The XX Factor: What women really think.

Quiverfull Feminism

"The threat of population decline," writes Michelle Goldberg at the American Prospect, "is one of the best arguments yet for socialized day care, family leave, and other dreamy Scandinavian-style policies.... I get why liberals have shied away from this discussion, since there's so many uncomfortable issues involved. But they really shouldn't, because the only solutions to the problem are liberal ones!"

I wrote a Reason feature on this issue for anyone who is interested in sociological and economic analysis of natalist policy. But for now I'll just say: Liberals ought to be very, very cautious about engaging natalist rhetoric in the promotion of social welfare policies. The claim that Western Civilization is on the brink of extinction might help sell universal daycare or any other policy that can be cast as an incentive to motherhood, but population alarmism lends credence to a number of wildly illiberal arguments. Once you've bought into the idea that a nation-state must defend its existence through native population growth, you've come uncomfortably close to arguing that a particular subset of women has a patriotic responsibility to reproduce. You've also legitimized some legislator's attempt to bribe women into using their bodies in a particular way. There is a reason that the producers of Demographic Winter are traditionalist Christians.

Gradual population decline of the kind we are seeing in Germany and Japan is, I think, manageable. But even if we insist on addressing population decline as some kind of crisis, it's not at all clear that liberal policies like paid family leave are going to turn the tide. The most obvious difference we see between developed countries with relatively high birth rates and developed countries with relatively low birthrates is cultural. Swedes and Americans are relatively more likely than, say, Singaporeans or Koreans, to believe that work and motherhood are compatible. The countries with the lowest birth rates in the world are countries in which childless women are integrated into the workforce but women with children are expected to stay home.

Such attitudes are distinct from redistributional social welfare policies. It may be that Sweden's welfare state is responsible for its near-replacement birth rate, but the evidence for this is not terribly compelling. In order to frame the story this way one needs to cast the high-fertility United States as an anomalous outlier rather than part of the general, culture-driven trend.

I am sympathetic to Goldberg in that population alarmism might be a useful way to argue for policies I happen to support; more open borders, for example. But there are better arguments for a humane immigration policy, and there are better arguments for an expansive welfare state.