Our media outlets have a strange obsession with declining birth rates. While the world’s population clocks in at 8.2 billion and adds another 70 million per year—and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that population growth is a major contributor—we read near-daily headlines about the “crisis” of declining birth rates.
While often attributed exclusively to the right, handwringing about women’s fertility decisions and their societal implications is equally the province of the left. Though the target of their criticism differs—the right is obsessed with women’s failure to conform to an archaic notion of femininity, while the progressive critique centers on the inadequacy of our social safety nets—the left is equally off base in its explanation for declining fertility. By all accounts, many women are not having babies not because they can’t afford them or don’t have time for them, but because they simply don’t want them. Which, if we truly believe women have rights, should stop pronatalist scheming of …