Abortion Bans—and Shaming—Aren’t Boosting Fertility Rates. What Does?

In his 2021 remarks about “childless cat ladies” who “don’t really have a direct stake” in our country, Senator JD Vance invoked three examples of irresponsibly childless Americans: Vice President Kamala Harris; Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Representative Alexandria Octavio-Cortez. Unsurprisingly, there’s been a strong backlash to his comments, largely focused on affirming the value of the many child-free Americans (including Taylor Swift). But Vance’s examples had a specifically political focus. It wasn’t just that he didn’t approve of people without kids; he didn’t want the particular groups those three individuals represent running the country: women, people of color, and LGBT people. Not coincidentally, that coalition and their allies are on the brink of achieving a critical mass in our politics that could enact a family-support infrastructure that would positively impact all families. The conservative economic model, by contrast, depends on keeping many families poor, desperate to feed their kids, and willing to take any job for low wages. So conservatives are working hard to convince us to turn on one another, and to prevent that coalition from growing its political power.

The conservative pronatalist effort to increase the number of babies—through abortion bans, threats to contraception, and blather about how women are happiest when they’re at home with babies—aims to push women of all backgrounds out of civic life before they can build that infrastructure, which would definitively alter the current American business model for the better. US fertility rates have been trending downward since 2007, with an overall decline of 21.3 percent as of 2023, including a 68.5 percent decline among teens. While we might have expected rates to increase in abortion-ban states in 2023, an analysis by the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Houston of Centers for Disease Control birth data shows that the fertility rate fell in all 50 states in that year, though they fell slightly less rapidly on average in ban states than in states without bans (report forthcoming).

Multiple factors are in play in the declining rates in ban states: Some people in those states are still able to obtain abortions (the overall rate of legal abortion in the United States increased in 2023, as some in ban states travel for care, and self-managed abortions with medication or other means are also known to be rising). Many people are being more vigilant around their contraception, with increasing numbers of young women choosing sterilization, suggesting that there will be fewer unplanned pregnancies in the near term—and fewer planned pregnancies later. More young people are coming out into LGBT relationships that are naturally contracepted, also lowering the rate of unplanned pregnancies overall. And more people may be refraining from sex, fearing lack of access to abortion post-Dobbs or for other reasons.

There are bleaker causes for this shift as well. Many couples who don’t want to take on the health risks of pregnancy in ban states where doctors hesitate to render aid are choosing not to start the families they’d hoped for. And some pregnant women are dying before they give birth in ban states, because of lack of aid. All of these factors contribute to the 2023 fertility fall. Much more data in these realms is to come—but the signs are that if the bans were in some measure an effort to expand births to reassert patriarchal power and a status quo economy, it’s not working out that way. Trying to force women into families they don’t feel ready for while pushing them out of civic life only makes them even less likely to start families than they were already.

On the other hand, building a family-support infrastructure would make it easier for young couples today to combine career and family earlier, if they so choose. Such an infrastructure could encompass a universal sliding-scale childcare system, paid family leave, and public after-school and summer care programs, among other possible components. That’s the approach that has the greatest chance of increasing the declining fertility rate (though not a cure-all globally)—if we as a society decide that a higher fertility rate is indeed the goal (a topic for more discussion going forward). It’s women who’ve delayed childbearing in order to move up into policymaking roles and their allies who’ve brought us to a point where that’s possible.

Vance was factually wrong, of course, in claiming that Harris was “childless”—she’s actively helped raise her two stepchildren for 10 years. But the remarks are also out of touch with contemporary realities of birth timing and family formation: Buttigieg (then 39) and his partner adopted twins in 2022, and AOC (then 31) might yet choose to have children (or not, up to her)—the average age when women have their first child is now 27, and it’s 31 for college grads.

Later parenthood is common now, and it’s been key to the mass movement of women into civic life—including all aspects of employment and government, over roughly the last 35 years—as reliable birth control enabled increasing numbers to move up through the ranks. The more than 100 women I interviewed for my book Ready, a study on later motherhood, reported that delaying childbirth allowed them to complete their educations, climb the ladders at work, find a partner for the long term, and see something of the world before settling down. As a Supreme Court majority acknowledged in their 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey opinion, “the ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives” —through access to both contraception and abortion. That transformation has both expanded the workforce, as more women have stepped into it, and catapulted us much closer to a full democracy, as those women with more money of their own and more civic presence could begin to directly represent their views. The hard-won expansion of social acceptance and access has similarly increased the representation in office of people of color and the LGBT community. More women moving into the workforce can also address concerns around future workforce declines (an efficiency that also lessens the climate burdens of expanded population).

For women who want children, a key part of the delay story has been the unaffordability of childcare. In a vicious cycle, in a time when few women were in office, they couldn’t create the childcare infrastructure that would let women with kids climb into the policymaking roles to create the infrastructure. As a result, use of birth control to delay first birth has served as a shadow benefits system for many women, allowing them the time needed to rise into positions in which they could earn enough to pay for care themselves and begin to build the family-support infrastructure for the generations following. Progress has been made in great part because women with birth-timing stories similar to those I spoke with for Ready, as well as women who didn’t have children, now comprise a large portion of the women in policymaking roles around our nation. That’s who Vance wants to force out.

Blocking from policymaking roles people who’ve delayed or refrained from biological procreation, as Vance advised, would effectively exclude most women who currently have the education, experience, and time to allow them to serve in those roles—specifically because they put having kids on hold. Rather than building a care infrastructure, Vance recommends that children should all be tended by their grandparents if their mother isn’t available.

That’s a possible solution for parents who have grandparents able, available, willing, and close by, though even they are not always able to do full-time care. And many parents don’t have family nearby. It’s also not always the best option—either for the many children who would be better served by trained, energetic early childhood educators, or for their grandparents, who may like to spend time with grandkids but don’t need a full-time job in retirement. Vance’s “solution” is another way of saying he doesn’t want to fund a universal sliding-scale childcare system, like the one that almost passed in 2021 as part of Biden’s Build Back Better bill. It lost by one vote, when business owner and Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin voted nay, arguing that he couldn’t support the “entitlement mentality” that would result. But the vote was closer than ever before.