So JD Vance’s criticism of childless women, or crazy cat ladies, went viral over the past week, with various pundits claiming this was disqualifying in the election for Vice President. His claim, quite simply, was that childless women were less able to think about the long-term future, than mothers whose perspective was influenced by their concern with their children.
Will those childless women, and the child-ful women who support their literal or figurative sisters, rise up in support of Kamala Harris? Or, on the other hand, is Vance right that women without children cannot think about the long view of the future of the country and put their own immediate desires first? (Yes, you might ask, “what about the crazy cat men?” and, let’s face it, there seems to be a certain assumption that women are voluntarily choosing to be childless and men are either, as “incels,” involuntarily without a relationship, or else, even if in a relationship, are not the decision-makers around starting a family.)
But the rise in childless women, or childless adults, is in fact real and might, in fact, cause some real problems.
It should go without saying that not all women are called to be mothers, and not all men are called to be fathers. (Even discarding the current popularity of “childfree by choice,” the Catholic Church has had celibate religious life since its start.) But it’s a problem for society if not enough men and women are willing. Is this a trivial and obvious statement, in the same way in which not every individual has a moral obligation to be a doctor/firefighter/teacher/etc., but if everyone in the country collectively rejected these jobs, we’d be in a world of hurt? It’s murkier than that — after all, we only need a small proportion of Americans to choose any given profession, and said profession can be made more attractive by its pay or working conditions. But for our society and our economy to be stable, we need for the large majority of men and women to have children — and we seem to be headed in the wrong direction. You’d think it would be obvious, that, since pretty nearly all of us have grown up as a part of a family — whether large or small, with or without both parents or extended family — that young men and women, as they grow up, would see their future as one in which they start their own families. But in a society which increasingly treats having children as a sort of hobby, to be undertaken only by those who are sure it is the right fit for them, it seems likely that those young men and women will become no more likely to think of having a family as a normal part of adulthood, because of their own childhood, than that they would model themselves after their parents’ career choices, or actual hobbies.
For reference, looking at a calculation by Lyman Stone at Institute of Family Studies from 2022, the prior peak prevalence of childlessness was for the birth cohort born in 1904, who would have been 25 when the Great Depression started. (This is all eyeballing off of a chart.) About 25% of these women were childless. With the return of economy prosperity after the war, that rate dropped to a low of about 10% for women born in 1934, and for the latest cohort of women who have passed their fertile years (1974-ish), the rate is back at 15% — but with the much more recent, very sudden drop in fertility, Stone projects that for women born in 1989, or age 35 now, somewhere between 25% and 30% could end up being childless (depending on the data source), and the jump is so high there’s no telling what the ultimate trendline will be.
Stone’s interpretation of survey data is also that women are not, by and large, “childfree” — that is, they do not reach the end of their fertile years without children due to a deliberate choice, but despite having wanted children. They either don’t succeed in finding a spouse while still young enough, or don’t feel they have established themselves sufficiently, or for other reasons don’t have the children they always intended to have.
But whether women (or couples) deliberately choose not to have children or simply end up without them due to an accumulation of decisions and life experiences, there’s more at stake than just “will there be enough children in the future?” because, yes, I can believe that parents will make different voting decisions, or other types of decisions about control. After all, we saw children get the short end of the stick with schools closed for far longer than they should have, in the aftermath of covid. And in the longer term, however much we seem to have escaped the consequences of the ever-growing national debt, we won’t be able to avoid them forever — the need for austerity measures or tax increases (or both, or maybe a tax increase is a form of austerity?) will increase the intensity of the debate over federal spending and tax levels because, campaign promises notwithstanding, we will be faced with harsh choices. Should our limited resources be directed at daycare subsidies or other benefits for parents, or be directed at increasing Medicare or Social Security, or funding long-term care programs?
And, no, the answer is not immigration. In this day and age, when we repeatedly read the demographic statistics that a growing percentage of young Americans are immigrants, and that the racial/ethnic composition of young Americans is diverging dramatically from older Americans, and the growing emphasis on pursuing “equity” for those of your own racial/ethnic group, why would those new immigrants be at all interested in the welfare of strangers, merely because they happen to occupy the same territory? The answer is families, with adults connected to new generations through their children, and to the generations which preceded them through their parents. But if we forget or abandon that, we are in trouble.
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