a tubal ligation (“getting her tubes tied”) in her early thirties to prevent any further concern about the possibility of becoming pregnant. My sister is in a happy cohabiting relationship with an intelligent, well-paid, all-around great guy; her concerns have nothing to do with the fear of being an abandoned single mother, or of being poor and struggling, or anything like that. She just recognizes that having a child would represent a considerable and arguably permanent deduction in her quality of life. It would substantially decrease her freedom to travel, to make decisions without intensive planning around childcare and child-rearing costs, etc.
Our brother has three daughters, ages four, two, and infant. I love them to pieces and am extremely grateful to have them in my life. I envy my brother, and my desire to have children of my own gnaws at me daily. However, I have to acknowledge that a great many things about my brother’s life became infinitely more constrained, more stressful, more irritating, when he had children. His ability to hang out with us, to do any activity or attend any venue that is not friendly to small children, is massively constrained by access to childcare. He is very fortunate to still live in the same city as both our own father and his wife’s mother, which provides access to free childcare; I cannot imagine how much more constrained his life would be if he and his wife had to pay for childcare every single time he had to leave the children unattended. Nevertheless, we see him more rarely, and get less quality time with him, than we would if he didn’t have children. His oldest daughter is at an age where she constantly demands and monopolizes attention, such that any gathering which includes her inevitably requires at least one person to be fully attentive to entertaining and indulging her, lest she become a terror. I am so happy for my brother that he gets to experience fatherhood (and again, I fervently hope to experience it myself in the future) but I admit that it has negatively impacted my relationship with him in a number of important ways. And my sister sees that - and sees how even more constrained our sister-in-law’s life has become - and has, understandably, said, “No thanks, I’ll pass.”
At least his children are healthy and his wife seemingly content and well-adjusted, though. My very good friends - well, formerly my very good friends - had a far worse experience. I’ve known these two since high school; we were inseparable friends for over a decade, both before and after the two of them got married. My buddy always talked about wanting a large family; his mother was one of nine siblings, and he dreamed of having a similarly-sized brood. However, his wife is small-framed, physically fragile, and somewhat sickly. It was always clear to me that she was not built for having lots of children. And, in fact, when they had their first child, it totally wrecked her, both physically and mentally. She was briefly hospitalized for postpartum depression. Probably a large part of that depression was due to the fact that her baby clearly had something wrong with it even from an early age. (My brother and I would, sheepishly and in secret, occasionally sing a certain Stephen Lynch song and he would smugly crow about how much better-looking his own newborn daughter was than theirs.) Well, it turns out the kid has pretty severe autism. She’s now four years old and can barely speak. She’ll likely never know more than a handful of words. She’ll need lifelong intensive care and support, which will consume the rest of their lives. The experience of childbearing was so taxing and so confoundingly disappointing for them - and for her especially - that she has recently undergone a hysterectomy. They moved to a different state years ago, just before having that child, and my relationship with them has cratered, partially because the stress of the experience and the extreme impact on their lives made them so stressed-out and insular. It also rendered them somewhat unrelatable to me; what could I possibly talk about with them nowadays? Their whole lives are about caring for this broken child, with whom I can’t even have a rudimentary conversation. It was so damaging for them, and I guarantee if she could go back in time and undo the whole thing she would. Hell, I hope she would. Surely many women are profoundly and justifiably terrified by the possibility that something like this could happen to them.
I think we really need to grapple with the fact that the revealed preference of nearly every intelligent and high-quality woman is for having few if any children. And rather than bending over backwards and tying itself into knots to figure out how to psyop them out of this perfectly understandable risk-benefit calculation, perhaps a healthy 21st-century society just needs to put all of its eggs into the basket of figuring out how to have a successful low-TFR civilization. Whether that’s robots, or AI, or artificial wombs, I don’t know, but honestly I just don’t see a viable path forward for forcing a critical mass of women to do something that’s manifestly going to wreck the lives of so many of them. And once we admit to ourselves that white and East Asian women are probably never again going to organically desire large families, we can then focus on reducing fertility in the third world, since the TRF differential between advanced and non-advanced countries is the real problem that we as a global species need to deal with.
Except the median mother is happy about her decision to have children, enjoys being a mother, and in fact IIRC desires more children than she’s likely to have. Convincing young people and especially women that the trade offs aren’t worth it is itself the result of a propaganda campaign, which is effected in part by separated non-mothers from mothers.
This seems analogous to the obesity epidemic that's also been called a "crisis" in many Western nations. The revealed preference of many people is that they would prefer to indulge in high calorie foods and lack of exercise, and then they suffer health issues including possibly early death later on. This is an eminently reasonable preference, especially in modern Western nations, where the deliciousness and diversity of food is at incredibly high levels and the importance of physical fitness and downsides of bad health issues are at incredibly low levels. It seems that at least some of these obese people regret their eating/exercise decisions that caused their health issues, but then all that means is that their revealed preference is to indulge in their youth, then later on suffer the negative consequences including regretting those indulgences, rather than to not indulge and to not suffer health consequences of obesity by not being obese.
I suppose this points to the difficulty of figuring out how exactly to weight revealed preferences when that preference includes both a decision and regretting that decision. In those cases, do we just say that everything is hunky dory, since they're meeting their preference of regretting their present decision in the future? Or do we say that something has gone wrong, because preferring to regret something is a concept that's in tension with itself?
I'm sure exceptions exist, but in my experience, most obese individuals I’ve encountered fit one or more of the following categories:
a) They struggle with poverty,
b) They deal with depression or isolation, or
c) They're part of a family with substance abuse issues, like alcoholism.
Revealed preferences are not a great way to model addictive or stress-driven behavior. Overeating, for example, may appear to be a revealed preference of someone who is depressed, but this behavior is highly contextual. It often vanishes when the individual is removed from those circumstances.
Furthermore, individuals aren't monolithic. Everyone is more like a collection of competing drives wrapped in a trenchcoat. "Revealed preferences" are often better understood as the final outcome of an internal, contingent battle between various drives and impulses, rather than the true essence of a person. What we observe as a preference in the moment may simply reflect which drive happened to win out in that context, not a consistent, rational choice.
As people age, they often gain the wisdom and self-determination to step back and recognize these internal conflicts. They realize that their earlier choices—made when their short-term drives held more sway—were myopic and not aligned with what they genuinely value in the long term.
Yes, and that's the rub, isn't it? In such cases, do we say that someone's myopic short-term drives are their "true" preferences that ought to override whatever they genuinely value in the long term, or do we say that what they genuinely value in the long term are their "true" preferences that ought to override their myopic short-term drives?
If it turns out that some significant proportion of women who choose not to have children when they can end up regretting it when they age up to when they no longer can - a big if, IMHO - then should the next generation of young women celebrate them and follow in their footsteps, since those older women got to live out their short-term drives in their youth, short-term drives that they would have had considerable difficulty living out even just 100 years ago due to the lower freedoms and opportunities offered to women back then? Or should the next generation of young women see these older women as warnings for how they could end up suffering in the long run due to following their own short-term drives? I could see different people having different answers to these depending on their values.
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