Fruitless Plains
October 7, 2022
It’s a bad day for love. Plummeting marriage rates are just the tip of the iceberg; now, even those who marry are finding it difficult to conceive. In 2020, American families had an average of 1.8 children per family unit. It’s unclear how many of these children were conceived under natural circumstances, which is to say, how many were created without the aid of in vitro fertilization, sperm or egg donors, or surrogates. The number conceived naturally by married parents can only be even smaller.
There are many ways to slice these statistics, but none of them disguises the fact that marriage and children, like anniversary jewelry, are becoming luxuries, available in midlife to those who can foot the bill. The marriage tax penalty makes it so that it costs more to combine two incomes, and waiting to finish law school and establish yourself in a career might also mean putting up thousands of dollars for fertility treatments when nature ages out. (Add this to nannying salaries and student loans and one has to wonder if we’re still coming out on top.)
