Americans aren’t having babies like they used to. In fact, the U.S. birthrate fell to a 32-year low last year, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some young people say having kids is irresponsible due to political or climate concerns. (“In this economy?!”) This argument against having kids has been made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who said it was “legitimate” to question whether having kids is a good idea when climate change will soon end us all.
But beside the fact that “the world is going to hell in a handbasket” is a timeless and very bad excuse for not having kids, the United States actually needs more children. The national rate of 3,788,235 births in 2018 isn’t enough to replace the aging labor force.
“It’s a national problem,” Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California, told NPR. Considering most economic standards, birth rates should be rising, he said. Instead, young people seem to be feeling crippled by high childcare costs and political concerns. How can they bring a new person into an unstable world?
In his recent TED Talk, “The Case for Having Kids,” writer and father Wajahat Ali makes several arguments for having children. The global fertility rate has halved over the past 50 years, he said. And people cite climate change, overpopulation, and resource scarcity as reasons not to have kids. Yet, “despite all this chaos, I still think we should have babies,” Ali said. “I believe we can and should fight for the earth and humanity side by side.”
We don’t want to end up like Japan, where the country has become so desperate for young residents that it paid couples to create them, and even that incentive didn’t really work.
“We need to invest in babies in developed countries if we want to help save our economy and pensions,” Ali said. “But that’s not the reason you have babies. That’s not the main reason. Babies have always represented humanity’s best, boldest, most beautiful, infinite possibilities.”
There are plenty of reasons not to have kids, but political concern is generally not one of them. Our economy needs more children, and our excuses to the contrary say more about us than about what our kids will actually experience.
The U.S. birthrate has been dropping since the ’80s, but that doesn’t mean the trend has to continue. Now is as good a time as ever to have children.
