‘Don’t be weird about this,” representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughed into the camera as she prepared to jab a hormone-filled needle into her midsection, adding that she knew full well that, yes, people were definitely going to be weird about it. At 36, the congresswoman had begun freezing her eggs, and was making a point of bringing her online audience along with her as she did, stepping directly into the fraught question of how an ambitious woman should manage her fertility.
It’s a live concern: around the world, birthrates are falling sharply. “Only the Black Death in the 14th century is comparable to what is happening now,” Financial Times journalist Camilla Cavendish notes in a new book examining why. Setting aside the most toxic gender-war narratives, “the standard explanation is that as women get educated, they choose freedom and autonomy over family”. As Cavendish explains, however, that is “not the whole story”.
Drawing on a wealth of reporting, her book seeks to present a more nuanced picture. Cavendish begins with the “fertility gap” – the official name for the difference between the number of children people say they want and the number they actually go on to have – and works her way backwards, focusing on the lived experience of men and women who find themselves with fewer children than they expected. What stopped them?
For some, the main barrier is finding the right partner in time. For others, it comes down to the increasing costs of raising a family (where housing specifically can be a factor) and the enormous difficulty of balancing a career with caregiving, particularly when it takes longer to establish a professional foundation in the first place. There’s more: a “rational pessimism about prospects for the next generation” in an unstable world, the stigma of embracing motherhood, the shortage of stories glorifying fatherhood, a pressure to perform “intensive parenting”, the lure of well-compensated but all-consuming “greedy jobs”, and so on. There’s also the sheer exhaustion that comes with caring for a small child. The headwinds are strong.
Taken together, “the joyous, messy, life-giving task of raising a family has become something that feels more like a daunting, lonely, and expensive chore,” Cavendish observes. “We’ve shifted, slowly but surely, into treating parenthood like a self-indulgent lifestyle choice. The onus is on you to cope.” These aren’t abstract observations. Cavendish herself is a working mother of three, well acquainted with the difficulties of supporting a family and managing a career. She has no illusions about how hard it can be, and no interest in pretending otherwise. “I am struck by how little has changed in the workplace in the last 20 years, despite the rhetoric about flexibility,” she notes. “What has changed, I think, is how grimly realistic young women now are about the trade-offs.”
“Reproduction is kind of the whole ballgame,” the trailblazing feminist Gloria Steinem told David Remnick in a 2015 interview, “and who controls it is the most fundamental question.” Generation Maybe charts how authoritarian governments in China, Russia, Iran and elsewhere have responded to falling birthrates with a variety of repressive pronatalist policies – sanctioning child marriage, making divorce more difficult and denying abortion access. The Trump administration’s attacks on reproductive rights and federal childcare funding follow this trend, conscripting women into domestic roles. A simple solution to the problem of birth deficit is to force women to breed.
It may not be easy to create effective pronatalist policy interventions that encourage, rather than entrap – but it’s not impossible. Cavendish looks at what’s worked and what hasn’t in Singapore, Scandinavia and France, and outlines just shy of a dozen ways to help people choose children, from building more housing to offering parents benefits and even giving children themselves the vote: “Almost all policies which may help to lift birthrates are also ones which could enable human flourishing,” she notes.
There is no hectoring or finger-wagging in this book. What’s offered instead is an empathic and curious approach to an entirely rational ambivalence. In so doing, Generation Maybe illuminates the enormous gulf between popular talking points about fertility and the actual conversations potential parents are having. For Cavendish, the real goal isn’t to persuade anyone to have kids; it’s simply “to make children a genuine choice”.
