Why are more women saying no to having kids? Big Brains podcast with Peggy O'Donnell Heffington

Show Notes

More and more women in the United States are saying no to motherhood; in 2023, the U.S. fertility rate reached the lowest number on record. But the idea of non-motherhood is actually not a new phenomenon—nor did it come out of the modern feminist movement. For centuries, women have made choices about limiting births and whether to become mothers at all. This history is documented in a new book, “Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother,” by University of Chicago scholar Peggy O'Donnell Heffington.

Heffington writes about the historic trends of non-motherhood as well as the modern factors that are playing a role in women's choices to not have children today — from a lack of structural support in the workplace, to a national law for paid maternity leave and the sheer lack of affordability. She writes that if these trends continue, American millennials could become the largest child-free cohort in history.

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(Episode published September 5, 2024)

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Transcript:

Paul Rand: More and more Americans under the age of 50 are saying no to parenthood. The US fertility rate has been falling for more than a decade, but in 2023, it reached the lowest number on record.

Tape: According to the CDC, 3.6 million babies were born in 2023 in the US. That’s about 76,000 fewer than the previous year and the lowest one-year tallies since 1979.

Peggy Heffington: And it’s not just the US.

Tape: That’s Peggy O’Donnell Heffington.

Peggy Heffington: It’s across Europe.

Tape: Experts are warning that global fertility rates will drop below the point needed to sustain the world’s population.

Peggy Heffington: And the lowest fertility rates in the world are in East Asia.

Paul Rand: She’s an assistant instructional professor in the Department of History at the University of Chicago and the author of the new book, Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother and that makes her the perfect person to ask the question on nearly everyone’s mind. Why are young adults saying no to kids?

Peggy Heffington: When someone doesn’t have children, we often ask them why and we expect them to have one reason, right, or a couple of reasons that they can spell out. We don’t expect parents to be able to answer that question with one reason. Parents chose to have children for a whole variety of reasons and I think it’s equally possible and quite likely that people who don’t have children are doing it for a wide variety of reasons.

Paul Rand: It might seem like this is a modern phenomenon, that people are saying no to parenthood for a host of new reasons, but Heffington’s research shows that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Peggy Heffington: This is not a phenomenon that is sort of invented by the modern feminist movement or that it’s invented by millennials ruining something else or because Gen Z is lazy or whatever the narrative is, but that actually women have been actively controlling their fertility for a very, very long time.

Paul Rand: Discussions about fertility have dominated recent headlines as questions about abortion, child tax credits, and even the morality of not having kids have become central political issues. But in order to better understand our current movement, it may be useful to take a look at our past.

Peggy Heffington: It’s really notable that this is 200 years ago. Clearly, women were making very active decisions to reduce their fertility, to limit births, to prevent births entirely. Fertility has risen and fallen throughout history and around the world in response to economic pressures, in response to political pressures, in response to things like wars. And so the efforts to control fertility and to limit births are certainly not new.

Paul Rand: Welcome to Big Brains where we translate the biggest ideas and complex discoveries into digestible brain food. Big Brains, Little Bites from the University of Chicago Podcast Network. I’m your host, Paul Rand. On today’s episode, the history of non-motherhood and how it could explain why birth rates are declining in the US today.

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Since the dawn of time, procreation is what has kept the human race alive and for much of human history, this created a social expectation to have kids for the good of society.

Peggy Heffington: Especially in the United States, the social pressure to have children has long been framed more in sort of civic and patriotic and sort of citizen terms, nationalist terms rather than religious terms. So in the decades after the American Revolution, the early 19th century, this ideal emerges of the Republican mother and that’s small r republican as in the American republic. The republican mother is sort of held up as the ideal way an American woman could be a citizen and that was that she’s supposed to have babies and then raise them as American citizens, so her primary civic contribution is creating more Americans.

And it kind of makes sense that the pressure comes from that direction because if it’s between a woman and God, if a woman is sort of violating God’s commandment, that’s kind of her problem. Once she gets to the afterlife, she’s going to have to talk to God about that. But if a woman not having children is sort of an offense or a violation of her civic duty, it’s an offense to society, then society has something to say about it, right? And so that becomes the primary rhetoric that’s pushing women to have children.

Paul Rand: Well, when you talk about society, politicians speaking out, I was dumbstruck as I read some of the things that Teddy Roosevelt back in 1905-ish talked about.

Peggy Heffington: So in 1905, Teddy Roosevelt gave a speech to a group that has since evolved into the PTA, the Parent Teacher Association, but at the time, it was an association of mothers. He expressed great sympathy for women who were experiencing infertility, who wanted to be mothers but couldn’t. However, he expressed great contempt for women who opted out of having children. He compared them to soldiers who run away in battle.

Paul Rand: Wow.

Peggy Heffington: Just like men to serve as soldiers, it is women to serve as mothers. He said women who don’t have children are as useful to society as unleavened bread. Basically, that they’re useless. Bread made without yeast, it doesn’t rise. It’s not worth eating. And he said that they were one of the least nice features of modern life. I’ve been thinking a lot about his quote in the last couple of weeks because I think that you could put those words in the mouth of a number of politicians who we could name and they would sound very 21st century.

Tape: Former President Trump’s, vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, at the center of a political firestorm over these resurfaced comments made in 2021.

JD Vance: ... is that we’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless cat ladies.

Tape: Vance seeming to imply that people without children shouldn’t be in government.

JD Vance: If you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.

Peggy Heffington: JD Vance has come out and said people without children are bad and that therefore, they should pay higher taxes. Well, that’s kind of the Child Tax Credit, right? We do have the Child Tax Credit, which lowers taxes for families, but it’s a really weird way of talking about the child tax credit. JD Vance isn’t framing it as a pro-family policy. He is talking about policies as anti-not having a family, which is I think that’s a really important shift in the Republican party from being explicitly pro-family to being anti-not having a family.

Paul Rand: At least my impression of reading news coverage right now, even two or three stories in the New York Times today on this topic and a Pew study that just came out, it’s coming up everywhere. And you would get the impression that this is a first time in history that there’s been concerns about a country’s or the world’s fertility rates. But if we go back, even at the aftermath of Napoleonic Wars, fertility rates were down 30% not only in England and France, but even in the US at that point.

Peggy Heffington: Yeah, demographers call this period the fertility transition, which is when in Western Europe and in the United States, fertility dropped really, really dramatically. And at beginning of the 19th century, women had approximately seven births per woman and those are live births, so they’re likely having 10 in an era with high infant mortality. By 1900, fertility has dropped off really dramatically in the United States with some groups having cut that in half. White women in the North were only having three and a half by 1900. So this is in the span of 100 years, which is really, really dramatic. And this is a pattern that sort of across the Western world replicated itself.

There are a number of things going on in that period that contributed to that. I think one thing scholars would point to is the Industrial Revolution, which profoundly changed not only the way people worked, but also the way people organized their families and where they lived. In the US, the country transitions from primarily rural to primarily urban in the 19th century. If you have a farm, seven kids make a lot of sense. If you’re living in a tenement apartment in a city, maybe not so much.

Paul Rand: Right, right.

Peggy Heffington: So those factors are sort of suppressing the fertility rate.

Paul Rand: If there was ever a period of time that we could look back to and draw an almost straight parallel line, it might be just over a century ago at the turn of the 20th century. There was a global pandemic, a looming recession, and you guessed it, a declining fertility rate.

Peggy Heffington: Women born between 1900 and 1910, they are coming into their fertile years during a world war, during a global pandemic of the Spanish flu, which killed children and young people in huge numbers. And to date, that generation of women has the highest level of childlessness in American history. We’ll see if millennials beat that.

But during the Great Depression, by some estimates, between one in every two or one in every three pregnancies were aborted and abortion was illegal at a federal level in the United States at the time and yet, women were still looking at the world around them and being like, “These economic circumstances do not allow me to add a child to my family or to have children at all and we’re seeking out illegal abortions.”

The fertility rate is dropping really dramatically and it’s dropping really dramatically, especially as I said, among white women in the North, so educated, native-born white women. I don’t think that’s an accident that at the same time fertility is dropping, people who are concerned about the future population of the country or the future racial composition of the country are trying to prevent women from being able to end pregnancies.

Paul Rand: But the attempt to increase the fertility rate didn’t end with abortion bans. There’s a law you may have heard of that is making its way back into the news these days.

Peggy Heffington: The Comstock Act, which made it a federal crime to transport anything in the mail that had to do with sex or that was considered lewd and that included any contraception or anything that could be used for an abortion. This effectively made it illegal to have condoms, for example, because how would you have gotten them? You would’ve had to ship them. So it effectively made abortion and contraception illegal at a federal level.

I think it’s worth pointing out that the Comstock Act is still on the books. It was sort of chipped away at in the 20th century. Notably, the US army came back from World War I and petitions Congress and says, “Our soldiers could really use some condoms because they lost just an unbelievable number of personnel days to venereal disease, transmitted infections” and they were fighting German soldiers who were liberally supplied with condoms so who were not getting sick in the same way. But even so, Congress doesn’t change the law. It takes until the 1960s when a Supreme Court case in 1965 called Griswold v. Connecticut...

Tape: It’s a moral principle. It’s a religious principle that’s being enacted into law that it is immoral to use contraceptives even within the marriage relation and therefore, can be made an offense. That is the aspect of the statute we’re dealing with at this purpose. And I say that is purely a moral judgment, which cannot be measured by objective circumstances.

Peggy Heffington: The Supreme Court ruled that married couples had the right to access contraception within the sort of privacy of their marriage. And then it is in 1972 that another Supreme Court case, Eisenstadt v. Baird, comes along and expands that to all Americans have the right to access contraception.

Tape: Let me give you some of the patent absurdities. A married woman who’s been separated from her husband for three or four years, she can go be prescribed and get a contraceptive for family planning purposes. Despite the fact she hadn’t seen her husband for years, a bride, a girl about to be married, she can’t go to a gynecologist and be prescribed a contraceptive, non-prescriptive or any other type, until after the wedding ceremony. And she dashes from the church to the gynecologist to the drugstore and back to the wedding reception. It’s patently absurd.

Peggy Heffington: So these Supreme Court cases kind of neutered the Comstock Act because they overrode it in some ways, but sort of chillingly, the Comstock Act has reared its head again because like I said, it’s still on the books. It was never officially repealed. Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion groups have attempted to use the Comstock Act to make abortions more difficult and potentially illegal in states where they’re still legal. Matthew Kaczmarek, the judge in the mifepristone case down in Texas...

Tape: In Amarillo, a federal judge has ruled against the FDA in a lawsuit regarding its approval of the abortion-inducing drug, mifepristone.

Peggy Heffington: Cited the Comstock Act as though it was established law. He was like, “Well, obviously you can’t mail contraception because of the Comstock Act” and so this is something that legal scholars are going to be dealing with for some time. Both sides of the political spectrum thought it was dead in the water and didn’t need to be repealed. And here it is again, rearing its head. I think that there are this sort of constellation of reasons that are making people oppose birth control and abortion in the present moment. I also think that what we talked about earlier that the fact that we live in a moment where young women are increasingly saying that they don’t think that they want to have kids is stoking a lot of those fears as well and that that is contributing to efforts to limit access and reproductive rights.

Paul Rand: The state wasn’t the only entity concerned about keeping a woman’s role focused on motherhood. The private sector also played a leading role.

Peggy Heffington: So I think one thing that’s worth pointing out, if you look back in history, it has been extremely common, if not the norm, for women to have children and also contribute economically to their families. If you’re looking at an agricultural society, pre-industrial society, they are working and they are having children. In the 1880s in the United States, it became very common for employers to put in rules that women could work for their companies, but as soon as they got married, they would be fired because then they had gotten married. They were going to now have their real role, which was that of a wife and hopefully soon, a mother. And that was very common.

Paul Rand: Were those called marriage bars?

Peggy Heffington: Yeah, they were a way of employers to sort of express the sentiment that a woman’s rightful place, at least once she got married, was in the home. They were also ways of protecting women. They were framed at least as ways of protecting women. So the liberal Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote that limiting women’s participation in the workplace was actually something that society had an interest in because all women were potential mothers. So we had to make sure they didn’t work too hard and make it difficult for them to be good mothers. So in the late 19th century and well into the 20th century, this sort of sentiment remains that, sure, it’s fine if women work when they’re young, but then they’re going to take on their real role as wives and mothers.

Paul Rand: But this stereotype of the stay-at-home mom that was all over magazines and TV sitcoms wasn’t exactly an accurate picture of what was going on in the typical American household in the mid-20th century.

Peggy Heffington: The historian Stephanie Coontz has observed that even in the post-war period where we think about like Leave It to Beaver and these really traditional gender roles...

Tape: Girls have got lucky, don’t they, Mom?

Tape: Why do you say that?

Tape: Well, they don’t have to be smart. They don’t have to get jobs or anything. All they got to do is get married.

Peggy Heffington: Even in that period, something like two-thirds of families had both parents working outside the home.

Tape: Well, Beaver, today, girls can be doctors and lawyers too. They’re just as ambitious as boys are.

Peggy Heffington: And that’s because the families who could survive on one income, even in the post-war period where we think of that being the norm, they were a minority. They were a very privileged minority. The economic demands of having a family have long required that both parents work. And I think that that’s what we’re seeing today too that a one-parent household that is also able to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, those are vanishingly rare and that most women who have children also have to work.

Paul Rand: So far, we’ve covered the societal pressures on women to become mothers. But Heffington also wants to explore why women who want to have kids are pressured not to and if we can find answers to explain today’s declining fertility rates. That is after the break.

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Heffington is not a mother herself, but that’s not what got her interested in writing about this idea of non-motherhood.

Peggy Heffington: It actually came out of my personal experience of finishing graduate school. I went to UC Berkeley, I got my PhD, and I took the only job that I got, which was a postdoc at the United States Military Academy at West Point. So I went from this environment that was a bunch of Berkeley graduate students and Silicon Valley tech people, none of whom were thinking, even thinking about having children yet or maybe at all. And I landed on a military base where everyone who was my age, all of the women had two, three, four children and it was incredibly jarring. And I found myself sort of contemplating why would this be? And I found that I wasn’t satisfied by cultural explanations. It wasn’t just that in the Bay Area, people don’t have kids, so people don’t have kids, and on a military base, people tend to so they do. And I started to realize that on a military base, there’s subsidized housing, subsidized daycare, free healthcare. And so it became very clear to me that those were factors that were allowing people to have these large families. And also, there is a way in which work is shifting.

Paul Rand: There was an interesting quote in your book, “The problem isn’t that motherhood is incompatible with work. The problem is that the way we work today is increasingly compatible with motherhood.”

Peggy Heffington: Certainly in the 21st century of requiring people to be available at all times, our work comes home with us on our computers. It comes home with us in our pockets. That is increasingly incompatible with motherhood. But I wanted to dispel the notion that it is inevitable that having a family and contributing to that family economically are sort of incompatible. It’s that the way we work today has made that incompatible. That’s a decision we’ve made. It’s not just some sort of inevitable law of physics.

If you look at Europe today, countries where more women work outside the home also have higher fertility rates than countries where women tend to stay home. And I think that just speaks to the idea that when policies are supportive of people having options, they exercise those options. Because in France and Sweden, those governments make great efforts to make it possible to be a mother and to work outside the home. And in those countries, women are more likely to do both. So these are things like paid maternity leave, extended maternity leave, prenatal care, paid time off, healthcare for your children, subsidized daycare that allows you to go back to work without spending your entire salary. So these are the policies that make women feel like they can at least try to do both.

Paul Rand: As we think about family life and working families and so forth, you do talk about a transition where we went from this idea of a network structure to a nuclear family and the impact that had.

Peggy Heffington: I discovered fairly early on in research that you don’t have to go back that far in American history and certainly anywhere else in the world to find family structures that looked really different than what we consider to be normal today, which is the nuclear family, a biological unit of parents and their kids.

In the American colonies, as one historian has put it, colonists thought of the family only in the context of the community. It was very common for children to go live with other families, for women in the community to sort of, in very real material ways, help raise each other’s children, mother each other’s children, discipline them, feed them, love them. And these were multi-generational networks, but they weren’t limited to family. Sort of slowly and then all of a sudden, people, when they get married, started moving further from their families. They started moving into households that they set up there themselves without intergenerational support and effectively creating what we know today as the nuclear family. And there are real consequences to that.

So in my book, I write about how this meant that women without biological children of their own are suddenly shut out of the process of raising the next generation. They’re not helping their neighbors with their kids. It also means that mothers are suddenly isolated in their family unit. They no longer have all of the support from all of the other women in the community. They are now doing all the work of raising their children. And so this sort of consolidation into the nuclear family affects all women regardless of their reproductive status.

The brilliant sociologist, Patricia Hill Collins, put it really well when she said that the nuclear family is not only the most stressful way of raising children in the world, it is also the most unusual. As soon as you leave the United States and Western Europe, you see much more collaborative ways of raising children. Collins was in particular talking about Black communities in the United States and she observes that West African parenting practices are much more intergenerational. They’re much more collaborative. A group of demographers looked at birth records from the early colonial period in Canada, so they were French colonists in Canada, and as demographers do, they looked at parish records and births and baptisms. Basically, they were able to find that the further a woman moved from her own mother, the fewer children she was likely to have and the less well her children would do. They would become more likely to die as children.

Paul Rand: Oh gosh.

Peggy Heffington: And I thought that was fascinating, both about the power of grandmothers, my mom would really like that story, but also I think it’s a really powerful metaphor for what community support, what support networks do in terms of making it possible to have children and making it possible for people to thrive.

Paul Rand: Right, right. But it didn’t have to be this way. We almost lived in a different world.

Peggy Heffington: This is something I think about think all the time as a sort of historical what if. So the Comprehensive Child Development Act was passed in December 1972. It got two-thirds of votes in the US Senate and more than half of votes in the US House, so it was a very sort of bipartisan bill. The idea was to create a nationwide system of universal daycare, so sort of like public education, but extended to babies. These were conceived of as being on a sliding scale, so from free to quite affordable, even if you had some money. They were also conceived of as providing nutrition assistance and healthcare. And it was bipartisan because for Democrats, it was conceived of as pro-labor, pro-women, and as a sort of a poverty alleviation mechanism. And for the Republicans, they saw it as a pro-family measure. This is a great thing for families. And so it passes with this wide bipartisan margin.

It lands on President Nixon’s desk and he not only vetoes it, he takes the very unusual step of sending a scathing letter back to Congress, basically chastising them for having passed this law. And so, of course, it doesn’t.... it’s vetoed, it’s dead, and it’s never been revisited. Even really, the most progressive Democrats in the government are not talking on that scale. And so when I say I think about it all the time, I sort of imagine what world we would be living in if that had passed.

Paul Rand: But the question is would that alternate world still have a declining fertility rate or is there more to this story than just economic pressures?

Peggy Heffington: But that can’t be the only driver and we know that because in Europe, for example, countries like France and the Scandinavian countries, they do have very supportive policies. They have extended paid maternity leave. They have healthcare. They have subsidized daycare. They have paid time off, all things that we don’t have in the United States, and their fertility rates are higher than ours, but not by a whole lot. In the US, we’re around 1.7. France is the highest in Europe at 1.89. So we can see that that has a marginal benefit and it certainly helps the lives of parents there, but it isn’t the difference between sort of a radically different fertility rate. So there are other things going on.

Paul Rand: It was interesting as I was looking at some of the research that had recently come out and the profound finding was if they ask young people why they were choosing not to have children, I think the answer was, “we just don’t want to,” which is really interesting. And part of that is you hear about this happiness gap of that there’s a... having children may take away your happiness. Thus, I don’t want to.

Peggy Heffington: So there is an annual World Happiness Survey which surveys people about their countries around the world. One of the sort of standing findings is that in the United States, there is no kind of parent and that includes stepparents. It includes parents of young children. It includes empty-nesters whose children have gone to college. There is no kind of parent that is as happy as people without children. It finds that parenthood brings people contentment. It brings them satisfaction, but it doesn’t make them happy. In fact, it makes them less happy than people without kids. Researchers are very careful to say that this is not because children... the problem isn’t the children. It’s not that children are making people unhappy. They might make people tired, but they don’t make people unhappy. It’s that the policy context where parents have children is what’s making them unhappy.

So if you look to those countries that I keep mentioning, like France and the Scandinavian countries where they have these really supportive policies for parents, that happiness gap goes away. And in fact, in the Scandinavian countries, parents are significantly happier than people without children. And so that, to me, is just such a huge insight about where we are failing as a society, policy-wise and support-wise for parents. It is possible to make parents more happy. We’re just not doing it.

Paul Rand: If you look through letters you’ve been getting, comments, criticisms, praises, tell me what kind of reaction you’ve been getting to your book on both the pro and the con side, if that’s the right word.

Peggy Heffington: I have been both fascinated and heartened by the reaction of younger women who’ve read my book, who seem to be disappointed in it and see it as something that’s sort of overly conservative. Like they were looking for a book that really celebrated the idea of not having children, of being child free, and they wanted something that sort of validated that more. Historians don’t really celebrate life choices. That’s not our goal in a book. It’s more about providing context. But I was also trying to tell a story that wasn’t just about people who enthusiastically chose not to have children. It’s a much more complicated story. It’s the full range of not having children from infertility as a life and existential crisis to people who really didn’t want kids. So I was telling a different story and also, I’m a historian.

However, I’ve found it very encouraging that the conversation maybe has moved beyond me and my millennial sort of angst about my reproductive options, that they’ve sort of moved beyond and they’re like, “We are not upset about not having kids. We’re having a great time out here.” As I’ve observed in France and the Scandinavian countries, their fertility rates are 1.8, 1.9 to our 1.7 and scholars have observed that around the world, as soon as women get access to education and professional opportunities and have access to birth control, fertility tends to fall to around two. That that’s just sort of what happens regardless of cultural context, regardless of religion, that that’s where fertility falls when women have other options.

And so I think I would say temper your expectations. Unless we start really limiting women’s options, I don’t know we’re going to get them to have... go back to three and a half or four as our fertility rate and I don’t think we should want that. I think that that is our goal should be to create policies that allow people to have as many children as they want, not policies that force people to have children they don’t want.

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