Here’s a quiz: You’ve just gone into lockdown with your partner and small child. You’re stuck together inside your 800-square-foot home. It’s the start of a global pandemic, the likes of which haven't been seen for a hundred years. The virus may live on the surface of your groceries, your bathroom sink and all of your child’s toys, or it may not: You’re not sure, because information is 100 percent confusing. Your partner is suddenly unemployed, and your own salary has just been cut.
Do you:
A) Turn on some soft music, light a few scented candles, set aside your birth control, and see what happens?
Or
B) NOT do that?
The answer, for a majority of Americans of childbearing age, was, apparently, B.
That’s right: In February, the Brookings Institute issued a report that predicted there would be about 300,000 fewer babies born in the U.S. in 2021. There is some early data to back this up. Five states -- Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii and Ohio -- have reported 50,000 fewer births in 2020 compared with 2019. The birth rate, which was already sloping downward, was going lower still, now as a result of the pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis.
Now, these headlines surprise us not in the least. As the journalist Lyz Lenz put it: The Pandemic Is Breaking Women and Now We Have to Have Babies? Go to Hell.
There are differences in the experience of white women, Black women and Latinx women: The Guttmacher Institute, which conducts research on reproductive rights, found that Black and Latinx women were more likely than white women to plan to have children later, or have fewer children, as a result of the pandemic, according to their COVID-19 report.
But nonetheless, is anyone caring for an actual child surprised that the birth rate is falling? Given the circumstances, putting the breaks on more babies for the moment seems like a reasonable choice.
And yet, falling birthrates have been headline fodder for years: think tank researchers and hand-wringing opinion writers trot out concerns about the dropping birth rate on the regular.
We had birth rate questions on the mind when we first conceived of Matriarchy Report, back in 2019. We spoke to historian Molly Ladd-Taylor who studies gender, family and social policy in the U.S.
We asked her: Historically, what’s behind these perpetual headlines about the birth rate in the U.S.? She told us about America’s long history of politics and birth rate anxiety, and how that intersects with anxiety about race, gender, and long-standing ideas about who should have children in America, and who should not.
And she told us what has really motivated women to have children over the years (spoiler: it’s not propping up the economy, or saving social security!).
We spoke with her in September 2019 in the midst of another round of headlines about the falling birth rate. We’re offering highlights below.
Walk us through the history of where this anxiety about the birth rate comes from. This is not the first time there's been anxiety about this, right?
Molly Ladd-Taylor: The idea that society can be “improved” by controlling reproduction, or conversely, that uncontrolled reproduction is a threat to society, is a very old one. What's interesting to me is that sometimes the concerns are about overpopulation, and sometimes they're about declining population. But they really reflect a long history that is tied fundamentally to gender and race anxieties.
Your research has looked at debates about women’s sexual and reproductive health since the turn of the 20th century. Why did race get so quickly scooped up in this conversation about population?
MLT: In the early 20th century, dramatic social changes like immigration, the acquisition of new overseas territories like the Philippines, and instability in the status of Black and Indigenous peoples, amplified class and race anxieties. "Race suicide" became a big concern of white elites. The term was coined by a sociologist named Edward Ross. He was concerned about the combined effects of the declining birth rate among so-called “old stock Americans,” meaning white, Protestant Americans, and the influx of new immigrants, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe. He thought they [“non-white” immigrants] were hyperfertile, and having particularly large families.
The term became popular when President Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech in 1905. His focus in this speech, where he used the term “race suicide,” was on the growing number of affluent, educated “old stock” women, who were either childless by choice, or were choosing to have smaller families.
And he was very harsh in his criticism of supposedly “selfish new women” who might be using birth control, or having a career and not getting married.
Roosevelt said, “The woman who is a good wife, and a good mother is entitled to respect. But the woman -- or man -- who deliberately avoids childbearing merits contempt as hardy as any visited upon the soldier who runs away in battle.”
So this over-the-top rhetoric had two components. One was a concern about Black and immigrant women having too many children, and the other was about affluent white women deciding for themselves how many children to have, or if they wanted to have children.
It sounds like this term “race suicide” was being used on two fronts: One, to address anxiety about race. And second, to address anxiety about women having too much freedom and not having as many kids, and that being labeled as selfish. Is there also an aspect of this that is meant to control women?
MLT: First, just to point out, the understanding of race at that time was expansive, and it included what we might call today “ethnicity.” So elite white people were concerned about the Irish, or Italian, or so-called “Hebrew” races, coming over, and undermining the “American” race. We might use those terms today to describe ethnicity, but at that time, they were understood as race. And they wanted to save the “human” race, meaning, obviously, the elite. But the importance of controlling reproduction and, hence women, was absolutely central to the idea of race suicide.
The question of a mother who's going to have children, how many they're going to have, has been completely central to this. It's absolutely about both urging and pushing affluent, white women, to have more children, the women who are considered fit to have more children. And of course, the other side is to reduce the number of children of those who were considered less fit.
This brings to mind a 2016 article written by Ross Douthat of the New York Times, in which he actually articulates an argument not that different from Theodore Roosevelt's. He argues that the U.S. is becoming a place that is depressed and doesn't care about the future, especially for white baby boomers, because women have stopped having “enough” children. And thanks to these women, the fabric of society sort of falls apart.
MLT: Yep. I think that Roosevelt absolutely used that same language, as others like him did.
It's very much wrapped up in those same issues of women's place and women's right to birth control, and bodily autonomy, and the right to work outside the home and have a career, in a more affluent context.
The thing that is different, though, that's interesting, is that today's discussion is often shaped by memories, or perhaps myths, of the 1950s and the “baby boom.”
The fact is, the number of babies born to women in the United States, has been declining since the 1800s. But we think of the baby boom as the norm.
And so the trends that we see now, the declining fertility rate, seems like a new and shocking thing, but actually that's really more of the norm. And the baby boom is the aberration, if you take a longer view in terms of US history.
So after the Roosevelt “race suicide” speech happens, this idea is now part of the American consciousness and lexicon. And then when do we see the next spike of that again? When does the anxiety about fertility raise its head again in the U.S.?
MLT: I think in some ways you can see the legacy of the “race suicide” argument in the eugenics movement, which was taking off at the time of Roosevelt’s speech. Between 1907 and 1937, 32 states passed eugenic sterilization laws. At the same time, birth control was mostly illegal. So certain people are not allowed to have children, and others are encouraged to have children.
Concerns about white women not having enough children abated during the baby boom, but they returned with a vengeance in the 1970s with feminism, legal abortion, and fear of a "population explosion" in the developing world. In the U.S., many Black, Latina and Indigenous women were sterilized.
You do a lot of research around policies and ideas that benefit women and children. What are some of the policies that you found that seemed to best benefit women and children? And are they sometimes stymied or undermined by these ideas that we have about fertility?
MLT: In my book Mother-Work, I started looking at a group of middle-class women (in the late 19th century) known as maternalists, and their work with poor mothers who were so desperate for health care and prenatal care at that time. They ended up together enacting the first American social welfare measure, which was so paltry: it was just infant and maternal health education, where public health nurses and doctors provided clinics, well-baby clinics, and preventive health care, and would go visit pregnant women and new mothers in their home.
They enacted the Sheppard Towner Act to reduce infant and maternal mortality, that was passed in 1921. It was repealed in 1929, as a result of opposition from conservatives and from the American Medical Association, who saw it as a step towards state medicine.
So the first thing we obviously need to think about in terms of fertility, prenatal care, reproductive health care, is access to health care. And the United States is totally an outlier in that regard. And it's really quite shocking at this point that it's still an issue.
But wouldn't those things encourage women to have more babies? Why not encourage fertility through those tools?
MLT: Some European countries have tried to do that, and have had some limited success in upping their fertility rate. The bottom line is that, really, the increase or decrease in fertility rates has probably less to do with policies, than to do with what women and their families want. And there is an equity issue here. BIPOC women have made it clear that being able to have children is just as important as the right to birth control and abortion.
But don't you think that women and birthing people would like to have more children if they had policies like that, to make it easier to have more children? If they were able to have maternity or paternity leave and not feel like their life paths or careers were going to be torpedoed by this decision to have a child, or to have another child? It seems like those things should encourage the people who do want to have children, to actually have them.
MLT: Absolutely, I certainly think that is true. Everything about our society is shaped by the nuclear family and the idea of the nuclear family, the women or the father is responsible, on their own really, for raising children. Even in the design of our houses or in the design of a car: it seats five people or maybe seven people if you have a minivan. It's very much shaped on a certain number of children and a certain number of adults. That is not particularly creative, in terms of developing that village necessary to raise a child. Our policies and our culture really privileges individualism and the kind of capitalist, for-profit motive. And it's hard to fit children into that.
"NOPE" by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Wonderful article. It was eye-opening how outrage around “birth rates” touches on the intersectionality of race, feminism, class and capitalism.
Thanks. I appreciated this comprehensive response to why the birth rate is falling. I especially appreciated the last paragraph about how our individualistic capitalist system pervades everything, including cars.