Societies have grappled with concerns over low or declining fertility since as far back as Ancient Rome. More recently, these concerns have been discussed most intensely in places like Japan, which has had sub-replacement fertility since the 1970s, South Korea, which has the lowest fertility in the world, and in parts of Europe where fertility has been declining since 2010.
In the last few years, sub-replacement fertility has made its way to the US and the fertility question has unsurprisingly made its way into the US discourse.
What I find most interesting about the fertility issue are the philosophical tensions that it brings to the surface. The ideal scenario for fertility is that individuals have whatever number of children they wish to have and this results in an aggregate fertility that is not too high and not too low. When this state of affairs obtains, fertility is not a matter of public concern, not something that could ever plausibly be seen as a legitimate subject of politics or policymaking. People will have their own personal opinions about ideal family sizes for themselves and others, just as they have other personal opinions like the value (or not) of stay-at-home parenting. But these remain personal opinions, something perhaps suited for lifestyle blogging, but not much else beyond that.
What is so troubling about a scenario where there is too-low overall fertility is that it confronts us with the reality that something we regard as a deeply personal and private matter is also, in the aggregate, very socially important. This observation is potentially destabilizing to liberal principles — personal autonomy, individual rights, and neutrality towards and acceptance of pluralistic conceptions of the good — that are dominant in American society. If we acknowledge that aggregate fertility is a matter of social concern, then some might conclude that individual fertility is something society and the public should have a say in, which is, among other things, repulsively illiberal and anti-feminist.
There are four ways to respond to this observed tension:
First, you can stake out philosophical positions that deny the tension altogether. This is Nathan Robinson’s move when he says that, even if sub-replacement fertility led to full-blown extinction, he does “not think that is a matter of moral concern.” For Robinson, the fact that the aggregate of individual fertility choices can have negative spillovers on the rest of the society does not in any way challenge the conclusion that the society has no business concerning itself with aggregate fertility. It remains entirely a matter of private, individual concern.
Second, you can stake out a factual or framing position that attempts to render the tension moot, at least for now. Perhaps aggregate fertility is not presently too high or too low. Perhaps one’s notion of aggregate fertility is too narrowly focused on particular geographies, like Japan or the United States, and instead should be focused on the globe, or should take into consideration the possibilities of migration into low-fertility geographies. Perhaps fertility has a cyclical characteristic to it that will match our current bust with a corresponding boom without having to publicly attend to it. Whatever the specific case may be, the way this move works is not by denying that there may be a philosophical tension underneath all of this, but rather by bracketing the philosophical question, and insisting that the blissful ideal scenario of things working out without having to make it a matter of social concern still obtains.
Third, you can navigate the philosophical tension in an illiberal way by adopting essentially authoritarian social and policy stances that attempt to force or shame people into having more children. You can think of this as the The Handmaid’s Tale option, even if the particular illiberal mechanisms one might pursue are different. This is obviously where much of the far right goes with the tension as they are already inclined towards rejecting pluralistic conceptions of the good and punishing ways of living that they personally dislike.
Fourth, you can navigate the philosophical tension in a liberal way by looking for policy mechanisms that increase aggregate fertility without sacrificing the ultimately private and individual nature of the millions of personal choices that make up the aggregate. This is where left-of-center (and really even most right-of-center) politicians in other countries, especially in Europe, wind up on the topic.
This last option might seem like a bit of a dodge in itself, or, at minimum, some kind of deception. How can you both respect individual choices while also enacting policy that changes them? Isn’t that a straightforward contradiction?
One way to respond to this charge is to point out that people always make decisions within the economic and social system they find themselves in. Changing that system will generate different decisions, but those decisions are no less “theirs” than the decisions they made in the prior system. There is no systemless baseline that can reveal what each person’s “real” uncorrupted decisions are. A system that relies more on out-of-pocket spending to cover children’s expenses will result in fewer births than a system that relies more on socialized spending to cover children’s expenses, but this observation does not tell us which (if either) of the two systems is liberty-respecting or liberty-destroying.
Another way to respond to this charge is by analogy. The fertility discourse tends to treat the question as if it is sui generis, but there are actually many other issues that have the same basic form as the fertility issue. The one that seems most analogous to me is the rural doctor shortage issue.
The rural doctor shortage issue is that there are rural areas in the country where there are too few doctors to provide adequate medical services. You could respond to this issue in all the four ways discussed above:
- Philosophical Rejection. You could say it is not actually a matter of social concern because it pertains to something that should be left to individual choice. Doctors can locate wherever they’d like and it’s none of my business where they live.
- Factual Rejection. You could say there is not really much of a medical services shortage at all in rural areas and that we have other mechanisms, like telemedicine, that allows for individuals living elsewhere to fill the gap.
- Illiberal Solution. You could attempt to use illiberal mechanisms to force doctors to live in rural areas, such as by requiring medical school graduates to enter a draft where some are selected to work in rural areas and punished with prison if they do not do so. This sort of thing would finally make some sense of the claims made by libertarians like Rand Paul that a right to healthcare implies a corresponding ability to enslave.
- Liberal Solution. You could attempt to use liberal mechanisms that result in more doctors deciding to work in rural areas but without requiring any of them to do so. This is in fact what we have done with initiatives like the National Health Service Corps that provides financial incentives for medical professionals to work in underserved areas. This type of thing is not understood by anyone as being repulsive or liberty-destroying.
Of course, the rural doctor shortage is not totally analogous to the fertility question as fertility decisions are perceived as being much more personal, private and individual than where in the country one decides to ply their craft. This difference explains why the fertility issue generates much more intensity of feeling, but it does not actually change any of the basic calculations involved.
Based on this above analysis, it is easy to see why the fertility issue is one that could favor the economic left. The most liberty-respecting policies that increase fertility are the left-wing ones that socialize the cost of children by enacting things like paid parental leave, a monthly cash benefit for kids, and free child care, pre-k, education, and health care. These benefits also happen to be favored by the left for totally other reasons rooted in opposition to inequality and poverty. Indeed, there is such a consensus in favor of the benefits that when people like Nathan Robinson go out of their way to explain that they philosophically reject the idea that fertility can ever be a matter of social concern, they still nevertheless feel the need to indicate that they support all these policies anyways, just for other reasons.
Of the the four types of responses identified above, it is ironically the pronatalist right where you will find the most hostility towards these proposals, not because they don’t realize that they will, at the margin, increase fertility, but because, for many of them, their commitment to market income distributions takes precedence over their pronatalism. Pushing family benefits would thus have the added benefit of revealing how full of shit they really are.
Despite all of this, I suspect that this issue will, if it has not already, fall prey to a dynamic I call overlapping dissensus.
In Political Liberalism, John Rawls explicates a concept he calls “overlapping consensus,” which is meant to address the question of how a diverse, pluralistic society with many divergent moral, religious, and philosophical worldviews can nonetheless operate as a liberal democratic society. Rawls’s answer is that people with divergent underlying worldviews and motivations can still develop an overlapping consensus in favor of certain principles (or, I’d add, policy goals). This overlapping consensus allows for governing majorities and relatively peaceful governance to be established because it manages to achieve agreement over governance-relevant things without requiring agreement on more fundamental questions.
Put simply, if you and I both support principle or policy goal A, it doesn’t matter that I support it because of worldview B and you support it because of worldview C, even if the worldviews B and C are totally at odds and repulsive to one another.
As elegant as Rawls is on this point, I have found that in a lot of public discourse at least, things often work out in exactly the opposite way. When people see that a person, reason, or worldview that they find repulsive is in favor of a particular principle or policy goal, they will oppose that goal purely because they do not wish to overlap with that person, reason, or worldview. If their own pre-existing worldview seems to favor the same policy goal but for different reasons, they will respond by altering their worldview (including by inserting a contradiction into it) rather than accepting that they are part of an overlapping consensus with a social grouping they despise.
Thus, overlapping does not necessarily result in a plurality-respecting consensus but often in deeper and more vicious dissensus that actually makes policymaking and governance harder, not easier.