A few days ago, data was released showing that the fertility rate in the United States – the number of babies born per 1,000 women of childbearing age – hit a record low in 2017, for the second year in a row.  The fertility rate has been declining every year since 2008, and the 3% drop from 2016 to 2017 is the largest single-year decrease since 2010.  The New York Times published an article about the phenomenon in Thursday’s paper with the headline “Fertility Rate Again Falls to a Record Low, Confounding Demographers.”  It seems no one can figure out why women between the ages of 15 and 44 aren’t having as many kids as they once did.  As a 33-year-old woman who conceived my first child in 2017, perhaps I can shed some light on the topic.

First, it’s important to note that a decrease in teen pregnancies accounts for a significant portion of the decline, and everyone seems to agree that’s a good thing.  Many people question whether we really need to worry about a declining fertility rate at all.  More people in the world means more competition for scarce resources.  Some have even suggested that to reduce our negative environmental impact, we should all have fewer children.  But others note that fewer young people makes it harder to fill jobs and care for the aging population.  Additionally, some people argue that the world will be better off if it is populated by people who share our Western democratic values and that, essentially, we should not allow ourselves to be outnumbered by people in societies with values antithetical to our own.

I suspect, however, that those considerations do not play into the childbearing calculus for most people in their twenties, thirties, and early forties, at least not in a substantial way.  Our decisions are driven more by the practicalities directly affecting our lives.

Many of my friends do have children, though most have only one or two.  Some have decided that raising children is not for them, and some wanted to have kids but found it wasn’t in the cards.  A few of my friends and acquaintances began having kids in their twenties, but most waited until their thirties, and some did not get started until their early forties.  Why did they wait, and why aren’t they having more children?  The reasons are varied and complicated, but I think the single biggest factor is financial.

Having kids is expensive.  Under the Affordable Care Act, most health insurance plans are now required to cover prenatal doctor visits at no cost to the expectant mother.  Things like lab work and ultrasounds, however, often are not covered.  Amazingly, the cost of the delivery itself is not always covered either, meaning that even mothers with health insurance can end up with a hospital bill of several thousand dollars or more.

And that’s just the cost of actually having a baby.  Add in the cost of fertility treatments for those who need them (those usually aren’t covered by insurance either), the loss of income from unpaid maternity leave, and the staggering cost of raising a child to age 18, and the numbers are daunting.  The expense that tends to be most worrisome for people considering having children is the cost of childcare, which for each child can easily rival a monthly mortgage payment.  Paid childcare is a necessity for many people in my generation because many of us have moved away from our hometowns and don’t have family nearby who can watch our kids while we work.  Those who do live near their parents often can’t rely on them for childcare, either because they are still working themselves or are incapable of or uninterested in watching children full-time.

Most people I know who really want children will figure out a way to make it work financially for at least one child.  But, responsibly, they often delay trying to conceive until they feel at least somewhat financially secure.  That may mean waiting until they have paid off huge student loans and have saved enough money for a down payment on a house.  Even for people who are on conservative loan repayment plans, this can take a good decade.  Assuming that a person graduates from college at 22 and perhaps goes on to graduate school, she may not meet these financial benchmarks until her early to mid thirties, or later.  Keep in mind that while student loan debt has risen astronomically in recent years, and housing costs have steadily increased, wages have remained stagnant.  People in my generation spend a large portion of their income on debt repayment and housing, which often doesn’t leave a lot of budgetary wiggle room for the costs of bearing and raising children.

Additionally, many women (and men) are focused on their careers in their twenties.  We’ve been told to lean in and not to leave before we leave.  We’ve heard over and over again how hard it is to balance a career with raising children.  We know that the wage gap widens for women who have kids between 25 and 35 and that the gap never really closes.  We’ve been told we can’t have it all, at least not all at once, so we try to get as far in our careers as we can before taking maternity leave and scaling back a bit to raise kids.  We know that we need to build a certain amount of career capital before having children if we want to be taken seriously and afforded some amount of flexibility once we have kids.

Unfortunately, some women discover in their mid- to late-thirties that they’ve waited too long.  Maybe they’ve frozen their eggs and then discovered when they tried to use them that the technology isn’t as foolproof as they thought it was.  Maybe they discovered too late that their eggs were not as plentiful or as viable as they’d hoped.  Assisted reproductive technology has come a long way, but there are no guarantees, and options like in vitro fertilization, donor eggs or embryos, and surrogacy are incredibly expensive, emotionally fraught, and risky.  Faced with difficult choices, some women and couples decide that the best option is to forego having a family.

I also know a number of women who haven’t had kids because they haven’t found the right partner.  The average age at first marriage in the U.S. has risen.  Some women choose to become single mothers, but many understandably would rather not go through the child-rearing journey alone.  There are now more educated young women than men in our country, an imbalance that makes it hard for some women to find a partner they consider desirable.  In some cities, the ratio of women to men is quite askew.  And the problem doesn’t only affect upper class or highly educated people.  The labor participation rate for men without a college degree is decreasing, meaning that a large number of men don’t have jobs and aren’t looking for them.  I suspect many women would find those men to be less than optimal life partners.  In some communities, a huge portion of the young male population is incarcerated.  The result is a lot of single women.

I didn’t have a child until age 33 for several reasons.  I wanted to graduate from college and law school before starting a family.  I knew it would make a negative impression on an employer to get pregnant immediately after starting a job, so I always figured I’d wait a year or two before trying to conceive.  But that never became an issue for me because I separated from my first husband right at the end of law school.  I dated for several years and sought a long-term partner, but I didn’t find one right away.  I remarried at 31.  My son was born about two and a half years later.  We might have had a child sooner, but it just didn’t happen as quickly as we had hoped, and we had to seek medical assistance.  We would like to have another child someday, but I doubt we will have more than two.  Our considerations include our ages, expenses, and most importantly, the amount of time and energy required to raise a child.  (One thing I can say for sure is that the timing of my childbearing and the number of children I may ultimately have has absolutely nothing to do with the rise of screen time and the prevalence of Netflix, as one sociologist hypothesized.  Really, dude? That’s your best theory?)

If we as a nation want to encourage people to have more kids, there are ways to do that.  Other countries have successfully implemented policies in that regard, and several states and companies are taking action as well.  We can provide for paid maternity and paternity leave. We can require insurers to cover the cost of fertility treatments and delivery.  We can wholly or partially subsidize the cost of childcare.  Employers can be more flexible in terms of hours and facetime, and they can stop making unwarranted negative assumptions about the dedication and capability of women with kids.  These changes would not only encourage people to have more kids, they would ease a lot of stress and might go a long way toward improving the lives of many American families.

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N.B.: In an effort to publish this post more quickly, I have not included links to all my source material. Adding lots of links takes time, and I find that few readers ever click on them. I do intend to provide links to sources in this post eventually, so check back later if you have questions about the statistics referenced.