For some reason, I’ve had an increasing amount of pregnancy-fearmongering content land on my social media feed lately. From the ‘Top 10s Reasons Not To Have Kids’, to videos titled ‘This Is Your Reminder To Take The Pill’, I have observed an increase in not only the amount of concerns related to pregnancy, but also in the overall marring of childbearing as a whole. I’ve heard mothers themselves express regrets about having children of their own, warning other women to “think twice”. While on one side, I do agree we should think twice about the decisions we make in life, I do stand against overgeneralizations. I do not have children (yet), but I can confidently say that children are not bad per se. As a matter of fact, children are what we make them to be. So if they turn out bad, chances are you’ve got something to do with it. What children are too, is less and less present in our population. Children, and the topic of having them, is in less and less people’s mind, especially women’s, it appears. So what caused this shift in mentalities and priorities when it comes to childbearing? Are there other factors impacting people’s ability to procreate? Is the increase in childlessness rather voluntary or unvoluntary? Let’s unpack this together and attempt to understand the root causes of an issue which, if unaddressed, could impact the whole of humanity.
Roughly 70 years ago, in 1952, the average global family had five children. That’s the number of children my own grandmother had back in Mauritius. Fast-forwarding to today, this number has halved, with an average global fertility rate of 2.4. Dr. Max Roser, founder of Our World in Data (a scientific online publication focusing on large global problems), suggests various factors to explain this phenomenon, from women’s empowerment, their entrance in the labor force, to family planning and the democratization of female contraception. The World Economic Forum (WEF) adds other contributing factors, including lower child mortality and the increased cost of raising children. James Gallagher, Health and Science Correspondent for BBC News, writes in a 2020 article that “23 nations—including Spain and Japan—are expected to see their populations halve by 2100”. While we hear some of the main causes cited by the WEF or Dr. Roser, it seems as there is way more at play. Looking through social media, we can see growing fears towards pregnancy and childbearing; from the refusal to bring a child amidst climate change or global warming, the growing tensions induced by political instabilities around the world and war waving at us from around the corner, to the rising cost of life—and consequently the cost of bringing a new life into the world. Among many, one particular trend struck me: the increasing devaluation of childbearing and the fears associated with pregnancy among women. Pregnancy has its fair share of risks, but we nowadays have significantly more tools and knowledge to prevent the dangers which pregnancy can bring along, in comparison to what people had a few centuries ago. What changed, however, is our relationship with our own bodies, and with children. Under the veneer of independence, what oftentimes hides behind the fear of childbearing is unaddressed childhood traumas. Lack of attention from parents, abuse, or generally bad parenting often cause now-adults to fear being as bad as their own parents. However, unaddressed childhood traumas have been around since time immemorial, and certainly aren’t the main cause behind the drop in birth rates over the years. It is rather an additive to a greater cultural shift: the erosion of family culture and the intensification of individualism.
Two important elements which contributed to the cultural shift around procreation is contraception and abortion—also represented as the quintessence of Western female rights: the freedom to do what one pleases with one’s own carnal envelope. Under the guise of female rights, what these two elements actually opened the door to was sexual hedonism. Reinforced by an ever-more individualistic culture, this sexual hedonism then closed the door on individual accountability. While third-wave feminism upheld the view of male sexuality as the pinnacle of sexual freedom, biology reminds us that male human beings do not incur the same risks as their female counterparts in the context of sexual activity, due to rather obvious anatomical reasons, which to this day remain scientifically immutable. Dr. Mary Harrington, researcher and contributing editor at UnHerd (a British news website centered around philosophy, politics and culture), explains on a March 2023 episode of Triggernometry, a podcast hosted by Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, that although the arrival of the Pill in the 1960s was perceived as a solution for accidental pregnancies, it turned out to also contribute to it. In their 2016 article “Fifty Years of Unintended Births: Education Gradients in Unintended Fertility in the US, 1960-2013”, Sarah Hayford and Karen Guzzo share some findings which highlight the complexity of the topic. Indeed, although unintended fertility declined for all women with the introduction of the contraceptive pill (1960s and 1970s), nuances soon appeared to challenge this: “Starting in the 1980s, unintended fertility continued to decline for women with a college degree, but stabilized for less educated women, producing increased education differences.”—suggesting that the key to lowering unintended pregnancies wasn’t just a question of contraception, but rather of reproductive education. With the widening gap between social classes, the issue of education would soon worsen to unprecedented levels.
Often packaged with the motto of female freedom, contraception is often taken at face value: the fix-all to sexual inhibition. Paired with the contemporary feminist belief that sexual hedonism is a given to one’s liberation (when in reality, libertinism doesn’t necessarily mean freedom at all—perhaps even the opposite, as it implies that freedom requires letting the body command the mind, instead of the mind taming the body and its induced carnal impulses), a second issue soon arose: that of abortion. Although necessary in many settings (e.g., ectopic pregnancies, rape…) the case of abortion was soon introduced as another necessary tool to women’s liberation. It meant adding a second safety net in case we fell through the first one. Gradually, we thus separated sex from procreation, and removed childbearing from the consequences we looked for in respect to sex (the most common consequence pursued here being one’s own pleasure). In parallel, the perception which a lot of women developed towards children was them being burdensome, and a barrier to labor productivity, hence the delaying of childbearing by many, and the prioritization of career as life’s highest purpose. Although it goes without saying that these attempts to gain greater control over some of our body’s functions goes fundamentally against nature, the most controversial trend here is the growing normalization of separating women from nurture—a historically major biological role associated with human females, and which we as people still mostly agree on. In a 2017 report on gender differences by the Pew Research Center, we can read that those gender roles remain important in people’s mind—whether based on societal, biological (or both) factors. This U.S.-based survey, conducted by Kim Parker, Juliana Horowitz and Renee Stepler, found that “When asked in an open-ended question what traits society values most in men and women, the differences were also striking. The top responses about women related to physical attractiveness (35%) or nurturing and empathy (30%). For men, one-third pointed to honesty and morality, while about one-in-five mentioned professional or financial success (23%), ambition or leadership (19%), strength or toughness (19%) and a good work ethic (18%).”
The normalization of prioritizing one’s career and keeping childbearing at bay until one feels ready for it is in fact one of the main reasons behind abortions. To help understand this a little better, the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy NGO aiming to improve sexual health and expand reproductive rights worldwide, found through a survey completed in 2004 by 1,209 abortion patients, that the most cited reason by the patient is that “having a child would interfere with a woman’s education, work or ability to care for dependents”, the other most cited reasons being lack of affordability, poor or inexistent relationship with the father, and unreadiness for childbearing. A more recent study, published in 2017, states that “In most countries, the most frequently cited reasons for having an abortion were socioeconomic concerns or limiting childbearing.”
While we’ve been brainwashed to think that the highest achievement we can have is a career, the reality is that most women (and that goes for men too) will never have such thing. They’ll have jobs. A career isn’t something we can all have. A career is a profession which often requires special training, certifications, and which one follows as lifework. A job is merely a post of employment. The truth is that most of us don’t fit the requirements for a career; the right network, the right environment, or (and that’s probably the most common reason) the right mentality. In the meantime, women continue to be told that their status of employment is more important than their happiness, for the sake of proving that anything a man has, a woman can have too. In fact, we tell women that a career will make them happy. Numbers say otherwise, with measures of subjective wellbeing indicating that women’s happiness has been declining both absolutely and relative to men (Stevenson & Wolfers, 2018).
Another consequence of the prioritization of career over the consideration for the ephemeral nature of female fertility is the increase in fertilization issues when couples finally attempt to conceive. In the United Kingdom alone, the average childbearing age went from 26 in 1975 to almost 31 in 2021. In the United States, the average childbearing age went from 21 in 1970 to 25 in 2006. The University of Rochester Medical Center adds that “in the U.S., birth rates for women in their 30s are at the highest levels in 4 decades”. While this doesn’t directly affect male human beings (or at least, not to the same extent), it does very tangibly females, with increased risks of miscarriage, birth defects, high blood pressure, gestational diabetes or even difficult labor. Chromosome problems are also more common when conceiving after 30. The University of Rochester Medical Center writes: “The risk for chromosome problems increases with the mother’s age. The chance of having a child with Down syndrome increases over time. The risk is about 1 in 1,250 for a woman who conceives at age 25. It increases to about 1 in 100 for a woman who conceives at age 40.” The American College of Obstetrician and Gynecologists in fact states that “a woman’s peak reproductive years are between the late teens and late 20s.”—the same age range during which modern women are told to prioritize their career over their love life.
To add another layer, plus icing on the cake, it is worth mentioning that the gradual drop in birthrates around the world also takes roots in environmental influences, and more precisely, chemical influences. The products we consume, use, and are willingly or unwillingly exposed to, take an invisible but veritable toll on our bodies and abilities to procreate. One example is the fabric of the clothes we wear. Take polyester for example; a synthetic fiber known by its full name as polyethylene terephthalate. That ‘phthalate’ bit rings a bell, doesn’t it? And probably not in a good way. Polyester is a fabric we probably all have in our closet. It’s in your gym wear, it’s in your going-out clothes, it’s in your underwear even—and that’s where they bear the most risks for us. Already in 1992, a study on the contraceptive efficacy of polyester-induced azoospermia in men, conducted by Ahmed Shafik, Egyptian researcher and sexologist, proved and outlined the effects of this fabric by measuring the contraceptive effect of a polyester sling applied to the scrotum of 14 men. In the suspensor-wearing period, all men became azoospermic after at least 139 days, with a decrease in both testicular volume and rectal-testicular temperature difference. For some, this happened as early as 20 days in the suspensor-wearing period. Going back to phthalates and their presence in our lives (and in our pants) the endocrine-disrupting effect of phthalates has also been observed in females through the use of menstrual pads, with some brands of menstrual hygiene products including it as ingredient to make plastic-based products harder to break. Kate Clancy, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois explains that “Phthalates and bisphenols in particular are implicated in endometriosis and endometrial cancer because both, as weak estrogens, can disrupt the natural estrogen-to-progesterone ratio in the body and therefore encourage extra growth of uterine tissue”. She adds that even at lower doses, phthalates influence adult reproduction in mice.
Now the final question is “Is there light at the end of the tunnel?”. Well one thing is for sure. For a tunnel, it’s an ugly one, but, yes, there is light. The ball is in our court, and that in multiple ways. For what concerns mentalities, more and more people seem to be slowly coming to their senses. An increasing number of women now concede that third-wave feminism and its ceaseless eulogy for sexual latitude caused them more harm than good, with many reaching their thirties with an overwhelming sense of loneliness and detachment from both the realities of the world and themselves as individuals. As for environmental factors, I believe we are now at a vantage point, where evidence-based research on our daily consumption habits can help us make the necessary adjustments in view of meliorating both our overall health and ability to procreate. Again, the ball is in our court. We just have to see that the ball is there in the first place.
Sources
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https://www.guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/2005/reasons-us-women-have-abortions-quantitative-and-qualitative-perspectives
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5957082/
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https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/global-decline-of-fertility-rates-visualised/
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https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
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https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/global-decline-of-fertility-rates-visualised/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1ZztpS_U1o&t=2615s
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Aude Calloch 