PollenTree

Let's not leave the baby-making debate to Musk and Vance

Roses are red, violets are blue. Rightwing politicians around the world want women to have more babies, and if you find this idea the opposite of romantic – well, me too.

Pronatalism’s cause is not exactly helped by having as its best-known figureheads JD “childless cat lady” Vance and Elon Musk, seemingly on a personal mission to reverse what he calls the “underpopulation crisis”. Even Nigel Farage, a twice-divorced father of four who takes the firmly libertarian view that private lives are no business of the state, squirmed when tackled on the subject this week, before eventually venturing that the west had “kind of forgotten that what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture” and that “of course, we need higher birthrates, but we’re not going to get higher birthrates in this country until we can get some sense of optimism”. But do progressives, who are after all supposed to be in the optimism business, have a stake in the baby-making debate too? A new collection of essays published this week by the cross-party Social Market Foundation (SMF) thinktank argues that they should.

The children of Britain’s last baby boom, my own son among them, are now pretty much grown up. Though it didn’t always feel that way at the time, as their parents we had it relatively easy: the 00s were in retrospect the golden years of a Labour government seeking to lift families out of poverty, extend maternity leave and take work-life balance seriously. It wasn’t men preaching traditional values, but working mothers in parliament determined to make life easier for others coming up behind them that unexpectedly helped send the birthrate in England and Wales shooting up from an average of 1.64 children for every woman in 2001 to 1.97 at its pre-recession, 2008 peak.

But by 2023 it had plummeted to 1.44, and the SMF calculates it will be under 1.4 by the mid-2030s. Though some of that fall involves people happily choosing to be child-free, that seems unlikely to be the whole story, given the SMF notes that the big fall happened during the austerity years and it was sharpest in more deprived neighbourhoods. Who could have guessed that if you offer would-be parents stagnant wages, galloping rents and some of the most expensive childcare in Europe, while limiting some child benefits to the first two children only, they end up having fewer children? Not five avowedly pro-family Conservative prime ministers in a row, apparently.

Read more at The Guardian