Most women want to have children—at least, that’s what The New York Times wants you to believe.
I’m not so sure.
In her recent viral Times article “Women in Their 20s May Not Be Having Babies, but by 45 Most Probably Will,” Claire Cain Miller argues that “most” women “want” children—and are simply delaying childbirth due to “anxiety about the future and finances.” She predicts that most women will bear children by age 45 and that “a period of very low fertility… could eventually rebound.” Another Times piece makes a similar argument, claiming, “It is not yet clear if the youngest cohort — Gen Z women — will eventually have children and make up for the delay… but the example of the 1970s shows that they might.” After all, as of 2024, “88 percent of 45-year-old women were mothers.”
I do not doubt any of this data in the slightest. What I do doubt is the conclusion Miller draws from it.
At the heart of Miller’s argument is a critical faux pas in inductive reasoning: she analyzes older cohorts of women to predict future behavior patterns of young women today.
The problem is that these young women have entirely different values from their predecessors.
Today’s 45-year-old women were born at the start of the 1980s. These are young Gen Xers who came of age in a society that largely promoted monogamy and traditional family values, portraying childbirth as a source of deep emotional fulfillment. In other words, the reason that 88 percent of Gen X women in America eventually became mothers was because they believed that children would make them happy.
Such is not the case among young women today—who do not look favorably on childbirth. According to data from Good Housekeeping, nearly two-thirds of women believe that motherhood is “detrimental” to their careers, with the number rising to 71 percent among Gen Z respondents. Similarly, Gen Z overwhelmingly believes that having children can damage your “self-confidence,” and over half of young respondents claim that motherhood ruins relationships.
Social media messaging accounts for many of these negative feelings, with childfree women blasting their supposedly “perfect” lifestyles to impressionable young viewers, who, bombarded by images of expensive vacations and luxury handbags on their phone screens, conclude that motherhood will preclude them from forming of other meaningful life experiences. The comments section of one such “childfree” influencer abounds with the words of jaded women giving reasons for their decisions not to become mothers. Top comments read, “I’m way too lazy … waking up before 8am and having to constantly clean are my worst nightmares” and “I don’t like people, and I don’t want to make one.”
But perhaps the worst of the anti-natal propaganda comes from the woke leftists at outlets such as The New York Times and their allies at New York Magazine, with a recent essay from The Cut diving into the “reasons that women regret having children,” painting motherhood as a sort of disease that will plague innocent young women for the rest of their lives. Couple the proliferation of such messaging among the liberal elite with the glorification of abortion in many leftist circles, and it is no wonder that birth rates are on the decline.
In an intellectually dishonest sleight-of-hand, Miller attempts to minimize the damage done by her anti-natalist compatriots by suggesting that most women actually do want children but that evil societal forces—i.e. “future and finances”—are preventing them from doing so. As is characteristic of many leftist commentators, Miller places the blame on external factors instead of urging women to take accountability for their personal decisions. And while it is true that finances may play a role in young women’s decisions to forgo making babies, the majority of childless women under 50 (57 percent) say that they aren’t having kids because they “just don’t want to.”
The fact is that young women have been fed the narrative that kids will destroy their quality of life and impinge on their personal freedoms. As a result, most women—contrary to what The New York Times wants you to believe—actually don’t want children.
Indeed, Miller goes through many hoops to present the—at best—tenuous claim and—at worst—blatant lie that women actually want children but simply can’t afford them. Citing three studies back to back (insecure much?), she presents a muddle of information that, if anything, does more to harm her argument than to support it. The first study from Pew Research is the most incriminating, fully contradicting her thesis that the “majority” of women “want” children by demonstrating that only 45 percent of women aged 18 to 34 without children want to have them someday. The second study from Gallup does not accomplish what Miller thinks: it simply reveals that most women view the “ideal family” as consisting of two children—a statistic that says nothing about individual intentions. The third study from Ohio University, bearing the misleading, clickbaity title “Most women want children – but half are unsure if they will,” claims the following:
On average, 62% of women said they intended to have a child and 35% did not intend to, with only a small percentage saying they didn’t know.
But up to 50% of the women who intended to have children said they were only “somewhat sure” or “not at all sure” that they would actually realize their intention to have a child.
In practice, this means that only 31 percent of women actually want to have children—a clear minority.
By all available data—including data from studies presented by Miller herself—“most” young women do not want to have children. Most women will not “probably” have babies by age 45. Meanwhile, as the birth rate hits all-time lows, the left continues to glorify childlessness.
So what do we do?
For one, dump the trad-wife messaging. While the right’s reaction to the left’s anti-natalism is understandable, no woman wants to feel as if her sole purpose on this planet is to bear children—especially not in a society that places so much value on professional achievement. Women who were already raised with traditional values, furthermore, gain nothing from having their views reinforced, and college-educated women unsure about having children only drift farther to the left after seeing women with few intellectual auspices and limited ambitions laud the stay-at-home mom lifestyle. After all, it is college-educated women who are having the fewest number of kids, and it is college-educated women who need the most persuading.
The answer, then, is to propose a middle ground: a woman can derive fulfillment both from her career and her family. If anything, we need more college-educated women raising the next generation of change-makers because these women are best equipped to instill the values of ambition, intellectual achievement, and professional success in their own children. The problem, however, is that our college system promotes lopsided messaging, accounting for the fact that a greater number of men than women say they want to have children in the future. While men are told that they must achieve professional success in order to provide for their families, women are told that professional success and motherhood are at odds with one another. In their early twenties, furthermore, women are repeatedly encouraged to focus on their careers and to not worry about marriage and children (I cannot tell you, for instance, how many times I heard such platitudes from friends and family members after each of my failed college relationships); as a result, by the time these women would otherwise be ready—in a more sane society, at least—to plan for motherhood, they have no marriage prospects and have never once thought about what their lives would look like with kids and a family. It’s no wonder that such a life-altering decision will feel uncomfortable: the topic of childbirth is seldom broached positively to women—not until it is often too late, that is.
One possible solution is to stop with the “focus on work and school” messaging—or at least to dial it back a notch. Professional success is not mutually exclusive with having children, and if we introduced the idea of motherhood earlier, it would feel far less daunting by the time many women are ready to settle down. Yes, women should focus on work and school—but that does not mean that relationships, marriage, and family should take a backseat. It is not revolutionary knowledge that the two can coexist harmoniously.
But even more importantly, we must present childbirth not as a necessity for the function of society but as a personal joy. Many women today turn away from having children because they are told, on the one hand, that the act of childbirth itself is a remnant of an outdated, oppressive system and, on the other, that they “should” have children because it is “morally good” on a societal level. While it is true that there are, of course, broader societal benefits to high birthrates, such messaging only depersonalizes the profoundly intimate experience of bringing life into our world, disfiguring joy itself by presenting it as an obligation. It is no surprise that when told to bear kids for an abstract societal purpose, many women will eschew childbirth entirely, not once considering the bliss that comes with raising little beings.
After all, The Cut can run as many pieces as it wants about women who “regretted” having children, but that does not erase the fact that for the entirety of human history, children make most people—men and women alike—profoundly happy.
We should not shame childless women—just as we should not shame a child who has not yet mastered his multiplication tables. Yet we have a duty to uphold a value system that teaches women—especially young liberal women with mental illnesses in record numbers—that children might be better for their general well-being than SSRIs and iced matchas. Because while motherhood may come with its fair share of challenges, it remains one of the surest paths not only to a meaningful existence but also to a life filled with utter joy.
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I loved your ending. Perhaps young women should be told that a meaningful life matters more than a successful life - and that a meaningful life generally includes children.
I would also tell them that putting their fertility on hold until their late 30s is often a mistake. And to think of a career that can accommodate children.
The message in the UK to young women is to have relationships but to remember their contraception. And that if they have children, they should return to work as soon as possible, leaving their babies in all day state childcare.
How sad and wrong such messaging is. No wonder young women are unhappy.
I got a degree from Cambridge, then married and had 8 children. The fabled career never got going - but my children got a lot of care and attention and as I read to them constantly they are very literate (!)
The trad wife movement seems to entirely miss how the modern economy has changed the economies of households. Traditionally (painting with a broad brush here), men went out to the fields and forests and brought home raw materials that women then processed into finished goods in the household, with the help of their growing children. Men and women were both engaged in important, complex, productive labor, which together built up the wealth of the household. And the labor of their children also contributed to the household wealth and ensured continuity of income for the family as the parents aged, making children an economic asset rather than a liability.
A modern household still requires maintenance work, but it is not the site of productive labor (except in the sense of doing office work from home). It consumes finished goods brought from outside and paid for with money earned from outside work.
There is no going back to the traditional economy that provided women with productive and challenging work in the home. At least, not without returning to the levels of poverty that pertained for most of history. This leaves a real problem for modern women who naturally want to be productive and also naturally want to have children and raise them at home. For the first time in history, they can't do both these things in the same place.