Falling fertility rates are not government's business

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There is a danger of overreacting to all this, treating the decline in fertility like a lemming-like plunge off the cliff rather than a fairly slow and steady downward trend that gives policymakers decades to adapt (and has led to a welcome fall in teenage pregnancies in the UK to boot). Yet falling fertility rates are becoming a dangerously hot political potato, as legitimate questions about how a shrinking pool of younger workers can support an expanding cloud of older ones start to become dangerously entangled with white supremacist hysteria about the supposed failure of Christian communities to breed fast enough, or with the perennial rightwing anxiety about what women might seek to do with their bodies if they had complete freedom to choose. For some men, it seems the only thing scarier than the prospect of a broody woman trying to trap them into pregnancy is the idea of one wilfully refusing to get into all that.

For years, conventional wisdom has been that policymakers could bump up the birthrate by investing in cheap childcare and flexible working, so that women didn’t face such agonising choices between work and motherhood. (For that is what “leaving it too late” so often boils down to in practice; not couples clean forgetting to have a baby, but women seeing what happens to other mothers in the office and not daring to risk a pregnancy until they feel more professionally established, by which time it’s often harder to get pregnant.) But now birthrates are tapering off even in Sweden, with its world-beating parental leave, heavily subsidised nurseries and an egalitarian culture that firmly encourages men to share the load with their exhausted partners. Neighbouring Norway’s prime minister, too, recently declared that the country “needs more children”, amid warnings that its welfare state model would otherwise be in jeopardy. Either the world of work still hasn’t evolved far and fast enough to meet millennial parents’ expectations, or something more fundamental is shifting.

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The more motherhood comes to be seen as a choice, rather than an unavoidable fact of female existence or some kind of great romantic destiny, the greater the anxiety both about making the wrong choice and about living with the ghost of the life not chosen. Trying to counter all that by nagging young women to knuckle down to it in order to avoid a future global pensions deficit is destined for the failure such emotionally tin-eared tactics deserve.

Better, perhaps, to treat a shrinking population less like an annoying economic aberration to be corrected, and more like a riddle of human happiness. Where people are struggling to have the family lives they want, then of course government’s role is to step in: to create the stable jobs, affordable homes and family-friendly working conditions that make it possible. But if millennials are simply thinking harder than previous generations did before having children – or if some people who would in generations past have felt railroaded into an unwanted family life are now finding the courage to remain childfree – well, that’s very different. Sometimes good governance, much like good parenting, is a question of knowing when it’s really none of your business.

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destined for the failure such emotionally tin-eared tactics deserve

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kittehpeoples
(What happened to our eyeroll emoji? 'Cause that attitude really needs one.)