Conservatives Are Breaking Their Brains Over Declining Birth Rates

While the answer is staring them right in the face

Pexels | Photo by Vika Glitter

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Conservatives are worried about babies. Or rather, the absence of babies. But not their babies. Other people’s babies.

Strangely, the conservatives fretting the loudest over empty wombs are, by and large, not at home knee-deep in diapers. They are hosting podcasts, sponsoring think tanks, and working behind closed doors at the Heritage Foundation. They are very busy.

But not too busy to stick their noses in other women’s private lives and scold them for not making enough babies.

Katie Miller, wife of eugenic-adjacent aide Stephen Miller, has been especially busy spewing nonsense on a podcast no one watches. Predictably, Miller’s inane statements get louder and more ridiculous in direct proportion to the number of people who would rather lick asbestos than listen to her mind-numbing diatribes.

Her latest all-caps rant: “AMERICA IS IN A FULL-SCALE BIRTH RATE COLLAPSE.”

Katie Miller on X

Miller further elaborated:

“Our biological destiny is to have babies — not slave behind desks chasing careers while our civilization dies.”

Hold up. Our civilization is dying because of office furniture? Shudders. If only we could get women away from the desks… (One pictures Mrs. Miller delivering this Malthusian dispatch from, presumably, a desk.)

Emma Waters, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, offers a simpler explanation for why women are forgoing motherhood. Waters has gravely concluded that “Girlboss feminism has a body count — in birth rates.” A body count. From a thing that did not happen. To people who do not exist. (At Heritage, these statements will earn you tenure.)

So there you have it. Those murderous “girlbosses” with their “desks” are killing the unborn. And all because they got too many tote bags that said CEO OF MY OWN LIFE.

And then there is Louise Perry, the conservative British journalist who writes a column called Maiden Mother Matriarch, which sounds like a 1970s feminist coven but is closer to a bloviating Victorian uncle explaining to his niece why she shouldn’t go to medical school.

Perry has built a career arguing that the sexual revolution was a big fat mistake. She believes women were sold a raw deal in the 1960s — that contraception, no-fault divorce, and the right to leave a marriage have left women lonelier, more anxious, and less fulfilled than their grandmothers, who knew their place (the kitchen) and presumably enjoyed it.

But lately, Perry has backtracked on her usual “feminism ruined a trad wife in the making” drivel. In a recent WSJ article on falling birth rates, Perry has now arrived at the place all bad arguments arrive at:

“Falling Birth Rates Are a Mystery.”

It’s the greatest sociological mystery of our time. We have no idea.

Only one problem. We have several ideas. Demographers have been studying falling birth rates for half a century. The literature is enormous. The findings are boring and consistent.

And the reason Perry has changed her stance on falling birth rates? Iran and the Nordic countries. These two won’t fit into her anti-feminism narrative.

Let’s start with Iran. Perry notes that between 1980 and 2000, Iran experienced one of the fastest falls in birth rates ever recorded. She concludes that since Iran is a theocracy where women are subjected to “compulsory veiling,” Iran should have had a baby boom. But it did not.

Take that, feminists. Veils, apparently, should make women procreate. Strange that no one mentioned this to my OB/GYN.

What Perry Doesn’t Mention About Iran

Here is what really happened in Iran between 1980 and 2000. Female literacy rose from roughly 35% in 1976 to nearly 70% by 2000 — almost doubling in a generation. Female university enrollment also surged from the mid-1990s onward. By the late 1990s, women were outnumbering men in university entrance exams.

Then the post-revolution government — the same theocracy that veils women — ran one of the most aggressive state-sponsored family planning programs in modern history. Contraception was free. Vasectomies were covered by the state. Religious authorities issued fatwas approving birth control — Ayatollah Khomeini himself issued one in 1980. Billboards promoted small families. And Iran became one of the only countries in the world to require couples to take a class on modern contraception before receiving a marriage license.

The results were predictable. The average age at first marriage for Iranian women rose from 19.7 in 1976 to 22.3 in 1996, then continued to climb to 23.4 by 2011 — nearly four years of postponement during the steepest fertility decline.

Iranian women got the same package Nordic women have: education, contraception, urbanization, and the ability to postpone marriage.

In other words, Iranian women were given choices.

Perry mentions none of this. In an article that presents Iran as a thesis-breaking puzzle, she omits the single most studied feature of Iranian demographic history – higher literacy, education, and access to contraception.

Instead, she points at the veils, declares the case unsolvable, and walks away.

When childcare is free, women don’t have twelve kids either

Perry is also confused by the Nordic countries. They have generous state-funded childcare and gender equality scores that put the rest of the world to shame. Education is universal. Contraception is free. Childcare is state-funded from age one. Parental leave is generous and gender-neutral. Career penalties for motherhood are minimized by law. Domestic labor is more equitably distributed than nearly anywhere else on earth. The religious pressure that historically pushed women into childbearing has weakened to almost nothing.

And yet they aren’t pushing out of a brood of human replacements either. What gives?

Here’s what the data shows. In Nordic societies, women still have children. They just have fewer than two of them.

In 2024, Finland’s fertility hit 1.25 — the lowest since record-keeping began in 1776. The rest of the Nordics are clustered between 1.43 (Sweden) and 1.56 (Iceland), each well below replacement, and each down 22–33% since 2010 (compared to a 12% decline across the EU as a whole).

Conservatives point at this and say… see, even paradise doesn’t fix it. Something deeper is broken. The argument carries an implication: if even the Nordic welfare state can’t get women to reproduce at replacement rates, then perhaps the problem is women’s choices themselves, and the project of giving women choices must therefore be revisited. Cue the red hoods.

This is the wrong conclusion. Catastrophically wrong, in fact, because it inverts what the Nordic data actually shows.

For most of human history, women had as many children as their bodies could survive, because no other life was available. Contraception was unreliable. Marriage was economically compulsory. Domestic labor was the only labor most women were permitted. Children were retirement insurance, farm labor, and the only socially sanctioned source of meaning.

Under those conditions, fertility rates ran high not because women loved having seven children, but because the structure of life left them no exit.

The Nordic countries are what fertility looks like when you remove most of the structural pressure. They are not a failure of policy. They are a finding.

And here is where the conservative counter has its strongest moment, so let’s meet it directly. If the Nordic system is the closest thing to free choice on Earth, and the Nordic period fertility rate is now well under “one or two,” then maybe that number is closer to what women want.

The Nordic women aren’t broken. They’re informed. When you have a kitchen you like, there is no need to invite more cooks, especially when the cooks resemble tiny bald dictators throwing peas in your face. (If my kids are reading this, my pea injuries are the reason you don’t have a third sibling.)

There is no third door here. Either you build a society in which women freely choose more children, or you reduce women’s options until they stop being able to opt out.

The conservative movement is busy choosing the second door while pretending to be confused about why the first one isn’t working.

Women are telling you the reason. Maybe listen to them.

Here is what the women — Iranian, Nordic, American, all of them — have been saying for forty years, when anyone bothers to ask.

The deal is bad.

The deal that produced the fertility rates conservatives are nostalgic for required women to absorb the overwhelming majority of unpaid domestic labor, surrender their economic autonomy, defer or abandon their education, and accept that their bodies were not entirely their own.

Then three things happened, more or less simultaneously, over the course of sixty years. Women got educated. Contraception became widely available. And the single-income household stopped being economically viable for most families. Once those three things were in place, the deal collapsed.

Humans are pretty simple like that. Once you give people the option to opt out of a bad deal, they opt out.

To be clear, the 1960s deal wasn’t great for men either. It required them to absorb financial responsibility for an entire household on a single income, defer their own ambitions in service of that paycheck, and participate in family life largely as a wallet and a disciplinarian. Everyone blames women for declining birth rates, but I don’t see men rushing to be the next Genghis Khan either.

Look at what young people are actually facing in the United States. The median home price has more than doubled in real terms since 1980. Childcare now exceeds in-state public college tuition in 38 states, and Washington D.C. Healthcare costs have outpaced inflation for decades. Student debt has reached $1.8 trillion. The cost of raising a child to age eighteen is now north of $300,000, and that’s before a single college tuition bill.

Young people looking at that number and saying not right now are not selfish. They are not sterilized by modernity. They are not casualties of girlboss feminism. They are not chained to a desk. They simply read the price tag.

The Fertility Outlier

Here is the fertility outlier conservatives don’t want to look at: older women. Working women. Unmarried women. In other words, the very “girlbosses” allegedly strangling civilization with their LinkedIn profiles.

CDC data show that while teen births and births to women in their early twenties continue to fall, births to women in their late thirties and early forties are moving in the opposite direction. In 2024, the birth rate for women ages 40–44 rose 2 percent, and the CDC notes that this rate has risen almost continuously since 1985. Meanwhile, the birth rate for women ages 20–24 hit another record low.

These older-mother births remain small in absolute terms — the rate is 12.7 per 1,000 for women 40–44, versus 89.5 per 1,000 for women 25–29. But the trend tells you something the conservatives refuse to hear: it shows you what motherhood looks like when it’s chosen rather than absorbed.

The “single” part is even more inconvenient. Bowling Green’s National Center for Family & Marriage Research found that in 2000, 61% of never-married single women ages 40–44 were childless. By 2024, the majority (52%) were mothers.

Let that sink in. The spinster with a career, apartment, health insurance, retirement account, and the emergency number of a divorce attorney is not necessarily refusing motherhood. She is postponing motherhood until it no longer requires handing her entire life over to an influencer with podcast opinions on “civilization.”

This is where the “girlboss killed the babies” theory steps on its own rake. Women with more choices are having fewer children overall because choice exposes the bad deal. But some women are still choosing children once they have enough money, stability, and exit power to make motherhood less of a trap.

The desk did not kill the baby. The desk is what made the baby possible.

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I won’t deny that falling birth rates are a problem. I mean, who is going to fund my Social Security in my golden years so I can sit poolside while a handsome pool boy pops grapes into my mouth? (In this dream sequence, my children also call every day to say, “Mother, we now fully understand the sacrifices you made.”)

I get it. Replacement rates matter. Aging societies strain pensions, health systems, labor markets, elder care, and all the invisible scaffolding that keeps civilization from collapsing into one long Medicare hold message.

But this is not a problem you solve by scolding women back into dependence. You do not fix falling birth rates by shaming women for getting educated, sneering at “girlbosses,” romanticizing economic captivity, gutting reproductive rights, pretending contraception broke civilization, forcing pregnancy into law, or asking women to exchange autonomy for a casserole dish. You do not get more babies by making motherhood more dangerous, more expensive, more lonely, and more compulsory.

That is not pronatalism. That is panic in a handmaiden bonnet.

If conservatives actually wanted more children, they would make children easier to have. They would make housing affordable, childcare sane, healthcare universal, pregnancy safer, paid leave real, and fatherhood something more substantial than a photo taken near a grill. They would build a country where women can choose motherhood without also choosing financial punishment, career collapse, medical risk, and permanent second-shift servitude.

Women are not refusing civilization. They are refusing the unpaid invoice that civilization keeps sliding across the table.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. Subscribe to Conversations with Carlyn for free content every Wednesday, or become a paid subscriber to get the juicy stuff on Sundays.