Over the past half century, parenthood has
undergone a change so simple yet so profound we are only beginning to
grasp the enormity of its implications. It is that we have our children
much later than we used to. This has come to seem perfectly
unremarkable; indeed, we take note of it only when celebrities push it
to extremes—when Tony Randall has his first child at 77; Larry King, his
fifth child by his seventh wife at 66; Elizabeth Edwards, her last
child at 50. This new gerontological voyeurism—I think of it as
doddering-parent porn—was at its maximally gratifying in 2008, when, in
almost simultaneous and near-Biblical acts of belated fertility, two
70-year-old women in India gave birth, thanks to donor eggs and
disturbingly enthusiastic doctors. One woman’s husband was 72; the
other’s was 77.
These, though, are the
headlines. The real story is less titillating, but it tells us a great
deal more about how we’ll be living in the coming years: what our
families and our workforce will look like, how healthy we’ll be, and
also—not to be too eugenicist about it—the future well-being of the
human race.
That
women become mothers later than they used to will surprise no one. All
you have to do is study the faces of the women pushing baby strollers,
especially on the streets of coastal cities or their suburban
counterparts. American first-time mothers have aged about four years
since 1970—as of 2010, they were 25.4 as opposed to 21.5. That average,
of course, obscures a lot of regional, ethnic, and educational
variation. The average new mother from Massachusetts, for instance, was
28; the Mississippian was 22.9. The Asian American first-time mother was
29.1; the African American 23.1. A college-educated woman had a better than one-in-three
chance of having her first child at 30 or older; the odds that a woman
with less education would wait that long were no better than one in ten.
It
badly misstates the phenomenon to associate it only with women: Fathers
have been getting older at the same rate as mothers. First-time fathers
have been about three years older than first-time mothers for several
decades, and they still are. The average American man is between 27 and
28 when he becomes a father. Meanwhile, as the U.S. birth rate slumps
due to the recession, only men and women over 40 have kept having more
babies than they did in the past.
In short, the
growth spurt in American parenthood is not among rich septuagenarians or
famous political wives approaching or past menopause, but among roughly
middle-aged couples with moderate age gaps between them, like my
husband and me. OK, I’ll admit it. We’re on the outer edge of the
demographic bulge. My husband was in his mid-forties and I was 37—two
years past the age when doctors start scribbling AMA, Advanced Maternal
Age, on the charts of mothers-to-be—before we called a fertility doctor.
The doctor called back and told us to wait a few more months. We
waited, then went in. The office occupied a brownstone basement just off
the tonier stretches of New York’s Madison Avenue, though its tan,
sleek sofas held a large proportion of Orthodox Jewish women likely to
have come from another borough. The doctor, oddly, had a collection of
brightly colored porcelain dwarves on the shelf behind his desk. I
thought he put them there to let you know that he had a sense of humor
about the whole fertility racket.
The steps he told us we’d have
to take, though, were distinctly unfunny. We’d start with a test to
evaluate my fortysomething husband’s sperm. If it passed muster, we’d
move on to “injectables,” such as follicle-stimulating and luteinizing
hormones. The most popular fertility drug is clomiphene citrate,
marketed as Clomid or Serophene, which would encourage my tired ovaries
to push those eggs out into the world. (This was a few years back;
nowadays, most people take these as pills, which are increasingly common
and available, without prescription and possibly in dangerously
adulterated form, over the Internet.) I was to shoot Clomid into my
thigh five days a month. Had I ever injected anything, such as insulin,
into myself? No, I had not. The very idea gave me the willies. I was
being pushed into a world I had read about with intense dislike, in
which older women endure ever more harrowing procedures in their
desperation to cheat time.
If Clomid didn’t work, we’d move into
alphabet-soup mode: IVF (in vitro fertilization), ICSI (intracytoplasmic
sperm injection), GIFT (gamete intrafallopian transfer), even ZIFT
(zygote intrafallopian transfer). All these scary-sounding reproductive
technologies involved taking stuff out of my body and putting it back
in. Did these procedures, or the hormones that came with them, pose
risks to me or to my fetus? The doctor shrugged. There are always risks,
he said, especially when you’re older, but no one is quite sure whether
they come from advanced maternal age itself or from the procedures.
My
husband passed his test. I started on my routines. With the help of a
minor, non–IVF-related surgical intervention and Clomid, which had the
mild side effects of making me feel jellyfish-like and blurring my
already myopic vision, I got pregnant.
My
baby boy seemed perfect. When he was three, though, the pediatrician
told me that he had a fine-motor delay; I was skeptical, but after a
while began to notice him struggling to grasp pencils and tie his shoes.
An investigator from the local board of education confirmed that my son
needed occupational therapy. This, I discovered, was another little
culture, with its own mystifying vocabulary. My son was diagnosed with a
mild case of “sensory-integration disorder,” a condition with symptoms
that overlapped with less medical terms like “excitable” and
“sensitive.”
Sitting on child-sized chairs outside the little gyms
in which he exercised an upper body deemed to have poor muscle tone, I
realized that here was a subculture of a subculture: that of mothers who
spend hours a week getting services for developmentally challenged
children. It seemed to me that an unusually large proportion of these
women were older, although I didn’t know whether to make anything of
that or dismiss it as the effect of living just outside a city—New
York—where many women establish themselves in their professions before
they have children.
I also spent those 50-minute sessions
wondering: What if my son’s individual experience, meaningless from a
statistical point of view, hinted at a collective problem? As my
children grew and, happily, thrived (I managed to have my daughter by
natural means), I kept meeting children of friends and acquaintances,
all roughly my age, who had Asperger’s, autism, obsessive-compulsive
disorder, attention-deficit disorder, sensory-integration disorder.
Curious as to whether there were more developmental disabilities than
there used to be, I looked it up and found that, according to the Centers for Disease Control,
learning problems, attention-deficit disorders, autism and related
disorders, and developmental delays increased about 17 percent between
1997 and 2008. One in six American children was reported as having a
developmental disability between 2006 and 2008. That’s about 1.8 million
more children than a decade earlier.
Soon, I learned that medical
researchers, sociologists, and demographers were more worried about the
proliferation of older parents than my friends and I were. They talked
to me at length about a vicious cycle of declining fertility, especially
in the industrialized world, and also about the damage caused by
assisted-reproductive technologies (ART) that are commonly used on
people past their peak childbearing years. This past May, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine
found that 8.3 percent of children born with the help of ART had
defects, whereas, of those born without it, only 5.8 percent had
defects.
A phrase I heard repeatedly during these conversations
was “natural experiment.” As in, we’re conducting a vast empirical study
upon an unthinkably large population: all the babies conceived by older
parents, plus those parents, plus their grandparents, who after all
have to wait a lot longer than they used to for grandchildren. It was
impressed upon me that parents like us, with our aging reproductive
systems and avid consumption of fertility treatments, would change the
nature of family life. We might even change the course of our
evolutionary future. For we are bringing fewer children into the world
and producing a generation that will be subtly different—“phenotypically
and biochemically different,” as one study I read put it—from previous
generations.
What
science tells us about the aging parental body should alarm us more
than it does. Age diminishes a woman’s fertility; every woman knows
that, although several surveys have shown that women—and
men—consistently underestimate how sharp the drop-off can be for women
after age 35. The effects of maternal age on children aren’t as
well-understood. As that age creeps upward, so do the chances that
children will carry a chromosomal abnormality, such as a trisomy. In a
trisomy, a third chromosome inserts itself into one of the 23 pairs that
most of us carry, so that a child’s cells carry 47 instead of 46
chromosomes. The most notorious trisomy is Down syndrome. There are two
other common ones: Patau syndrome, which gives children cleft palates,
mental retardation, and an 80 percent likelihood of dying in their first
year; and Edwards syndrome, which features oddly shaped heads, clenched
hands, and slow growth. Half of all Edwards syndrome babies die in the
first week of life.
The risk that a pregnancy will yield a trisomy
rises from 2–3 percent when a woman is in her twenties to 30 percent
when a woman is in her forties. A fetus faces other obstacles on the way
to health and well-being when born to an older mother: spontaneous
abortion, premature birth, being a twin or triplet, cerebral palsy, and
low birth weight. (This last leads to chronic health problems later in
children’s lives.)
We have been conditioned to think of
reproductive age as a female-only concern, but it isn’t. For decades,
neonatologists have known about birth defects linked to older fathers:
dwarfism, Apert syndrome (a bone disorder that may result in an
elongated head), Marfan syndrome (a disorder of the connective tissue
that results in weirdly tall, skinny bodies), and cleft palates. But the
associations between parental age and birth defects were largely
speculative until this year, when researchers in Iceland, using
radically more powerful ways of looking at genomes, established that men
pass on more de novo—that is, non-inherited and spontaneously
occurring—genetic mutations to their children as they get older. In the scientists’ study, published in Nature,
they concluded that the number of genetic mutations that can be
acquired from a father increases by two every year of his life, and
doubles every 16, so that a 36-year-old man is twice as likely as a
20-year-old to bequeath de novo mutations to his children.
The Nature
study ended by saying that the greater number of older dads could help
to explain the 78 percent rise in autism cases over the past decade.
Researchers have suspected links between autism and parental age for
years. One much-cited study from 2006
argued that the risk of bearing an autistic child jumps from six in
10,000 before a man reaches 30 to 32 in 10,000 when he’s 40—a more than
fivefold increase. When he reaches 50, it goes up to 52 in 10,000. It
should be noted that there are many skeptics when it comes to explaining
the increase of autism; one school of thought holds that it’s the
result of more doctors making diagnoses, better equipment and
information for the doctors to make them with, and a vocal parent lobby
that encourages them. But it increasingly looks as if autism cases have
risen more than overdiagnosis can account for and that parental age,
particularly paternal age, has something to do with that fact.
Why
do older men make such unreliable sperm? Well, for one thing, unlike
women, who are born with all their eggs, men start making sperm at
puberty and keep doing so all their lives. Each time a gonad cell
divides to make spermatozoa, that’s another chance for its DNA to make a
copy error. The gonads of a man who is 40 will have divided 610 times;
at 50, that number goes up to 840. For another thing, as a man ages, his
DNA’s self-repair mechanisms work less well.
To the danger of age-related genetic mutations, geneticists are starting to add the danger of age-related epigenetic
mutations—that is, changes in the way genes in sperm express
themselves. Epigenetics, a newish branch of genetics, studies how
molecules latch onto genes or unhitch from them, directing many of the
body’s crucial activities. The single most important process
orchestrated by epigenetic notations is the stupendously complex
unfurling of the fetus. This extra-genetic music is written, in part, by
life itself. Epigenetically influenced traits, such as mental
functioning and body size, are affected by the food we eat, the
cigarettes we smoke, the toxins we ingest—and, of course, our age.
Sociologists have devoted many man-hours to demonstrating that older
parents are richer, smarter, and more loving, on the whole, than younger
ones. And yet the tragic irony of epigenetics is that the same
wised-up, more mature parents have had longer to absorb air-borne
pollution, endocrine disruptors, pesticides, and herbicides. They may
have endured more stress, be it from poverty or overwork or lack of
social status. All those assaults on the cells that make sperm DNA can
add epimutations to regular mutations.
At the center of research
on older fathers, genetics, and neurological dysfunctions is Avi
Reichenberg, a tall, wiry psychiatrist from King’s College in London. He
jumps up a lot as he talks, and he has an ironic awareness of how
nervous his work makes people, especially men. He can identify: He had
his children relatively late—mid-thirties—and fretted throughout his
wife’s pregnancies. Besides, he tells me, the fungibility of sperm is
just plain disturbing. Reichenberg likes to tell people about all the
different ways that environmental influences alter epigenetic patterns
on sperm DNA. That old wives’ tale about hot baths or tight underwear
leading to male infertility? It’s true. “Usually when you give that
talk, men sitting like that”—he crossed his legs—“go like this,” he
said, opening them back up.
Dolores Malaspina, a short, elegantly
coiffed psychiatrist who speaks in long, urgent paragraphs, has also
spent her life worrying people about aging men’s effects on their
children’s mental state—in fact, she could be said to be the dean of
older-father alarmism. In 2001, Malaspina co-authored a ground-breaking study
that concluded that men over 50 were three times more likely than men
under 25 to father a schizophrenic child. Malaspina and her team derived
that figure from a satisfyingly large population sample: 87,907
children born in Jerusalem between 1964 and 1976. (Luckily, the Israeli
Ministry of Health recorded the ages of their fathers.) Malaspina argued
that the odds of bearing a schizophrenic child moved up in a straight
line as a man got older. Other researchers dismissed her findings,
arguing that men who waited so long to have children were much more
likely to be somewhat schizophrenic themselves. But Malaspina’s
conclusions have held up. A 2003 Danish study
of 7,704 schizophrenics came up with results similar to Malaspina’s,
although it concluded that a man’s chances of having a schizophrenic
child jumped sharply at 55, rather than trending steadily upward after
35.
“I often hear from teachers that the children of much older
fathers seem more likely to have learning or social issues,” she told
me. Now, she said, she’d proved that they can be. Showing that aging men
have as much to worry about as aging women, she told me, is a blow for
equality between the sexes. “It’s a paradigm shift,” she said.
This
paradigm shift may do more than just tip the balance of concern away
from older mothers toward older fathers; it may also transform our
definition of mental illness itself. “It’s been my hypothesis, though it
is only a hypothesis at this point, that most of the disorders that
afflict neuropsychiatric patients—depression, schizophrenia, and autism,
at least the more extreme cases—have their basis in the early processes
of brain maturation,” Dr. Jay Gingrich, a professor of psychobiology at
the New York State Psychiatric Institute and a former colleague of
Malaspina’s, told me. Recent mouse studies have uncovered actual
architectural differences between the brains of offspring of older
fathers and those of younger fathers. Gingrich and his team looked at
the epigenetic markings on the genes in those older-fathered and
younger-fathered brains and found disparities between them, too. “So
then we said: ‘Wow, that’s amazing. Let’s double down and see whether we
can see differences in the sperm DNA of the older and younger
fathers,’” Gingrich said. And they didn’t just see it, he continued;
they saw it “in spades—with an order of magnitude more prominent in
sperm than in the brain.” While more research needs to be done on how
older sperm may translate into mental illness, Gingrich is confident
that the link exists. “It’s a fascinating smoking gun,” he says.
Epigenetics
is also forcing medical researchers to reopen questions about fertility
treatments that had been written off as answered and done with.
Fertility doctors do a lot of things to sperm and eggs that have not
been rigorously tested, including keeping them in liquids (“culture
media,” they’re called) teeming with chemicals that may or may not
scramble an embryo’s development—no one knows for sure. There just isn’t
a lot of data to work with: The fertility industry, which is
notoriously under-regulated, does not give the government reports on
what happens to the children it produces. As Wendy Chavkin, a professor
of obstetrics and population studies at Columbia University’s school of
public health, says, “We keep pulling off these technological marvels
without the sober tracking of data you’d want to see before these things
become widespread all over the world.”
Clomid, or clomiphene
citrate, which has become almost as common as aspirin in women
undergoing fertility treatments, came out particularly badly in the
recent New England Journal of Medicine study
that rang alarm bells about ART and birth defects. “I think it’s an
absolute time bomb,” Michael Davies, the study’s lead researcher and a
professor of pediatrics at the University of Adelaide in Australia, told
me. “We estimate that there may be in excess of 500 preventable major
birth defects occurring annually across Australia as a direct result of
this drug,” he wrote in a fact sheet he sent me. Dr. Jennita Reefhuis,
an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control, worries that
Clomid might build up in women’s bodies when they take it repeatedly,
rather than washing out of the body as it is supposed to. If so, the
hormonal changes induced by the drug may misdirect early fetal
development.
Another popular procedure coming under renewed
scrutiny is ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection). In ICSI, sperm or a
part of a sperm is injected directly into an extracted egg. In the
early ’90s, when doctors first started using ICSI, they added it to in
vitro fertilization only when men had low sperm counts, but today
doctors perform ICSI almost routinely—procedures more than doubled
between 1999 and 2008. And yet, ICSI shows up in the studies as having
higher rates of birth defects than any other popular fertility
procedure. Among other possible reasons, ICSI allows sperm to bypass a
crucial step in the fertilization of the egg—the binding of the head of
the sperm with the coat of the egg. Forcing the sperm to penetrate the
coat may be nature’s way of maintaining quality control.
A
remarkable feature of the new older parenting is how happy women seem
to be about it. It’s considered a feminist triumph, in part because it’s
the product of feminist breakthroughs: birth control, which gives women
the power to pace their own fertility, and access to good jobs, which
gives them reason to delay it. Women simply assume that having a serious
career means having children later and that failing to follow that
schedule condemns them to a lifetime of reduced opportunity—and they’re
not wrong about that. So each time an age limit is breached or a new ART
procedure is announced, it’s met with celebration. Once again,
technology has given us the chance to lead our lives in the proper
sequence: education, then work, then financial stability, then children.
As
a result, the twenties have turned into a lull in the life cycle, when
many young men and women educate themselves and embark on careers or
journeys of self-discovery, or whatever it is one does when not
surrounded by diapers and toys. This is by no means a bad thing, for
children or for adults. Study after study has shown
that the children of older parents grow up in wealthier households,
lead more stable lives, and do better in school. After all, their
parents are grown-ups.
But the experience of being an older parent
also has its emotional disadvantages. For one thing, as soon as we
procrastinators manage to have kids, we also become members of the
“sandwich generation.” That is, we’re caught between our toddlers
tugging on one hand and our parents talking on the phone in the other,
giving us the latest updates on their ailments. Grandparents well into
their senescence provide less of the support younger grandparents
offer—the babysitting, the spoiling, the special bonds between children
and their elders through which family traditions are passed.
Another
downside of bearing children late is that parents may not have all the
children they dreamed of having, which can cause considerable pain. Long-term studies have shown
that, when people put off having children till their mid-thirties and
later, they fail to reach “intended family size”—that is, they produce
fewer children than they’d said they’d meant to when interviewed a
decade or so earlier. A matter of lesser irritation (but still some
annoyance) is the way strangers and even our children’s friends confuse
us with our own parents. My husband has twice been mistaken for our
daughter’s grandfather; he laughs it off, but when the same thing
happened to a woman I know, she was stung.
What haunts me about my
children, though, is not the embarrassment they feel when their friends
study my wrinkles or my husband’s salt-and-pepper temples. It’s the
actuarial risk I run of dying before they’re ready to face the world. At
an American Society for Reproductive Medicine meeting last year, two
psychologists and a gynecologist antagonized a room full of fertility
experts by making the unpopular but fairly obvious point that older
parents die earlier in their children’s lives. (“We got a lot of
blowback in terms of reproductive rights and all that,” the gynecologist
told me.) A mother who is 35 when her child is born is more likely than not to have died by the time that child is 46.
The one who is 45 may have bowed out of her child’s life when he’s 37.
The odds are slightly worse for fathers: The 35-year-old new father can
hope to live to see his child turn 42. The 45-year-old one has until the
child is 33.
These numbers may sound humdrum, but even under the
best scenarios, the death of a parent who had children late, not to
mention the long period of decline that precedes it, will befall those
daughters and sons when they still need their parents’ help—because,
let’s face it, even grown-up children rely on their parents more than
they used to. They need them for guidance at the start of their careers,
and they could probably also use some extra cash for the rent or the
cable bill, if their parents can swing it. “If you don’t have children
till your forties, they won’t be launched until you’re in your sixties,”
Suzanne Bianchi, a sociologist who studies families, pointed out to me.
In today’s bad economy, young people need education, then, if they can
afford it, more education, and even internships. They may not go off the
parental payroll until their mid- to late-twenties. Children also need
their parents not to need them just when they’ve had children of their own.
There’s
an entire body of sociological literature on how parents’ deaths affect
children, and it suggests that losing a parent distresses young adults
more than older adults, low-income young adults more than high-income
ones, and daughters more than sons. Curiously, the early death of a
mother correlates to a decline in physical health in both sexes,
and the early death of a father correlates to increased drinking among
young men, perhaps because more men than women have drinking problems
and their sons are more likely to copy them.
All these problems
will be exacerbated if we aging parents are, in fact, producing a
growing subpopulation of children with neurological or other disorders
who will require a lifetime of care. Schizophrenia, for instance,
usually sets in during a child’s late teens or early twenties. Avi
Reichenberg sums up the problem bluntly. “Who is going to take care of
that child?” he asked me. “Some seventy-five-year-old demented father?”
This
question preys on the mind of every parent whose child suffers a
disability, whether that parent is elderly or not. The best answer to it
that I’ve ever heard came from a 43-year-old father I met named Patrick
Spillman, whose first child, Grace, a four-and-a-half-year-old, has a
mild case of cerebral palsy. (Her mother was 46 when Grace was born.) In
his last job, Spillman, stocky and blunt, directed FreshDirect’s coffee
department. Now, he’s a full-time father and advocate for his daughter.
He spends his days taking Grace to doctors and therapists and
orthotic-boot-makers, as well as making won’t-take-no-for-an-answer
phone calls to state and city agencies that might provide financial or
therapeutic assistance. How does he face the prospect of disappearing
from her life? A whole lot better than I would. (My lame-joke answer,
when my children ask me that question, is that I plan to live forever.)
“We’re putting money aside now,” he said. Into a trust, he adds, so that
government agencies can’t count it against her when she or a caregiver
goes looking for Medicaid or other benefits.
Spillman also
prepares Grace for the future by practicing tough love on her, refusing
to do for her anything she could possibly do for herself. Her mother, he
says, sometimes pleads with him to help Grace more as she stumbles over
the tasks of daily life. But he won’t. At her tender age, Grace already
dresses and undresses herself; every morning, Spillman explained, they
do a little “tag check dance” to make sure nothing’s inside out. When,
he says, someone makes fun of her way of walking and chewing and
speaking, as he believes someone will inevitably do, “I want her to have
years and years of confidence behind her.” He adds, “She’s going to go
to college. She will be well-adjusted. She won’t be able to live on a
nineteenth-floor walk-up, but she will live a normal life.”
When
we look back at this era from some point in the future, I believe we’ll
identify the worldwide fertility plunge as the most important legacy of
old-age parenting. A half-century ago, demographers were issuing
neo-Malthusian manifestoes about the overpeopling of the Earth.
Nowadays, they talk about the disappearance of the young. Fertility has fallen below replacement rates
in the majority of the 224 countries—developing as well as
developed—from which the United Nations collects such information, which
means that more people die in those places than are born. Baby-making
has slumped by an astonishing 45 percent around the world since 1975. By
2010, the average number of births per woman had dropped from 4.7 to
2.6. No trend that large has a simple explanation, but the biggest
factor, according to population experts, is the rising age of
parents—mothers, really—at the birth of their first children. That
number, above all others, predicts how large a family will ultimately
be.
Fewer people, of course, means less demand for food, land,
energy, and all the Earth’s other limited resources. But the
environmental benefits have to be balanced against the social costs.
Countries that can’t replenish their own numbers won’t have younger
workers to replace those who retire. Older workers will have to be
retrained to cope with the new technologies that have transmogrified the
workplace. Retraining the old is more expensive than allowing them to
retire to make way for workers comfortable with computers, social media,
and cutting-edge modes of production. And who will take care of the
older generations if there aren’t enough in the younger ones?
If
you’re a doctor, you see clearly what is to be done, and you’re sure it
will be. “People are going to change their reproductive habits,” said
Alan S. Brown, a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at the
Columbia University medical school and the editor of an important
anthology on the origins of schizophrenia. They will simply have to
“procreate earlier,” he replied. As for men worried about the effects of
age on children, they will “bank sperm and freeze it.”
Would-be
mothers have been freezing their eggs since the mid-’80s. Potential
fathers don’t seem likely to rush out to bank their sperm any time soon,
though. Dr. Bruce Gilbert, a urologist and fertility specialist who
runs a private sperm bank on Long Island, told me he has heard of few
men doing so, if any. Doctors have a hard enough time convincing men to
store their sperm when they’re facing cancer treatments that may poison
their gonads, Gilbert said. The only time he saw an influx of men coming
in to store sperm was during the first Gulf war, when soldiers were
being shipped out to battlefields awash in toxic agents. Moreover, sperm
banking is too expensive to undertake lightly, up to $850 for
processing, then $300 to $500 a year for storage. “There needs to be a
lot more at stake than concern about aging and potential for genetic
alterations,” Gilbert said. “It has to be something more immediate.”
What
else can be done? Partly the same old things that are already being
done, though perhaps not passionately enough. Doctors will have to get
out the word about how much male and female fertility wanes after 35;
make it clear that fertility treatments work less well with age; warn
that tinkering with reproductive material at the very earliest stages of
a fetus’s growth may have molecular effects we’re only beginning to
understand.
But
I’m not convinced that medical advice alone will lead people to
“procreate earlier.” You don’t buck decades-old, worldwide trends that
easily. The problem seems particularly hard to solve in the United
States, where it’s difficult to imagine legislators adopting the kinds
of policies it will take to stop the fertility collapse.
Demographers
and sociologists agree about what those policies are. The main obstacle
to be overcome is the unequal division of the opportunity cost of
babies. When women enjoy the same access to education and professional
advancement as men but face penalties for reproducing, then,
unsurprisingly, they don’t. Some experts hold that, to make up for
mothers’ lost incomes, we should simply hand over cash for children:
direct and indirect subsidies, tax exemptions, mortgage-forgiveness
programs. Cash-for-babies programs have been tried all over the
world—Hungary and Russia, among other places—with mixed results; the
subsidies seem to do little in the short term, but may stem the ebbing
tide somewhat over the long term. One optimistic study done in 2003
of 18 European countries that had been giving families economic
benefits long enough for them to kick in found a 25 percent increase in
women’s fertility for every 10 percent increase in child benefits.
More
immediately effective are policies in place in many countries in
Western Europe (France, Italy, Sweden) that help women and men juggle
work and child rearing. These include subsidized child care, generous
parental leaves, and laws that guarantee parents’ jobs when they go back
to work. Programs that let parents stay in the workforce instead of
dropping out allow them to earn more over the course of their lifetimes.
Sweden and France, the two showcases for such egalitarian family policies, have among the highest rates of fertility in the Western half of Europe.
Sweden, however, ties its generous paid parental leaves to how much a
parent has been making and how long she has been working, which largely
leaves out all the people in their twenties who aren't working yet
because they’re still in school or a training program. In other words,
even a country with one of the most liberal family policies in the world
gives steeply reduced benefits to its most ambitious and promising
citizens at the very moment when they should be starting their families.
It
won’t be easy to make the world more baby-friendly, but if we were to
try, we’d have to restructure the professions so that the most intensely
competitive stage of a career doesn't occur right at the moment when
couples should be lavishing attention on infants. We’d have to stop
thinking of work-life balance as a women’s problem, and reframe it as a
basic human right. Changes like these are going to be a long time
coming, but I can’t help hoping they happen before my children confront
the Hobson’s choices that made me wait so long to have them.
