Sophie McBain
Jul 10, 2021 9:45 PM ET
There is another factor: people in wealthy countries are having fewer children than they say they want. This so-called fertility gap is small but not insignificant. It suggests that if people in the UK, the US and Europe had the number of children they wanted, the fertility rate would be just over two children per woman, or above the replacement rate. Perhaps, as the American journalist Anna Louie Sussman has argued, falling birth rates are “less a choice than the poignant consequence of a set of unsavoury circumstances”. “What we have come to think of as ‘late capitalism’ – that is, not just the economic system, but all its attendant inequalities, indignities, opportunities and absurdities – has become hostile to reproduction,” she observed.