In Peco Gaskovski’s 2023 novel Exogenesis, forced sterilization is typically unnecessary in the tightly and algorithmically controlled city of Lantua. Birth control regulations are strictly obeyed, with the option for couples to raise one child selected from a plethora of embryos—stored and grown until birth at a central facility. While a lifeless fog hangs over this machine-like city set up for maximum conformity and colorless autonomy, the nearby Benedites have to be routinely sterilized, as they don’t voluntarily submit to this one-child life. Their dwellings suggest a people immersed in a myriad of creative, tangible, and communal pursuits. They are content and secure in the natural goods of life and love, including their limitations—limitations that the city of Lanuta would seek to demolish with the mastery that technology affords. The Benedites are humane and have happy, pleasant boundaries affording them a generative world that they would prefer to keep.
Fertility rates and methods feature prominently in the societies of dystopian novels, including Huxley’s Brave New World, Forster’s The Machine Stops, and James’ Children of Men, in addition to Gaskovski’s Exogenesis. Forgoing a focus on individual decisions about procreation, these stories instead illuminate how fertility rates and methods are an outflow of philosophical and theological worldviews. Recurring examinations of this fact show that what society believes about the purpose of man also dictates how the world is run, arranged, and designed. Limitations on children both cause and are caused by inhumane ways of life. Stripped of all the tender mystery and generativity of relationships, of wells of deep love and bodily sacrifice, and of the friction of everyday living, characters in many of these novels are free to pursue limitless, carnal pleasures within the machine, whether literally or metaphorically.
And yet, a dull malaise persists. Hope manifests both internally and externally, and so does its absence. Why do such stories continue to resonate with something deep within us?
Downward trends in fertility rates have been well documented at this point. In my own nation, the United States of America, the total fertility rate has fallen to 1.7 per woman, which is below the 2.1 replacement rate. Crucially, though, this is not some inexorable result of the desires of our populous; in survey after survey, women admit to wanting more children than they are having. So what’s causing our dismal fertility rates?
In seeking to answer this vital question, Tim Carney’s new book, Family Unfriendly, takes a kaleidoscope approach, examining various factors at play. How did we get here, and what can be done to help people achieve larger families (or perhaps add just one more kid)?
Carney’s first chapter, “Have Lower Ambitions For Your Kids,” is a foray into the world of the overscheduled, professionalized, and high-stakes childhood that many parents feel compelled to orchestrate, often from a young age. The burnout and stress this causes for both children and parents are endemic to the middle- and upper-class experience. Expectations and desires for parenting are mimetic, with social pressure to conform. Much of the modern West has accepted a narrow definition of success, and childhood—meant for play, growth, and exploration—suffers for it.
This view, that humans are good only if they succeed, is a sad—and incorrect—view of mankind. It’s not accidental that this belief rises as family size shrinks. “Quality over quantity” parenting is really “anxiety over charity” parenting. Yes, Katie and I can tell you that raising six kids can be harrying and exhausting, but it’s a picnic compared to trying to raise one kid to perfection.
In the chapter titled “Hey, Parents, Leave Your Kids Alone,” Carney explains, “Having lower expectations for your kids is important. It’s also important to have lower expectations for yourself.” He chronicles the modern ‘demands’ of parenting that turn this identity into a full-time, active role for the risk-averse helicopter parent. These illusions of control and safety have not helped, but rather hindered, the flourishing of younger generations, who are exhibiting record levels of anxiety. According to Jonathan Haidt, this is due to “overprotecting our children in the real world while underprotecting them online.” Carney notes social pressure, fear of judgment—and in some cases, legal mandates—that prohibit children from experiencing the world and playing more freely. Thankfully, though, it is not just writers who are recognizing these problems and attempting to find solutions; organizations such as Let Grow are advocating for a more independent and resilient childhood experience.
The chapter titled “Posthuman” discusses the profound effect of technology on culture. Culture is how we learn what we want and do not want: it is how we develop “mimetic desires,” in the words of René Girard. Making things complicated are ‘momfluencers,’ ‘parenting is hell’ discourse, screen-absorbed kids, appified dating, and the ubiquity of pornography, which warps brains and stunts the ability for healthy relationships—and thus marriages—to form. The across-the-board “Sex Recession” described in Chapter 10 is “really a symptom of a relationship recession,” which treats consent as the only barometer needed. As Carney observes, “The hookup culture is not a result of voracious sexual appetites eating their fill of carnal pleasure, but a matter of relationship-starved young people grading whatever scraps of affection are on offer.”
Children are an outflow of both relationships and actual bodies. We can’t address the involuntarily childless without addressing the tragic state of relationships as well as women’s physical selves. Any discussion of birth rates needs to take notice of the countless people who earnestly desire to get married and have children, but for whom one or both hasn’t happened. This has become less an individual curiosity and more a cultural phenomenon, with social forces far greater than individual happenstance at work.
Data surveyed in the book reveal that “on average, women WANT more than 2 babies, INTEND slightly more than 2 babies, but end up with 1.7.” While noting that some women in their thirties are voluntarily childless, he cites a study that shows a growing group consisting “of individuals who initially wanted to have children or at least did not definitely reject having children but postponed family formation and ultimately remain childless for different reasons.” This could mean any number of things, but infertility, divorce, and singleness certainly fit the description—among innumerable scenarios where “life got in the way,” as Carney puts it.
The third-wave feminist transformation of sexual behavior and the marriage market have been profoundly influenced by technology. Indeed, this transformation is perhaps best understood as an attempted liberation from embodied difference and natural limits. Mark Regnerus, in his book Cheap Sex, lays out the data of the modern mating landscape of the last couple decades alongside its two biggest influences: contraception and pornography. When sex can be cheaply accessed everywhere via pornography (at alarmingly young ages), brains are rewired, the formation of real relationships is slowed, fidelity becomes more difficult, and marriage becomes less desirable. According to Regnerus’ data, women are having more casual sex than they would like, as the market is in men’s favor to expect it. Many of the women surveyed do admit to wanting a committed relationship, but they feel that sex is the price to help secure one, perpetuating a vicious cycle that hurts both men and women. Even the non-religious are finding large followings for their critiques of the Sexual Revolution.
Men have been facing their own specific and very real struggles. These hindrances to their flourishing—and therefore the flourishing of relationships, women, children, and society—have been documented in books such as The Boy Crisis and Of Boys and Men. Whatever solutions are offered to the problem of marriages failing to form will also need to acknowledge the gender-specific yet interdependent nature of modern struggles.
In Regnerus’ work, which complements with the related chapters in Carney’s book, we find a bleak look at how “the post-1960’s understanding of ourselves—oriented toward autonomy and adverse to connection—courses through the veins of our culture.” Widespread contraception and ubiquitous pornography (and increasingly, AI girlfriends) each play their part in distorting our view of the purpose of bodies and relationships. We are not senseless shells or devices programmed for cheap pleasure, and when we incorrectly believe that we are, the result is fewer relationships, marriages, and future people, creating a “civilizational sadness” of collective acedia along the way. We need hope to face the untidy challenges, risks, and surprising joys of real relationships. We will never be entirely human without embracing life’s unknowns, accepting its fundamental uncontrollability—something that can happen only away from a screen. As Carney posits, “Love’s opposite is not hate so much as fear, and so a life full of fear is a life lacking in love.”
Pointing to Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex, Carney notes that “a related dogma that went unquestioned … was that girls should get on hormonal birth control in their teens and stay on it permanently, until one day, with career, housing, and partner in order, they may choose to let their natural fertility return.” Carney rightly observes that the societal effects of contraception—particularly hormonal birth control—are large (inculcating against uncertainty, erasing differences, and the view that children are optional additions to sexual relationships). But let us press into the physical and hormonal effects he mentions only in passing.
In shutting down a woman’s reproductive system, as we’ve been experimenting with for the last few decades, we have been getting a better grasp on the (not inconsequential) downstream effects. Research includes the psychological effects documented in books such as This Is Your Brain on Birth Control. These spill over into forming and maintaining relationships and our experiences of them. We’ve learned, for instance, why ovulation in natural menstrual cycles is needed—for brain and bone health and development, immunity and heart health, preconditioning the uterus for future pregnancy, prevention of breast cancer—and how artificially suppressing the reproductive system inflicts harm both physically as well as mentally and sexually.
Gaps in fertility education persist, even in the OB/GYN field. Many providers, while prescribing hormonal contraceptives to manage symptoms, often miss the cause of underlying reproductive health issues. It is not uncommon for women to spend many of their fertile years on hormonal contraceptives, understandably alleviating painful or unpleasant symptoms, while their root causes of ill health are never addressed. Coming off contraceptives, eager to conceive, they may find they cannot—as the ailments, diseases, or imbalances have been there, undetected, all along, perhaps worsening over time. This is when women, now distressed, may finally start digging for answers in an attempt to find healing. We should not be neglecting and dismissing the poor health of women for so long.
Increasingly, women with endometriosis are sharing how they were ill-served and degraded for years in medical systems that cared not for the sources of suffering in their complicated female bodies. Women are not machines, and no amount of fertility suppression and symptom masking will be able to tell that lie for long. Thankfully, organizations such as FACTS aim to change the medical culture at large, and many women have found answers or restoration of natural fertility through NaProTechnology-trained physicians and other fertility care practitioners. A culture hospitable toward children will take greater care of the very bodies that are their first home and source of life.
Besides our relationships and our bodies, women’s work is also important in any discussion of declining fertility rates. Carney deftly draws out the need for a creative and multifaceted “family-friendly feminism” as well as honoring the work of the home and community-building that women often want more flexibility and time to devote to. However, connecting this to the previous chapter on technology, he argues that “The Pill made our culture less child friendly because making children into a ‘choice’ has relieved society from its duty to care for children.” As Erika Bachiochi skillfully chronicles in The Rights of Women, “The cause of women’s rights will only become what Wollstonecraft envisioned, a cause that honors both caregiving within the home and professional work without, when it disentangles itself from the excesses of the sexual revolution, and so firmly reestablishes the responsibilities that accompany sex.”
Carney offers an overview of the policy efforts of various countries to prevent falling fertility rates and their subsequent results: “When you subsidize a thing, you get more of that thing. Paying people to have kids (child tax credits, family allowances) seems to yield more kids. But indirect subsidies for parents don’t have the same effect. Subsidizing daycare, rather than subsidizing families … actually subsidizes work.” He notes that “in wealthy societies, strong dedication to work takes on a religious significance.”
While Carney doesn’t get into the weeds, there is a real opportunity cost modern women face that is far and away greater than many tangible costs. Other recent books, most notably Catherine Pakaluk’s Hannah’s Children, address the more personal and existential reasons educated women may choose to have multiple children anyway.
In seeking to create a culture welcoming of children and mothers’ work, parents will equally need to be accommodated: “This is mostly about men using their cultural power to set the expectation that family is more important than work. The more dads do this, the less employers can punish the moms for demanding flexibility.” The myth of the ideal (autonomous, unencumbered) worker is bad for everyone. The more we show that children of workers have certain claims on them, the more we honor those duties—and therefore create work expectations that are more humane and hospitable for the next generation.
In Chapter 12, Carney provides an overview of the importance of supporting the vital work of caring for children, community building, and other home-making activities that benefit from one spouse dialing down wage-earning work, even if only partly. Carney notes that a majority of women would prefer to stay home to care for children under the age of five.
The current U.S. social security policy is ill-served to support women raising the very children who will be paying into the future social security system. The neglect of such women is documented by Stephanie Murray at The Atlantic. It’s a cruel reversal that favors longevity in a career, not taking into account those parents adding to and sacrificing for the next generation—honorable and needed work. As Jonathan V. Last outlines in his 2014 book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, this has implications for our fiscal and social structures, which will inevitably strain under a population of exponentially more elders than young people—those who will presumably help care for them, keep society running, and fund the social security of its elders. In my own nation’s case, any policy changes that aim to correct the disadvantages parents face would include proposals from the policy organization American Compass, most notably reforms to social insurance and employer benefits. We can better serve the creative and fluid employment desires of many modern homemakers.
In Chapter 3, the discussion of walkability and family-friendly urbanism identifies realities such as “car hell” and “car seats as contraception.” Car seat mandates that hardly resemble those of the Boomer generation’s have brought with it a series of parental frustrations with the physical act of buckling and unbuckling constantly, keeping up with age and weight requirements, booster seats, and purchasing the necessary vehicles able to hold all this equipment past two children. Researches studying the rollout of such mandates “found that married parents of two kids were much more likely to stop at two kids when car seat mandates went into effect. Corroborating the hypothesis that the car seats had this impact, the anti-natal effect was limited to married mothers of two, and didn’t really apply to unmarried parents or moms going from one child to two, or three kids to four.” Carney echoes pro-family urbanists and socially conscious urban planners alike who describe the downsides of car-centric design. These environments require a seemingly full-time chauffeur for any and all activities outside the house. Incidentally, making walking and biking more feasible modes of transportation does not only improve the physical health of an area; it also encourages spontaneous and frequent interactions that build a sense of belonging to a community. Additionally, many vehicle and car seat combinations cannot fit three seats across, and parents may find themselves with the expense of a larger vehicle before the arrival of a third child. Companies such as Diono are assisting in this need, but the principle still remains. Dense and walkable environments are places where children and parents can thrive, and onerous car seat regulations bring some amount of safety but also tradeoffs.
City planners such as M. Nolan Gray have been proposing an aggressive approach to zoning to address the housing availability and affordability crisis. Doing so would yield numerous other positive results for cities. The current zoning laws, at least in the United States, have been a decades-long policy experiment dictating what can be built where, with heavy restrictions on the building of creative, desirable, dense, and truly livable places. Such environments mix the residential with the commercial and allow a variety of housing for a variety of needs, with no onerous lot size requirements. Current U.S. zoning laws restrict housing to expensive requirements, resulting in suburban sprawl, car-centric lives, and families being priced out of the limited supply of housing within walking distance of schools, amenities, socialization, and businesses.
Loosened (or abandoned) zoning could allow land use regulation to work in favor of pro-family urbanism instead of against it. Opening the floodgates for needed types of housing (in places that exclusively allow detached, single family homes, for example) could be a boon to both affordability and variety in housing. A sibling in an apartment down the street from your family? Grandparents in an ACD (accessory dwelling unit)? Conservatives should be open to a market-based approach that allows families to more easily afford to buy or build a home. Siloed neighborhoods for families might be streamlined, but they contribute to a lack of supply, affordability, and walkability, while also contributing to isolation, endless driving, and oftentimes ‘car seat contraception.’ Carney notes that “the military explicitly accommodates families with children—particularly by giving them a safe, walkable, place to entertain themselves and explore the world on their own and with friends.” We can unleash cities and their people to create built environments that serve them. We need to allow for more eclectic arrangements that aren’t always as compartmentalized and tidy but create the bustling freedom of people living life together outside of cars … children included.
In discussing the need for villages, Carney broadens the scope by saying, “We are all paralyzed by the infinite choices offered for every aspect of our lives.” Many professions have the built-in inevitability or necessity of relocation. This is often due to the nature of education or specialization, requiring the worker to move away from any relational networks they may have built or been raised in. Other suitable lines of work might be chosen that don’t require this of us. Perhaps we need to talk more frankly and counsel our own children more honestly about the tradeoffs they’ll encounter when choosing various vocations, universities, or professional paths. Many learn the hard way that making decisions solely based on individual interests and professional work does not always build the flourishing life they desire.
Limiting and re-ordering our choices of where to live around the communities we want to build with people may, in the long run, be a better choice than focusing exclusively on professional factors. Carney notes that a 2011 study of German families showed “that giving women money to pay for daycare or hire a nanny did nothing to make a woman want more children. The only thing that really worked was having family nearby that could informally help out.” Generational decisions—along with our own—have led to disintegrated cultures, villages, and networks of care. Perhaps our own act of hope could be reinforcing their value for the next generation. Even if hard-won communal ties have been lost in the age of the autonomous individual, we can take the long-view approach in our own lives for the sake of offering something different to our children. What a gift to be given something you yourself may not have inherited—something attractive and compelling to our children—and children’s children. What sort of life can we start building—rooted in relational riches and opportunities for connection—that our descendants appreciate and desire to experience? What goods might we give up—other vocations pursued—for the unquantifiable good of prioritizing proximity to those who love us?
Carney asks, “Are we all overcome by a mixture of guilt, despair, and grief—a civilizational sadness? Civilizational sadness is not unique to our time and place. It’s not the only cause of our Baby Bust. But it’s clearly a major cause, and it underlies many others.” He is one of many to attribute some level of this loneliness, nihilism, and deaths of despair, low marriage and childbearing rates—indeed, misanthropy—to the decline in religion.
One fascinating addition are his data from and interviews with Israeli Jews and Mormon young adults. It is perhaps unsurprising that devout religious communities tend to have higher birth rates. The more striking discovery, though, is his finding that childbearing rates seem to rub off on secular residents: “Even if you don’t eat from the trees of religion, nationalism, or tribe, you still live in a pro-child ecosystem—the norms, the expectations, and the infrastructure—those trees have created.”
Family Unfriendly is a tour de force that incorporates rigorous research as well as personal anecdotes and boots-on-the-ground conversations, takes both an individual and collective approach, proposes both policy and cultural change, calls out flaws in our built environment as well as our modern malaise, and sees both the external factors at play as well as our own locus of control.
The modern mindset that demands independence above all else also demands control and thus abhors whatever seems to have a life of its own. The inert is much more manageable, more fit for rational arrangement, for planning. This is increasingly the worldview of the wealthy West, and this philosophical shift makes our culture discordant with the realities of human life.
The aforementioned dystopian novels are not an inevitability; we can choose differently. Human life is teeming with the unknown and unexpected. It’s also teeming with a generative hope that cannot be neatly controlled and quantified.
In Family Unfriendly, we are shown how we can choose, in ways large and small, to become people fully alive to what’s real and what makes for real flourishing. We are shown how we can live as people with built environments, workplaces, relationships, schedules, medical providers, villages, social policies, and personal agency who resist perfecting ourselves out of everything that makes us human. Machines can eliminate unpredictability, but they do not teem with hope.
The generative existence of children shatters our illusions of circumventing time, place, and our bodies with unlimited options and control—and instead binds us to these human experiences. By binding us to them, we may rediscover the joyful mess of interdependence. This is a more hopeful and human way to live, which many of us desire. There is a way to re-order our lives and society. In welcoming the children, we all benefit.
