If We Want More Babies, Our ‘Profoundly Anti-Family’ System Needs an Overhaul
March 8, 2023
For the third and final installment in my newsletter series on the declining fertility rates in developed nations, I wanted to highlight reader responses to a question I asked a couple of weeks ago: What potential policy change or benefit would encourage you to have a child or, if you’re already a parent, more children?
I’ll reiterate that I don’t think people should feel pressured to have children they don’t want, and I’ll note that when societies try to control fertility in either direction, there’s a risk that their policies will become coercive. Writing for the Guttmacher Institute in 2012, Sneha Barot summarized some of these disturbing policies, such as the frightening pronatalist policies of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu — which outlawed contraception and abortion, with few exceptions, and included government-enforced gynecological exams — and the forced sterilizations that occurred in Peru and India during the second half of the 20th century. (Let’s not forget our country’s appalling history of forced sterilization.)
