Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s puerile remarks about “childless cat ladies” did have one positive effect, aside from the entertaining political cat memes that have colonized the internet. He pushed me to think about the causes, and consequences of the falling birthrate, not just in the United States, but around the globe.

When I was in my 20s, pop artist Roy Lichtenstein was at the height of his popularity: his work featured angry, frustrated women, often dating, or married to someone named “Brad” who was oblivious to their pain and frustration. As we young women, gay and straight, powered our way through graduate school, Lichtenstein T-shirts circulated. One featured a woman waking up from a nap, thinking: “Oh my God! I left the baby on the bus!” Another shows a woman clutching her forehead in frustration: “I can’t believe it,” she says. “I forgot to have children.”

This is funny because no one forgets to have children: you either can’t, which can be a heartache to those who want them; or you decide not to, and you retain a measure of life’s freedoms for yourself.

My own decision to not have children, or partner with someone who did, was an almost direct consequence of homophobia. I was born in 1958: during my peak, and even late, childbearing years, queer family formation was a largely invented thing. As we know, same-sex marriage was not federally protected until 2015, and second parent adoption did not begin to become legal until 1993 (and still is not legal, or straightforward, in all 50 states.) By the late 1990s, when lesbians could be sure in states like New York that their own and their partners’ custody rights were secure, I was well past the age when I could easily conceive or carry a child to term.

But I also did not particularly want to have a child, and in the 1980s, I entered a relationship with someone who felt the same. And as the first generation to come to maturity after second-wave feminism, my cohort of women—armed with legal abortion, plentiful birth control, and the right to go to graduate and professional schools, some of us just said no. Others said “Maybe,” a position that could become an effective no if the question was to be reconsidered after tenure, making partner, or finishing up a prestigious medical residency. Some of them slid under the wire and had a baby or two at what used to be considered an advanced age; others tried and failed.

I wouldn’t describe any of these people as miserable: we have all had, regardless of whether the choice to not bear and raise children was conscious or not, wonderful careers, partners, lives, and happiness in the same measure as those who did.

But was the choice “selfish,” as Republicans would, have it? In some part, of course it was. When any person decides not to procreate, it is an act of putting the self before the collective—whether that collective is family, society, or the nation. At the level of the individual, that choice is not invidious; in fact, some climate activists (one extreme is the Voluntary Human Extinction movement) view not reproducing as a form of planetary repair.

And here’s the news: having just retired at the reasonable age of 65, what made it possible was not having children. That’s right. I did a rough calculation the other day, and it probably saved me around $300,000, most of which went into my 401(k) to earn compound interest.

Did I miss something? Sure—but I not only had lots of young people in my life in my role as a college professor, but I have also had the pleasure of helping the children of friends and relatives find themselves. I am willing to stipulate that parenthood is unique, transformative, and special (on a certain level, I fervently hope it is), and that parenting is some people’s greatest joy.

But Sen. Vance (R-OH) is simply wrong that the childless are miserable, or in denial about being miserable. As sociologist Jennifer Glass and her colleagues wrote in 2018, using data gathered in 22 countries, with a few exceptions (Norway and Hungary), parents are less happy than non-parents. Those who did have children intentionally had fewer: “The decrease in family size among those having children suggests that the early experiences of parenthood in many countries convince parents that their social, economic and emotional well-being is improved by reducing their fertility intentions,” the Glass study hypothesizes.

And parents in the United States are the unhappiest of all. By ignoring this, Vance and the Republican Party are unable to either define or solve the problem of falling birthrates they claim to care so much about.

As I said, I was born in 1958, a year when the birth rate in the United States was higher than it had been since before the Great Depression: 3.5 live births per woman. However, for the next 20 years, the baby boom turned to baby bust, halving that number by 1978. While American childbearing rose slightly between 1980 and 2000, it then dipped again, settling in at 1.8, where the U.N. projects that it will stay, not just in the United States, but globally.

There are lots of reasons for this decline in the United States, some of which I noted above. But you didn’t have to be a radical feminist to want birth control: prior to 1960, while some people had large families for religious reasons (in my neighborhood, there was a Catholic family of 12), many couples had more children than they wanted to have sex and lacked reliable conception. Then, in 1960, the birth control pill became widely available to those who could afford it. Unmarried women and married couples gained even more control over reproduction through the constitutional right to birth control (1965) and abortion (1973). Barriers fell to women’s participation in the workplace, and while some fathers became equal participants on the domestic front, most didn't.

Today, despite the fact that Republicans are systematically attacking both the right to abortion and birth control and the right to assisted reproduction, large majorities of Americans (including Republicans) believe they should have the right to determine their own reproductive futures. And except for the poor, who lack access to both contraception and now, to abortion, the birth rate has remained low because Americans exercise that right. According to Pew Research, a growing number of American adults between the ages of 18 and 50 simply prefer not to have children: that’s 60% of women, and 50% of men.

The question is: why? And this is where politics matters. The Republican party chooses to believe it is a cultural problem: feminists are selfish, gays can’t make babies on their own, “transgender ideology” is turning boys into girls without uteruses and girls into boys without sperm, and masculinity is under attack by the libs.

Democrats, on the other hand, want to do concrete things that address the problems Americans say they have.

OK, not all conservatives.

If you want to read the conservative thinking person’s argument for why Americans should have babies, and why they don’t, travel on over to my friend Ryan Girdusky’s Substack and read his most recent post, which is a gentle rebuke from inside the house to Vance’s “miserable cat ladies” screed. Ryan and I have very different political philosophies, but one of many things I like about him (other than that he is kind) is that he spends a lot of time talking to young conservatives and thinking about what they say.

In this post, Ryan says all the things that Vance could have—and should have—said, an apology of sorts that Vance might have made without ever straying off the Republican reservation. As Ryan writes, women in his own circles “who have had miscarriages, medical issues, or wanted children but were never in the right relationship at the right time to make a family have said they were upset about the clip they saw, not realizing the Ohio Senator was not referring to them.” Other women Ryan talked to explained that they “just never wanted children,” and “also felt targeted by his comment that their lives were miserable.”

As Ryan notes, the uproar over Vance’s two-year-old appearance on Tucker Carlson

is an important learning lesson for the right and the conversation that conservatives should be having with women.
The individual choice of whether or not someone has a family is deeply personal. If someone says it’s not for them, it doesn’t mean their life isn’t valuable or worthy. Having children is not the only meaningful factor in a woman’s life. Thankfully, we live in a society and time where women are afforded options for who they want to be and where they want to take their life.

That said, Ryan also believes that we should all be concerned about the material consequences of population decline. While he is a cultural nationalist who decries immigration, he is also a policy wonk, and believes that falling birthrates trigger material problems: among them are greater global competition for workers, and how a larger, aging population will be cared for by fewer younger workers (currently a significant problem in Japan.)

But this isn’t just a conversation on the right, but one that Democrats understand as linked to the national social safety net and the larger economy. In the United States, the debate over the future of Social Security and Medicare is linked to demography, since these programs do not actually return money we paid into a so-called “lockbox.” Instead, those dollars come from taxes paid by millions of active workers, who will in turn be supported by the taxes of even younger workers.

Now, the United States is not in population decline—yet: births have flatlined. By 2021, the nation was effectively at zero percent population growth, something that briefly ticked up from .1 to .4 percent growth post-pandemic (according to the National Immigration Forum, 81 percent of that .3 growth was due to global migration.) But lower birthrates mean that the portion of the population over 65 is disproportionate. Currently at 18 percent, according to Pew Research, older Americans will constitute almost a quarter of the population in 2053.

This, of course, has led JD Vance to insist, as he did in 2021, that “we have to go to war” against people who say it’s ok for women not to have children. That’s stupid. But the economic argument for making it possible for people to have the children they wish to raise is not unimportant, because the United States needs to replace, if not grow, its workforce in the coming decades. Yet, what Republicans do, instead of making that argument, is say it is a cultural problem with cultural solutions which can be achieved by coercion: eliminating abortion, restricting birth control, and social shaming (e.g., “childless cat ladies.”)

Republicans have also created a theory of gender that privileges men in two ways. First, it draws on complementarity (a long-standing conservative principle in which women do not require equality with men because they are different from them) to frame even highly accomplished women as wives and mothers first. More troublingly, they position the decline in marriage and childbearing as a failure of male leadership—for which MAGA hypermasculinity is the solution.

But what we know is that many people who would like to have children, or more children, and would also like to educate those children, pursue professional self-fulfillment, retire comfortably, buy a house, and not worry about money all the time, are under tremendous pressure to choose one or the other. We know, for example, that achieving economic well-being and being overwhelmed with caretaking that they cannot afford to outsource, are the primary reasons why women choose abortion. “Most abortion patients say that they cannot afford a child or another child, and most say that having a baby would interfere with their work, school or ability to care for their other children,” according to the Guttmacher Institute; while 75% of abortion patients are poor or financially-stressed people.

Which is why you must wonder if the Republican Party has drunk so much of its own Kool-Aid that they do not understand the problems that shape real Americans’ futures. It’s not transgender ideology, critical race theory, or sex talk in public schools: it’s a lack of infrastructure that would allow potential parents to afford the children they want. And here are the Democratic policies that Republicans have refused to support, just in the last four years:

• An income-based student loan relief program that would be similar to Australia’s;
• SNAP, the most successful nutrition program for low income children in history;
• Expanding the Child Tax Credit to reflect inflation (this battle is going on right now; the bill passed in the House with Republican votes, but is expected to fail in the Senate);
• Affordable housing: Republicans want to cut the HUD budget, which mostly targets low income Americans; Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, has rolled out a half-trillion dollar plan “to encourage the construction of new housing, bring down costs for renters, and make it easier for first-time buyers and veterans to purchase homes.”
• The GOP opposes paid parental leave and universal child care, two policies that have eased the stress on family formation nearly everywhere else in the developed world.
• Republicans have persistently opposed reforming the national health care system, regulating it to reduce and prevent abuses, and supporting Medicaid programs for low-income Americans. They have also consistently opposed a federal program to fund health care for uninsured children.

If anything reveals the bankruptcy of the Republican culture wars strategy, it is the falling national birthrate they claim to care so much about. Culture wars are, by definition, nostalgic, displaying a commitment, not to the future, but to an imagined past, one in which women (and men) who were coerced into having larger families whether they wanted to or not become uniformly happy families.

Furthermore, it is simply wrong that the childless have “no stake” in the future of the nation, as Vance asserted when he addressed the backlash to his “cat ladies” slur. Parenting is one kind of stake in the future; another is work. Teaching, designing and building things, coaching, organizing, art, opening a small business, volunteering, medicine, research, policy-making, running for office, policing, technology—any work that engages human needs—is de facto a commitment to the future.

And so are Democratic policies.

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Claire Bond Potter is a political historian who taught at the New School for Social Research. She is a contributing editor to Public Seminar and wrote the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015.