Women Are Having Fewer Kids Because They Don’t Want Them
Most conservatives are too afraid to admit what many feminists proudly own: The decline in fertility rates is the direct result of the feminist project and women prioritizing careers over childbearing. Since the 1970s, when the feminist movement transformed gender dynamics and women entered the workforce by the millions, the fertility rate has been below replacement, and there is no prospect of this changing. In 2025, the fertility rate hit another record low, according to CDC data.
Women in their early 30s now have the highest birth rate of any age cohort, a profound cultural shift without precedent in history. This pattern aligns with the feminists’ ideal timeline: Climb the corporate ladder early, have kids later, or not at all. Roughly 85 percent of women aged 20-24, and 63 percent of women aged 25-29, are now childless.
The high cost of housing, healthcare, and childcare are the usual culprits cited in the fertility discourse. There is something to this, of course, and sound policy initiatives to address it should be implemented. But it should also be remembered that having a family has never been easy or cheap. Moreover, fertility was already in sharp decline when housing was much more affordable, and the Boomers were buying their homes. So something more than that cost explains declining fertility. The extraordinary cost of childcare, though also real, is an entirely newfangled problem that seeks to rectify the severe, and vastly underreported, shortage of full-time mothers.
Blaming impersonal economic forces is an attractive choice because it never hits cultural bedrock: It lets women off the hook for life choices they often consciously and even proudly make. This choice presupposes feminist principles that hold women’s autonomy as the ultimate societal good. Little is said about how this relegates the needs of the young and demographic sustainability to minor concerns. The discourse is limited to making children “affordable” and “convenient”—while avoiding anything that might impose limitations on women’s career choices.
The refusal to compromise with feminist priorities has led to some absurd conclusions. The New York Times, for example, has suggested that the record decline in fertility could someday be alleviated by a biologically improbable baby boom among women in their mid-to-late 40s. This absurdity is what demographic reality looks like through an ideological lens.
Conservatives, for their part, have examined the fertility issue from two angles: by proposing economic incentives, like Trump’s proposed $5,000 “baby bonus,” and by portraying women as the victims of a false consciousness. Unfortunately, financial incentives have not, and probably will not, change the revealed preference of many women for smaller (or no) families, and nations that have attempted to subsidize child-rearing, like Hungary and South Korea, have found limited success.
The right-wing narrative that women have been indoctrinated to ignore their biological clocks is, moreover, only half-true. Many women happily sacrifice children for a high-status career, and once they achieve high status in the job market, marriage to ordinary men appears to many financially successful women to be unattractive. Thus, many high-income women choose to forgo marriage and family precisely because there are fewer men available who meet their standards.
While modern women are intensely career-driven, as a group, they have, at best, a lukewarm interest in children. According to Pew Research, young men who lack children are more likely to say they want kids someday (57 percent) than young women without children (45 percent). The indifference many women have for family life is often blamed on men for not “stepping up.” Indeed, many young men are forgoing family life, but there is seldom any investigation into their motives—probably because such an investigation would reveal some hard truths about what feminism has bequeathed to us. On the flip side, society today insists that women are strong and independent, but it continues to treat them with great delicacy while ignoring their actual preferences.
The absolute primacy of women’s supposed needs is perhaps best illustrated in how society treats children, especially those without the privilege of being born, who are so easily sacrificed to the ravenous market. Instead of replacing itself, as former generations did naturally, society is involved in a verbose, agonizing dialogue about the horrible burden of children and how to fit them into the professional aspirations of their mothers. The focus is almost entirely on the financial cost of children, with no attention given to the deeper question of what it takes to raise a human being.
Mothers provide not only sustenance and affection but moral and religious formation. You can’t place a monetary value on this kind of work. It is indispensable labor, labor which a feminist society wants literally anyone but mothers to perform. It has largely shifted to strangers, iPads, or possibly reluctant (hopefully, loving) grandparents.
Feminism punched a giant hole in nature’s safety net, and what’s left is a sad patchwork. There is a quiet understanding that this arrangement cannot be disturbed but must simply be made more manageable so women can pursue their careers. The fertility debate, in other words, is a disingenuous charade leading nowhere.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/women-are-having-fewer-kids-because-they-dont-want-them