What A Day - The Hidden Roots of America's Baby Bust

Episode Date: May 18, 2024

Birth rates are plummeting around the world and no one has cracked the code on how to get people to have babies. More money, free daycare, and medical advances don’t appear to help…and criminalizing abortion DEFINITELY doesn’t help. This week on How We Got Here, Erin and Max break down how the 20th century baby boom is misremembered, the factors responsible for declining birth rates today, and whether anything can be done about it.  SOURCES: Understanding the Baby Boom - Works in ProgressGerman birth rate drops steeply against backdrop of unease – DW – 03/20/2024Italy's falling birth rate is a crisis that's only getting worse | EuronewsSouth Korea’s birth rate is so low, the president wants to create a ministry to tackle it | CNNRomania's abortion ban was deadly for women and is a warning for U.S. - The Washington PostEl Salvador (CIA)El Salvador: Court Hears Case on Total Abortion Ban | Human Rights WatchAlarm as South Korea sees more deaths than birthsWork–life balance - Government of SwedenU.S. Fertility Rate Falls to Record Low - WSJA World Without Men: Inside South Korea’s 4B MovementEverything you need to know about artificial wombsCan Immigration Solve the Demographic Dilemma? – IMF F&D

Erin, is it just me, or does it seem like there's a doom and gloom article about the dangers of a falling birth rate, like, every few days? Max, are you messing with me right now? Like, you know this is one of my favorite topics. I am not messing with you, I promise. Okay, fine. I'll bite. No, it is not your imagination. The U.S. fertility rate has decreased to 1.6 children per woman. Which, according to this napkin math, is less than the replacement rate. You're doing birth rate napkin math? What? Don't worry about it. Okay, fine. This 1.6 children per woman thing means that if people don't start having more babies in less than two decades, there will be more old people than young people in the U.S. Which, although probably the

best case scenario for Werther's hard candy sales, is a big problem for the economy as a whole. But the real puzzler is that this isn't just an American problem. All over the world, countries are facing similar demographic collapse as they struggle to convince or cajole people into having more babies. And nobody's cracked it yet. Everybody's got theories, but nobody's got solutions. What are they all missing? I'm Max Fisher. I'm Erin Ryan.

This is How We Got Here, the show that each week asks one big question behind the headlines and tells a story that answers that question. This week, are humans the new giant pandas? Just kidding. If only we as a species were that cute and roly-poly. Have you seen the panda enclosure at the San Diego Zoo?

Oh, it's great. It's nicer than my house. Seriously, though, in the years post-pandemic, countries around the world have seen a precipitous drop in their birth rates. So our question is, why has that been so hard to solve? Governments around the world really seem to be throwing spaghetti at the wall trying to come up with solutions. Even in Italy, where throwing spaghetti at the wall is not something to be done lightly. Let's get this out of the way first. Humans not reproducing fast enough is only a problem if you're looking at things from certain socioeconomic perspectives.

Right. If you asked, say, a sea turtle or a timber wolf their opinion about the human population being on track to decline within the next couple of centuries, they'd probably be fine with it. Perpetual human population growth isn't sustainable environmentally, at least not without also fixing, say, our reliance on fossil fuels. However, as birth rates decline, it presents hard challenges for policymakers and governments. When there are too many old people and not enough young people, that creates what's known as an unfavorable dependency ratio. Too many people aging out of the workforce and not enough working age people to support them and pay into social welfare programs for them.

And not to defend U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, but I think that's the point he was clumsily trying to make when he said this. Your class should have been twice as large or maybe a third larger than it was. Your classmates were not allowed to be born. You think about the implications of that on the economy. We're all struggling here to cover the bases of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest. If we had all those able-bodied workers

in the economy, we wouldn't be going upside down and toppling over like this. Listen, I will not yield. I will not. Okay, I'd say that crossed over from clumsy to straight up creepy. The GOP special. Yeah, blaming women for choosing not to have children rather than the circumstances that led them to make that choice. But regardless, something that's been missing in most of the birth rate discourse, creepy and non-creepy, is that there was a time not that long ago in the grand scheme when the fertility rate actually increased dramatically over a relatively short period of time. Oh, yeah. Okay, let me guess. We're going to talk about the baby boom. All those soldiers returning home from World War II, so excited the war was over, they couldn't help but get

everybody pregnant. That's the story we've been told. But the so-called baby boom of mid-century America and elsewhere actually started in the decade before World War II ended, and it was preceded by a century-long decline in the birth rate. Huh. So there was actually a previous long decline in the birth rate, kind of like the one today, about a century ago, which means if we can decipher what reversed that old baby bust, then maybe we're closer to solving the one happening today. Exactly, but also easier said than done. So let's start with the history and work our way forward.

Okay, between 1800 and 1915, the number of children born per woman across the U.S. in several European countries declined slowly. At first, people were still having enough kids on average to more than replace the old people. What do demographers think was behind that? Well, in general, when income and education increase, birth rates go down. The Industrial Revolution meant higher wages and more widespread access to education. And as people's quality of life improved, having more kids became less appealing. Oh, and leaving the workforce to care for children would have a higher cost.

Plus, if you can afford a comfortable lifestyle, well, too many kids can kind of mess that up. Right. I would also think that more access to early education would make people better equipped to decide when they do and don't get pregnant. Yes, there is a lot of evidence that across societies, higher rates of primary and secondary education lead to big drops in the teenage birth rate. The more you know about what pregnancy and parenting will do to you, the less likely you're going to choose it. All of which I'm sure people were very calm and normal about when this first started happening. Right. The more you know about what pregnancy and parenting will do to you, the less likely you're going to choose it. All of which I'm sure people were very calm and normal about when this first started happening. No, unfortunately, they weren't, in fact, very racist about it. In 1906, President Teddy Roosevelt said that Americans deciding to have fewer children was, quote,

the one sin for which the penalty is national death and, quote, race death. Yikes. Okay. So people have always freaked out about the birth rate. After 1915, that slow decline became a fast decline. By the 1920s, America and more than half of Europe had birth rates below that magical 2.1 children per woman number. You know, for my entire life, I'd been told that the end of World War II led to this big baby boom because all the soldiers came home and, I guess, celebrated. But what you're saying is making me realize that that can't be right, because then the same thing would have happened after World War I, but the opposite happened. The birth rate went down.

But then in the mid-1930s, something happened. The birth rate started increasing rather suddenly across Europe and the U.S. Wait, before World War II even started? Yeah, and it didn't matter what side you were going to be on during the war either. Neutral countries like Sweden, future allied countries like France, and, well, Germany all saw birth rates go up. Erin, you are blowing my mind right now. Everything I have been told about the post-war baby boom was a lie?

What? That's wild. So if it wasn't actually caused by victorious soldiers coming home, what was it? Before we get to the most likely reason for this, let's discuss some theories that come apart under scrutiny. First, there's a theory that more available housing meant that more people felt comfortable expanding their families. Well, that makes sense. If you're going to have a kid, better to have a place to put them. But wait, that's not right. There are plenty of places in the world with cramped housing situations and high birth rates. Also, if it were housing, then you would expect people to have more kids as they made more money. But you just told me

that the opposite happens. Exactly. So it couldn't be housing alone. Then there's this theory that modern appliances gave women more time to take care of babies since they were spending less time on housework. That seems kind of feasible, and it would be cool to rename the greatest generation something a little less aggrandizing like Generation Frigidaire. I like how that rolls off the tongue. Except people without appliances like the Amish were still having more babies in the 1930s. Oh, this is so strange.

Like, no explanation fits. Could it be that fewer babies were dying during their first years of life? Like, better infant care? Well, you're getting warmer. The answer that seems to be the most feasible is that in the U.S. and Europe, childbirth was getting much less dangerous for women. Oh, that makes a ton of sense. I would also become a lot more game for a painful nine-month-long medical ordeal if I thought it had become less likely to kill me. Between 1936 and 1956, the maternal mortality rate went down across the U.S. and Europe.

In the U.S., it went down by 94%. Whoa. Pregnancy went from the personal safety equivalent of joyriding in a Ford Pinto to a weekend trip to the grocery store in a Volvo. So the baby boom was more a product of advancements in public health practices than post-war optimism. Exactly. And make childbirth less deadly was one way to decrease the cost of birth. Kind of a gimme, especially if you've got a body that can get pregnant.

It is so telling that we as a culture have completely ignored this very important and in retrospect, very obvious explanation for the baby boom and have instead built our entire generational history around war good, war make babies. But anyway, what we're dealing with today isn't an exact analog to what was happening then. It's not? What do you mean? Yeah, you can only solve the bulk of the maternal mortality rate once.

And once the 1950s were over, the birth rate started its determined march downward again. Turns out making birth less dangerous wasn't a sustainable sell. And that drop would have also coincided with rising incomes and rising education, which you said drives down birth rates. And it also coincided with a big wave of social activism. Including second wave feminism, which increased opportunities for middle class American women to have better access to education and employment outside of the home. And as women have more choices, they choose to have children less.

Yeah, that's one of those facts that really punctures the old nostalgia balloon. Many women only choose to have children because they perceive it as the only choice they can make. That feels like it helps explain why increasing opportunities tends to especially drive down the birth rate among teenagers. Yeah. Back to our timeline, though. The birth rate in the U.S. bottomed out in 1976 at 1.74 births per woman. Then it perked back up, hovering right around two births per woman replacement rate until the Great Recession,

when it started to drop and hasn't recovered. Which brings us to our big question. Why has it proven so hard for any government facing this sort of sustained decline in the birth rate to push it back up? Because they've tried a lot. This is the point in the story where I need a giant true detective season one style garage wall of suspected causes and connections. And so to map that wall out for me, I called up Jennifer Shuba, a demographer and the president of the World Population Bureau.

She sounds pretty qualified to help us out here. Jennifer brought up a really interesting point. To put it simply, having children is expensive and not just or even primarily in the money sense of being expensive. If you ask people, they'll say we would like to wait till we hit certain milestones in our lives, could be postgraduate education or a job that pays a certain amount of promotion, owning your own home. Those things matter. But even when those things are satisfied, that doesn't guarantee somebody's then going to have a child or go from one to two. And that's

because those aren't the only reasons why. And I think we all know this anecdotally. Anybody who's listening would think about maybe their own lives or think about friends who seemingly have it all financially. And then they're like, yeah, but I really want to take that trip to Patagonia next year. So it's just not the right time for us. And so these postmodern values are coming into play here. I think everybody makes their own calculation to put the bar in a different place for themselves. But at some point you say, I'd rather not have another one because these are some things I'd rather do with my time and my money. Expensive can mean an uncomplicated hospital birth can cost close to $30,000, or it can mean I'd rather not give up the life I currently have to devote all

my free time to looking after a kid. Yeah, that also makes the issue a complicated one to address, though. Because the way to convince more people to make a choice is to increase the perceived benefit of the choice or to lower the cost of the choice, or both. And in this case, that is a hard thing to make policy around. But that hasn't stopped governments around the world from trying their best. Some have taken a carrot approach and others have taken a stick approach. Where should I start, Max? I'm guessing the stick is much less pleasant, so let's get that one out of the way. All right, stick it is.

So in the 1960s, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu instituted Decree 770, a brutal policy designed to increase the birth rate. Abortion was totally banned. Birth control was banned in most cases. Wow. Secret police monitored hospitals for women who are trying to skirt these laws. I know a lot of stuff gets compared to The Handmaid's Tale, but this sounds very Handmaid's Tale.

Yeah, fun fact. Margaret Atwood deeply researched Decree 770 and its aftermath as she wrote that book. That's not very fun, actually. But it is a fact. Decree 770, quote, worked for a few years. The birth rate in Romania went up to nearly four children per woman. But it didn't take long for people to figure out ways around it. And the policy was devastating to Romanians, especially women and children. So Ceausescu canceled it right away, right? No. The policy was in place for decades,

even though it didn't work and a lot of people died and many more suffered permanent physical and mental damage as a result. So raising the cost of not having children by criminalizing abortion or birth control doesn't work? That is not what the American pro-life movement has led me to believe. Here's another fact that is not fun. Banning or restricting abortion does not increase the birth rate either. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in the U.S., the number of abortions has increased and the birth rate has decreased. Have babies or else is not a good way to get people to have more babies. No, no, it sure isn't. Even in a country with a total abortion ban like El Salvador, the birth rate is only 1.8 children per woman. Women desperate to not be

pregnant will figure out a way to not be pregnant. Wow. Yep. Seems like total failure. Yeah. More recently, a conservative government in Poland enacted a near total abortion ban that was both unpopular and unsuccessful. The birth rate in Poland continues to be one of the lowest in Europe. I think it's around 1.3. And voters ousted the conservatives in favor of a centrist coalition last year. Okay, let's get to the carrots. Certainly you catch more babies with honey than you do with vinegars, I like to say. Yeah, that is how the saying goes. Unfortunately, offering more incentives to people to have kids hasn't proven to be a long-term solution anywhere.

Germany, for example, had one of the lowest birth rates in Europe from the mid-1970s onward until the German government decided to take some drastic steps. Every new baby goes home with a giant custom beer stein? Free David Hasselhoff concert tickets? That would probably boost the birth rate

and the Hasselhoff thing would probably work. It wouldn't hurt. The government dramatically increased benefits to parents. A year of paid parental leave per parent, which can be used until the child is three. Child care in Germany is heavily subsidized. So parents who send their kids to state daycares sometimes only pay about 150 euros or less per month.

And every child over the age of one is guaranteed a spot in one of the public daycares. So no jockeying for a place on the wait list like parents in the U.S. Wow. So like the dream wish list of socialist pro-natal policies. Plus Germany, like a lot of Western Europe, has pretty good health care, like pretty close to universal. Yeah, it costs like 10 euros to see a doctor there. It's wild. I am anticipating that the word that comes next is but. Yes, but.

But despite all these efforts, the birth rate in Germany has only nudged up to around 1.5 to 1.6. Whoa. And in the last two years, the rate has fallen again. Huh. So even when people say, hey, I can't have kids because it's too expensive and I don't get enough support, and then the government comes in and says, okay, here you go, here is money and government support, then people do not actually have more kids. And Germany isn't even the country that is doing the most for parents.

In Austria, paid parental leave is 2.5 years long. Wow. In the Netherlands, an assigned nurse will visit mothers at home after they return from the hospital to help them in the days and weeks after giving birth. Swedish families are entitled to 480 days of paid family leave to be split evenly

between the parents. Holy shit, 480 days? That is way better than the U.S. guaranteed parental leave of, let's see, sorry, I'm just checking my math here. Oh, it's zero. Yep, 480 beats zero days. Yes, and other countries are straight up bribing people to have kids. Hungary is offering newly married couples $30,000 loans that are forgiven if the couple has three children. Nice. Russia has offered a payment of about $7,000 to couples with two or more children. And how well is all that working? It's not. Russia's birth rate is at the lowest it's been in decades. Hungary's birth rate has risen since

Viktor Orban took power, but it's still below the dismal 1.6 we've been bemoaning in the U.S. And we have got to talk about the big one here, which is South Korea. Yeah, South Korea is fully in crisis mode. In 2020, more people died than were born. You know, that doesn't sound good. No. The birth rate in South Korea is under 0.8 per woman. This despite the fact that over the last 16 years, the government has poured more than $200 billion into trying to get the birth rate back up.

More than a third of young women in South Korea have no desire to have children at all. Okay, so why don't South Koreans want to have kids? I mean, to put it simply, they've determined that the cost is too high and the benefits are too low to justify the decision. In South Korean culture, wives are often expected to care for everybody in their family and their husband's family and provide all of the domestic labor in addition to earning half of the household income. Okay, that doesn't sound like a super attractive deal. No, and no five-star luxury postpartum suite or monthly cash stipend from

the government can make up for that. And then it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. More people who don't want kids means it's more socially acceptable to join them, which means there are fewer places that are kid-friendly because there are fewer kids. And that brings us to the United States. Yes. While our birth rate may not have reached a crisis point, it's still pretty worrying. I know there have been some measures on this from the Biden administration, like extending paid parental leave to 3 million federal employees and some big tax credits for child care. But we also have dismal parental leave, health care, and child care in this country. Here's a fun story.

When I was 20 weeks pregnant with my first kid, I put her on a daycare wait list. And we are still on the wait list. And it's been three years. Although we should say it's not clear this is why. The U.S. birth rate is low. If it were, you'd expect a higher birth rate among people who can afford things like private daycare or gold-plated health plans. But you actually see the opposite. And like you were saying earlier, Americans actually have fewer kids as their financial situation improves.

In the U.S., despite the fact that things like national paid leave and subsidies to lower the cost of child care are overwhelmingly popular, we still can't seem to get them done, though. To borrow a quote from The Simpsons, we've tried nothing. We're all out of ideas, man. Okay, not to pour cold water on this, but we've seen both reward and punishment fail to move the needle elsewhere. That's true. And that brings me to my final point about why the birth rate is such a stubborn thing to fix, because no amount of policymaking can bring down certain costs associated with it. Oh, you mean like physical and emotional costs? Yes, Max.

That's exactly what I mean. You've been around me for these last several months. I am currently incredibly pregnant. Wait, what? Yeah. And what have I spent the last several months doing? Oh, complaining. Complaining.

Exactly. Pregnancy, even easy pregnancies, objectively suck ass. We are biologically terrible at making and birthing children. Our producer, Emma Illich-Frank, called up Kat Bohannon, author of the book Eve, to give us more insight into just how bad we are at reproducing as a species. We evolved to walk upright, which narrowed the pelvic opening. And we simultaneously started getting bigger and bigger heads and bigger and bigger shoulders. And so now our situation is we're trying to squeeze a watermelon out of a lemon sized hole. And if you've met fruit, it's a problem, right? So that's the one big reason that

our birth sucks. But the more pervasive reason, actually the even more dangerous reason, is that our placentas are really invasive. They penetrate the mother's bloodstream. So that has knock-on effects on our immune system, how vulnerable we are to certain kinds of infections when we're pregnant. It has knock-on effects for the kind of bleeding scenarios, that hemorrhage thing that might happen during birth or more importantly, during the postpartum. So compared to other primates, compared to most mammals, we actually just suck at this. I am never going to look at watermelons and lemons the same way again, ever again. Okay. So there's no way around the biological cost of childbearing on the mother's body. Every

method of extracting a child from the womb is painful and complicated, and C-sections are one of the most intense abdominal surgeries. The physical changes to the body can be permanent and irreversible. Okay, but what about reproductive assistance technology? So IVF is a great tool for people who want to extend their fertility for a few years or for LGBTQ people who otherwise couldn't conceive children. But it's expensive, not everybody can access it, and it doesn't always work. I am so sorry to go full Silicon Valley tech guy here. What if we could just grow babies in jars or test tubes or really any glass vessel would do? Are you disrupting the uterus? Maybe. Pregnancy is one of the least understood biological processes

humans undergo. But one thing we do know is that our technology to replicate it is pretty far away. We are nowhere near having a truly functional, non-harmful artificial womb that can go from top to bottom of a human pregnancy. We don't even have that for like a mouse pregnancy. The entire female body in a mammal is the gestation engine. It's not just the uterus. When you have a placenta that's hot docking into the mother's body in this way, it's not the case that you just kind of lay eggs internally and have a nest in there, right? Your whole body is pregnant when you're pregnant, not just your uterus. So to invent an artificial womb,

we basically have to invent an entire artificial female person. So the big problem with artificial womb, she's saying, is that even if you could somehow make an artificial womb, that's actually not even close to everything you need to do this. Yes. Currently, reproductive technology can help extend viability for babies born too early, but it can't eliminate the biological cost of childbearing on women. Somebody's still got to get pregnant, and somehow that baby's got to come out. Plus, once babies are born, even if you have all of the well-compensated help in the world, you're still a parent. Right. Kids need you. Taking care of them and being a parent takes an emotional toll and represents a permanent lifestyle change, especially on women. You don't get to just be

a mom or dad sometimes. Once you have a kid, you're that child's parent until the day you die. Plus, parenting has become a lot more intensive than it once was. In the 1980s, there were PSAs on TV reminding parents to check in on their kids. It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are? And now the children of that generation are all mentally ill. Checking in. And the pendulum has swung the other way now. Parents spend way more time with their children than they ever have in the past. Well, another not so fun fact, mothers who work full time spend as much time on parenting in 2024 as stay at home moms did in the 1970s.

Wow. OK, I feel like this illuminates something really important for me because I know in surveys, a lot of people who did decide to have kids say they actually would have preferred to have more. I always wondered, like, OK, so why didn't they? And this is why they're spending so much more time on each child, and they are having them later in life, there's simply not enough time in the day, and there are not enough days in the year, and not enough years in the time in which they're having kids for most parents to have more than one or two, and to parent them as intensively as we all parent now. Add on to that that nearly half of Americans under 50 now say they don't want to have kids at all, and it's a lot easier to see why the birth rate is so hard to raise. Like, Erin, I hate to be glib, but can I propose a simpler solution to the problem of too few young people in rich countries?

Go for it. Migration. Interesting concept. Go on. Okay, that's the thing. There are many countries in the world with high birth rates, mostly in the global south. A lot of people in those countries would like to work or live in rich countries like the United States, which at this moment very badly needs more working-age people to supplant the declining birth rate. So these are two problems that solve each other, no? Yeah, and all we'd have to do is eliminate centuries of racism and xenophobia.

How hard could that really be? Though we know that once migrants move to richer countries and have kids, that second generation will have a birth rate that is more in line with the low national average. Because more opportunities and higher incomes equals fewer children. Exactly. So the solution isn't a one-off generation of immigration, but rather sustained, indefinite immigration. And that might even only work for a while. Globally, the birth rate is hovering around 2.3 and trending downward. So here's the center of the big tangled knot that is the so-called birth rate problem. Birth rates rise and fall, but often for reasons that can't be predicted or controlled. Governments can pour massive amounts of resources into trying to increase the birth rate.

Generous paid leave, child-friendly infrastructure, accessible and affordable child care. They still can't eliminate some of the costs of having children. They can't reduce the biological cost of pregnancy and birth on the human body. They can't reduce the emotional demands that children make of their parents. They can't make people feel good enough about the future to want to reproduce. In countries with long traditions of misogyny, they can't make having men around materially improve the lives of women. Look, as a 39-year-old without kids, on an individual level, I get it.

I get the decision not to have kids. At the same time, as someone who has seen what it looks like in a place like Japan, when birth rates are too low for too long, I do hope that we as a species figure this one out. Yeah, and to all the sea turtles and timber wolves listening to this episode, congratulations on what sounds like will be a peaceful next few centuries. Now we leave you with Kansas City Chiefs

kicker and masculinity expert Harrison Butker with some thoughts on what women should be doing with their bodies and wombs. I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. Some of you may go on to lead successful careers

in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world. I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabel, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a

mother. I'm on this stage today and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation. Did she teach him how to kick? How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher, and by Erin Ryan. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Evan Sutton mixes and edits the show. Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Production support from Adrienne Hill, Leo Duran, Erica Morrison, Raven Yamamoto, and Natalie Bettendorf. And a special thank you to What A Day's talented hosts, Traevel Anderson, Priyanka Arabindi, Josie Duffy Rice, and Juanita Tolliver for welcoming us to the family.