Now for the bad: even with that tick upwards, the nation’s total fertility rate remains way below “replacement,” the level at which a given generation can replace itself, 2.1 babies per woman. In 2024, the U.S. fertility rate was 1.62. In most years since 1971, and in every year since 2007, the rate has been below 2.1. What can be done to boost it?

The short answer is a pro-worker natalist policy that emphasizes so-called predistribution — altering the spread of the social income through better jobs, higher wages, and worker bargaining power, rather than redistributive handouts from above.

The Trump administration has signaled openness to post-tax redistribution. Last month, President Trump echoed Vice President JD Vance’s case for giving mothers a $5,000 “baby bonus,” calling it “a good idea.” Maybe, baby. A recent Niskanen Center report touted baby-bonus policies in New Zealand and Australia and claimed that just “$2,000 for every baby” born in the United States could be “an affordable, effective” policy “to support families.”

Fair enough, but let’s not kid ourselves about how many more kids a baby bonus might beget. In most nations that have experimented with baby bonuses, the impact on birth rates has been trivial, transitory, or ambiguous. A 2024 study found that financial incentives boost fertility rates slightly in the short run but do little to “increase the total number of children in the long run.”

Still, what if we aspired not merely to claw back to 2.1, but soar past it to the Baby Boom days of 1946 to 1964, when America’s fertility rate averaged close to 4. What might we do?

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Well, we might start by recognizing that while politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from economics with respect to fertility rates. Specifically, the quantity of high-quality blue-collar jobs for men matters greatly to marriage rates and birth rates: the better and more plentiful the jobs, the higher the rates of family formation and childbearing. There are good reasons, both anecdotal and analytical, for thinking so.

Let me start with the anecdotal. In 1958, I began life in a semi-dilapidated, brick-row house in South Philadelphia, just across the street from the cathedral-like Catholic church where the fictional Rocky “The Italian Stallion” Balboa got married in the sequel to the 1976 blockbuster Rocky — and where my nonfictional older sister got married in 1977.

The urban, Catholic, blue-collar Boomer world of my Philly youth was no paradise, but it was close. Most dads had steady, decent-paying union or other jobs. Nobody needed a credit card to take their vacation week on the Jersey Shore. Nobody bowled or drank alone. Nobody thought they needed to go to college to make it. Above all, nobody thought that intact families with three or four or more kids was anything but the natural, good, and godly order of things.

Indeed, Saint Barnabas, the Catholic elementary school I graduated from in 1972, had about 180 kids in each grade. And that was small compared to our K-8 rival, Most Blessed Sacrament, which at its Sixties peak averaged more than 400 students per grade.

Tutored by hard-won experience, the adult working-class women in my life never doubted that good jobs were essential to making men moral, marriage-ready, and marriage-worthy. As my maternal grandmother would say, “senza buon lavori, senza buon uomini,” meaning, “without good jobs, no good men.”

One of my aunts was married to a — as my father would always inject, “half-assed” — house painter. The guy would commence carousing and boozing whenever he was short on work, which was often. When girl relatives turned 15 or 16, she gave them “the talk”: men behave like animali (animals) on Saturdays and skip church on Sundays unless prezioso lavori (valuable jobs) await them and their paesani (male friends) on Mondays.

And lest you think it was just an Italian-American thing, one of my father’s brothers, a unionized construction boss, was married to a German-Irish woman. They had five children, plus me as their godson. She gave her four daughters essentially the same talk. And when her son talked of being a professional drummer, rather than working construction, she counseled him to “drum on the bricks” instead if he wanted to win a decent wife and lead a good family life. He did.

That job-centered male marriageability narrative is backed by statistics from numerous solid empirical studies. For instance, a 2024 study estimated that unionization, all by itself, “accounted for 20% of overall fertility increases during the Baby Boom”; and that these pro-family-formation effects were “driven primarily by wage growth” and “protection against adverse labor market shocks.”

Unfortunately, the relationship also holds in reverse. For instance, in 2017, three years before publishing their book-length discourse on “deaths of despair,” economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case detailed how decades of “worsening labor-market opportunities” were implicated in sizable and persistent declines in marriage rates.

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Likewise, “When Work Disappears,” a 2019 study published in American Economic Review, documents how, in the early Nineties, the loss in US manufacturing jobs, owing to the China trade shock, tanked earnings among young working-class and low-income men, and, in turn, resulted in steep declines in their marriage rates.

Now, Good Jobs, Strong Families: How the Character of Men’s Work is Linked to Their Family Status, a new study by the Institute for Family Studies, scholars Brad Wilcox and Grant Martsolf demonstrate that “the nature and character of men’s work play a major role in determining whether men marry and form families.” As they explain, factors like “job stability, predictable hours, good benefits, and high pay help men to flourish and, in turn, elevate their appeal as husbands.” The upshot: “prime-aged men with good jobs are markedly more likely to be married with children when they are well-paid, their jobs are stable, and their benefits are good.”

Based on cutting-edge statistical analyses of differences in married family-formation rates by job characteristics, Wilcox and Martsolf find that, across different employment sectors (construction, retail, health care, food and hospitality, trucking, manufacturing, and others), working-class “men who are employed in stable, good-paying jobs with decent benefits” are significantly more likely to get married, stay married, and become fathers.

So, more and better blue-collar jobs have been, and continue to be, the seedbeds of robust birth rates, stable working-class families, and strong blue-collar communities. If only we had a critical mass of seriously pro-worker and pro-family leaders in both parties, who knows, we might yet one day witness the dawn of a second midcentury blue-collar baby boom.

It’s a humiliating state of affairs because Russian power has always been built on the foundation of demography. Back in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw that Russia would become a world power, because “Russia is of all the nations of the Old World the one whose population is increasing most rapidly”. The only other country with its population potential was the United States. De Tocqueville prophesised that, “Each one of them seems called by a secret design of Providence to hold in its hands one day the destinies of half the world.” A century later, they were the world’s two uncontested superpowers.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Russia’s population was 136 million, and was still booming, just as those of other European powers started to slow. Germany’s population was 56 million, excluding its colonies, and the threat of ever-larger cohorts of Russian recruits into the Tsar’s ranks haunted Germany’s leadership; historian and public intellectual Friedrich Meinecke fretted over the “almost inexhaustible fertility” of the Slavs while Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg complained that “Russia grows and grows and lies on us like an ever-heavier nightmare”. This pressure was probably the decisive factor in Germany’s 1914 leap in the dark. German Secretary of State Gottlieb von Jagow wrote to the German ambassador in London as the storm was gathering that “in a few years, Russia will be ready … Then she will crush us on land by weight of numbers.”

In the First World War, it turned out, numbers were not enough to compensate for Russian industrial and organisational inferiority. But by the Second World War, Russia’s numeric superiority had exploded. Despite the horrors of Civil War and Bolshevism, the nation’s population grew at about three times the speed of Germany’s in the opening decades of the century. The army had an endless supply of soldiers, the military infrastructure an endless supply of workers, giving the country a decisive edge in the Forties. Vast spaces and appalling weather helped, but ultimately it was the endlessness of Russian manpower which ground down the Wehrmacht in what was perhaps the most epic military struggle of all time. Field Marshall Erich von Manstein complained as he faced Russia’s armies: “We confronted a hydra: for every head cut off, two new ones appeared to grow.”

But if demographic prowess buttressed Russian power then, population decline has undermined it in the years since. Most nations have developed out of the high birth and death rates seen throughout most of human history: as mortality and then fertility falls, first the population expands, then it flattens; eventually, it may contract. But in Russia this process has taken place with a vengeance.

At the time of its dissolution, the Soviet Union was the home of 290 million people, 50 million more than the USA. Today, the Russian Federation has less than half that number — and less than half of the USA’s current total. In large part, this is the result of the loss of non-Russian republics, including Ukraine (which at the outbreak of the current conflict had a population of 43 million). But in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period, the country also collapsed into an orgy of suicide and alcoholism, particularly affecting the country’s men.

One journalist in Russia at the time wrote about how “the deaths kept piling up. People … were falling or perhaps jumping, off trains and out of windows; asphyxiating in country houses with faulty wood stoves or in apartment with jammed front door locks … drowning as a result of driving drunk into a lake … poisoning themselves with too much alcohol … dropping dead at absurdly early ages from heart attacks and strokes”. By the early years of this century, life expectancy for Russian men was on par with countries such as Madagascar and Sudan.

Meanwhile, Russian women were having fewer and fewer children. In the later decades of the Soviet Union, the average woman in the Slavic heartland had an estimated six or seven abortions in the course of her life. The populations in the Caucasus and Central Asia were booming, though, undermining Russians as the USSR’s majority ethnicity.

This proved especially corrosive in the military. Year after year, the share of recruits from the peripheral republics went up, while the share from Russia went down; in the late Eighties, three-quarters of recruits from Central Asia could not speak Russian. (The problems of having a polyglot military had been rehearsed earlier in the century by the Austro-Hungarian Empire — which had, of course, fallen apart.)

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It’s also worth recognising that the Russian men who fell fighting the Germans in the Forties were from families of six or seven siblings; those who fell fighting the Afghans in the Eighties were from families of two or three. Those falling now, fighting in Ukraine, are likely to be only-children or one of two siblings. The preparedness of a society to sustain military losses falls as family size falls; the only conflicts in today’s world that go on and on for years — from Libya to Syria to Yemen to Congo — are in places where the men who die have many brothers.

Once the Soviet Union was abolished, Russia maintained its population size only by inward migration. Ethnic Russians returned from the now-independent periphery to the Soviet heartland. Increasingly, people of other ethnicities followed them to the North-West, where prospects were better. At least a million and a half Muscovites are ethnically non-Russian, some from places such as Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, others from Muslim regions of Russia like Tatarstan. In 2013, the mayor of Moscow swore that there would be no more mosques built in the city, hoping to discourage more Islamic migration.

Putin has never publicly expressed concern about the ethnic mix of contemporary Russia, but this demographic nightmare haunts him, and informs his worldview. In 2006, he launched policies to encourage larger families. And last year he lamented: “We have a little more than 81 million people of able-bodied age. We are obliged to increase the number by 2024 and 2030. This is one of the factors for economic growth. Not to mention the geopolitical component of this major issue.” At around 1.5 children per woman, Russia is still dwindling. In the next decade, Russia’s population is forecast to decline by around 300,000 a year, though some suggest the decline will be much faster — perhaps 12 million in the next 15 years.

This steady depopulation is more than a nuisance; it is a strategic headache. Russia’s immense size was supported by the preparedness of its people to settle in some of the most inhospitable habitats in the world. As it reduces, it retreats back towards the big cities of the west and centre, and will leave vast regions uninhabited. “In Siberia it becomes harder and harder to find people to maintain big infrastructure. Things are starting to collapse. And that is making the place less and less liveable which reinforces the problem,” one expert told me. Thousands of villages have been abandoned, particularly in remote areas.

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What is Putin to do? “Ensuring sustainable natural population growth” was at the top of the executive order of National Goals and Strategic Objectives of the Russian Federation signed by the President in 2018. Payments were given to those with two or more children, who are eligible for increasingly generous welfare benefits. Now, payments are given to those with one child. But the best evidence so far suggests that, after a modest bounce-back, fertility is in decline again. At this stage it is not clear that these policies have had any material impact at all.

Of course, one way of growing the population is to annex neighbouring countries and try to persuade its people and the world that they are really Russians. After all, definitions of ethnicity and national identity can be easily manipulated. Turkey, for instance, has tried to redefine Kurds as “mountain Turks”. There were even suggestions in the 18th century that Scots be considered “North Britons”.

But if an incorporation of Ukrainian identity into a wider Russian one was Putin’s plan, it has backfired. The invasion has undoubtedly solidified a sense among Ukrainians that their identity is distinct and that they are in no way Russian. Vitaly Chernetsky, an expert in Slavic languages, commented that, “this crisis galvanized, consolidated, accelerated the development of this new civic identity, where folks who never in their lives spoke Ukrainian all of a sudden made a conscious choice to make an effort to start speaking Ukrainian in public”.

Meanwhile, the war could undermine Putin’s plans to boost the birth rate in Russia’s heartlands. With sanctions starting to bite, the funds for generous payments to parents will simply not be available. On the contrary, the economic hardship which the Russian population must now endure is likely to further depress childbearing.

And to compound the problem, many Russians will look to emigrate. It was said in Soviet days that dissidents were trying to change the unleavable, refuseniks to leave the unchangeable. Putin’s Russia seems unchangeable but, for now, it remains leavable. It is estimated that 200,000 people left the country in the first ten days of the conflict alone; millions more are likely to follow, whatever the outcome — partly to reject the regime, partly to escape the impending, sanctions-driven economic crisis which the country faces.

Meanwhile Russia is losing thousands of young men in the war in Ukraine. Many in their early twenties, they are unlikely to have had any children, which doesn’t bode well for Russia. Already ageing and shrinking, the nation simply cannot sustain the kind of campaign it has fought in the past. Its days of vastly superior manpower are over. A long, grinding war followed by a bloody occupation would cripple it.

This should not be a surprise. Human babies take a long time to reach independence, which confers significant obligations on their parents. Before the existence of the welfare state, or reliable contraception, societies attempted to hold both men and women to these obligations by stigmatising sex outside marriage, and as far as possible forcing marriage on any couple whose illicit fun resulted in an unplanned pregnancy.

The alternatives to a ‘shotgun wedding’ were terrifying: in the 19^th century, unmarried pregnancy could leave a woman indigent, imprisoned in near-slavery in places like the Magdalene laundries, as or at grave physical risk in the hands of a backstreet abortionist. Without easy access to divorce, too, a shotgun wedding could leave a mother dependent for life on an abusive spouse.

It is no wonder, then, that the 20th century women’s liberation movement sought economic independence and control over fertility for women. Feminists founded organisations such as Women’s Aid to challenge domestic abuse and violence, agitated for equal pay and, more fundamentally still, demanded greater control for women over their own fertility.

In 1961, the contraceptive pill was first made available. In 1968, the Abortion Act made it legal to terminate a pregnancy. And in 1974, health authorities were given permission to prescribe the contraceptive pill to unmarried women. The marriage rate promptly began to fall, and continued to do so steadily from its 1970 peak of nearly 60% before stabilising at around 20% at the turn of the century.

It seems that when marriage and raising babies becomes optional rather than inevitable, many women will choose to prioritise other things (I know – imagine!). Today, those couples who still marry do so an average of more than a decade later than they did in 1970. The average age of having a first baby has climbed from 23.7 in 1970 to 28.8 in 2016, and the same statistics show that more than half of first-time UK births are now to parents aged over 30.

And as well as (or in my case because of) starting later, we are also having fewer children: nearly half of households never have more than one. Only one in seven families has three or more.

In 1974, the year the birth control pill became available to unmarried women, the British birth rate fell below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, where it has remained ever since. Nor is this phenomenon confined to Britain, where in 2018, the rate was 1.7 live births per woman. In 2017, the overall fertility rate across the EU was 1.59 babies per woman.

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So did feminism kill the birth rate? Actually, no. Though antifeminists are often keen to blame dwindling fertility on the selfishness of modern women, it is more accurate to say that liberal individualism killed the birth rate.

The liberal individualism at the heart of modern civilisation, as elaborated perhaps most influentially by John Locke, views us as free, rational and equal to all other individuals. The liberal individual is autonomous, in command of his body, and in possession of natural rights including liberty. And for a long time, it was a boys’ club from which women were excluded, because we were instead expected to represent all the spare bits of human nature left out of the Lockean vision of the ideal person.

For as well as having the capacity for logical thought, humans are deeply irrational. We are not disembodied rational consciousnesses but evolved animals, with instincts developed over millions of years. And we are not atomised individuals but inherently social.

But these other aspects of human nature get palmed-off on women. As Simone de Beauvoir observed, men have historically defined women as ‘Other’ — that is, as whatever men did not wish to be. So as liberal individualism gained in dominance, those men who embraced it did so in large part by celebrating their own superior rationality, autonomy and command of their mortal flesh against a stereotype of women as irrational, childlike in their dependence and hopelessly addled by emotionality and the concerns of the body.

It is no coincidence that the modern democratic political project, which is premised on the capacity of each individual for reason and judgement, excluded women. Women’s allotted role was to serve as cultural dumping-ground for all the spare bits of human nature, such as animal instinct and strength of feeling, whose persistence compromised the arguments for enfranchisement. So it must have seemed only natural that the rights due to a rational Enlightenment subject should be denied to women.

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Then, the Women’s Liberation movement turned liberal individualism from an instrument of women’s oppression into a central plank of our liberation. If the Lockean individual is autonomous, rational and possesses natural rights, why should women not also claim that rationality, enjoy that autonomy and exercise those rights?

Well, quite. But this is where we get to the birth rate. If, as feminists, we accept as a core premise the liberal-individualist conception of personhood, it follows that ‘liberation’ must mean liberation from dependence on others, and from our emotional and animal nature.

As I have argued elsewhere, having a baby cuts radically across the liberal conception of personhood. Motherhood tends to makes us more emotional and in need of social connection, even as we find ourselves suddenly inhabiting a ballooning, leaky body over which we only have the most marginal control. It is astonishing how much of feminism has a conflicted relationship to motherhood. But perhaps it should not be surprising, given that it is very difficult to be entirely free and also have dependent children.

In policy terms, it is clear that feminist liberation is understood as in tension with motherhood. In the 2019 election, every major political party competed to show they were thinking of women’s interests — mostly via subsidised childcare. While this may be of practical benefit to many, it is telling that family policy understands ‘choice’ to mean subsidising childcare, and offers little support for parents who choose to look after their own offspring.

As well as marginalising motherhood, conflating feminism with liberal individualism is increasingly producing mixed messages. As ever more of the great battles for equality are won, the feminist remit is getting wider and less coherent —including everything from environmentalism to Palestinian rights. The definition of ‘woman’ is receiving the same treatment. We are now expected to include males in the definition, if they say they are women, or be labelled reactionary bigots.

And none of this is doing anything to make space for the spare bits of human nature left out of the liberal ideal. Now that we are all rational, autonomous individuals, who carries the can for our embodied, social and emotional aspects? Today, the messy stuff either still gets dumped on women as a ‘second shift’ or outsourced to — you guessed it — poorer women. Small wonder we are putting off becoming that messy, leaky, animalistic and shamefully dependent Other.

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Does it matter? There is much talk today of what we can and should do to ensure the survival of liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is the political expression of liberal individualism. But liberalism seems to be liberating women from willingness to give birth to new liberals, at least in sufficient numbers to keep liberal populations static across generations. Does it not follow from this that either liberalism must adapt, or else liberals — and their democracies — must, in the end, die out?

This should worry anyone who recognises (as we should) that women’s sex-specific interests still need advocacy. It may not have been feminism that killed the birth rate so much as the conflation of feminism with liberal individualism, but you can bet your bottom dollar it will be women who get the blame. The reaction of misogynists to the waning of fertility in Western liberal cultures is less likely to be a critique of the liberal conception of personhood, than a concerted effort to stuff women back into our pre-feminist role as hysterical, flesh-bound, dependent and fecund Other to the rational male subject.

How are we to resolve this? If we are not to watch our worldview expire or else invite the grandfather of all antifeminist backlashes, we need to address the heart of the problem: our impoverished understanding of ideal personhood. To put it another way, we need to make more space for emotion, social bonds and our evolved nature as embodied creatures. This goes not just for women, but for everyone. We need to allow love and the body back into the way we see human nature.

If we managed this, what then would women’s political interests look like? Or men’s, for that matter? Would we still see rationality and freedom as the only important values? How might we rethink our social, economic or ecological priorities? These are questions worth asking.