This past year, I have bothered many Boston College students with a thought experiment that sparks fascinating levels of both curiosity and frustration: If you had to choose, would you have a baby now, or never?
Assume that in the first option, your baby arrives today without complications. You will be able to have as many or as few children as you want afterward. But if you choose the second option, you will not be able to have or raise a child, nor can you have children through IVF, adoption, or surrogacy. You also cannot exploit your decision as a form of hassle-free birth control.
When I ask this question to friends, I mostly receive thoughtful answers that weigh the pros and cons of each option. From my conversations, it seems that BC students generally feel uncomfortable with the “baby now” choice, which makes sense. We are in college, so having a child would be, at the very least, impractical.
Crucially, though, most respondents also said they feel uncomfortable with the idea of having a baby in the next year, five years, or even 10 years. While some simply do not like kids, most feel too uncertain about the world and their place in it to raise a child. With heavy hearts, they would press the “baby never” button and sink somberly into their seats.
Sometimes when I ask this, I get raised eyebrows and offended looks, as if I’m forcing a deal with the devil onto them. After all, it’s hard to talk about fertility and young parenthood as a dude without sounding like an out-of-touch Twitter natalist who believes parents should have more voting power than non-parents. I do not hold these beliefs, but I am still aware that our collective “baby never”-esque decisions may have created a genuine fertility crisis.
More Americans than ever are choosing to “opt out” of parenting entirely, and those who do have kids are not having as many as they once did. Across the developed world, declining birth rates have led to a net-negative “replacement rate,” which means that, if current trends persist, we will not have nearly enough kids to sustain the current population. This phenomenon might seem like a good thing to reduce carbon emissions. But, declining birth rates spell out a slow, inharmonious terror for the shrinking future generations that will inherit the Earth.
The modern world was built for growth—growing economies, growing labor needs, and growing numbers of people. As children become dramatically outnumbered by their parents, future generations will never be able to replace the labor of their retiring elders.
As fewer people are able to take on labor needs, entire pillars of the economic system will collapse. Food systems, which require complex, often unglamorous agricultural labor, will not produce enough food for senior citizens and drive millions into malnutrition. Fewer people and inputs mean vast swaths of unmaintainable land will fall into disrepair, decay, and desolation.
Economic resources will be diverted away from forward-looking investments in new technologies and instead move toward short-term supportive senior living and end-of-life care. The “caretaker state” will become the “caretaker economy,” and as we become subsumed with older loved ones, we will have even less reason to want kids, and we will send yet another shrinking generation into a morbid world.
Pretty grim, right? It should be noted that this is not some radical pet conspiracy, either. Ezra Klein, an icon of center-left political thought, considers the collapsing birth rate one of the four existential issues facing the world today. And various other geopolitical thinkers agree.
As countries like Taiwan have shown, simple policy changes alone cannot reverse this trend.
Giving people money to have kids or inspiring them with patriotic advertisements generate only marginal changes in birth rates at best. It will require fundamental changes in attitudinal headwinds—in other words, vibes—for young people to feel comfortable having kids again.
When I conducted my informal BC surveys, I concluded that most “baby never” people want real, long-term assurances about the future before they consider kids of their own. They want assurances that they can afford housing, childcare, and education for their children. They want assurances that the planet their sons and daughters inherit will not be on fire—whether via nuclear bombs or environmental disasters. And, as petty as it sounds, they want assurances that their decision to have kids won’t invite judgment from an anti-child society.
So, to those of you who feel an inexplicable sense of discomfort when you press the “baby never” button, I would ask you to do three things. First, reflect on this moment and consider why you feel the world would be unfit for your children. Second, imagine a world that would be fit for them and what steps it would take to realize that world. Finally, consider decisions in your life path—in your relationships, in your career, in your values—that could shape a better world for that next generation. Maybe, one day, you’ll feel comfortable pressing “baby now.”
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