Confessions of a female draft-dodger

"More Babies, Please," read the headline on a recent Ross Douthat op-ed column in the New York Times. If Americans don't reverse our declining birth rate, Douthat contends, our whole society will suffer. "Today's babies are tomorrow's taxpayers and workers and entrepreneurs," he explains.

First the Pentagon lifts its ban against sending women into combat. Now this. The whole future of American civilization rides on the shoulders of married, childless young women like me. And you wonder why we feel stressed?

Douthat joins a cadre of hand-wringing pundits, mostly on the right, who worry that a declining birth rate, or delays in starting families, will cause everything from the collapse of Social Security and the decline of America's military to a generation of grandparents who'll be too old to help raise their grandkids.

These writers acknowledge that economic factors may play a role in the decline of births: The recession has surely discouraged otherwise fertile families from jumping into parenthood. But ultimately, most conservative writers place the blame on a moral failing.

Blaming "'greed'

Douthat points to "cultural forces" that seem immune to legislative incentives: Americans' apparent reluctance to produce babies is due to the "decadence" of rich societies, the "comforts and pleasures of modernity" and a selfish refusal to make the sacrifices that civilization requires.

Austin Ruse, in the Catholic magazine Crisis, goes Douthat one better: He bemoans the increasing proportion of non-religiously-affiliated Americans. Their "nihilism," he insist, prevents them from having children.

For good measure, Ruse adds that religious people are slightly less greedy than non-religious people— which he finds significant, because the dip in childbearing is mainly attributable to "greed."

Vacation quandary

Ruse chastises those who, unlike him and his wife, choose material goods over childrearing. "For many people such things really matter," he says: They want new cars and vacation homes. But babies bring a different reality. "Think about two or three or four children," he continues, "and then ponder a future of vacations not in Paris but at the small lake down the road."

No. Please no, Austin. Not the small lake down the road! Anything but the small lake down the road!

Ruse urges fertile Americans to follow his own patriotic example. "When my wife and I married we went to Europe a lot," he says. "When our first daughter came, we still went to Europe but less. Our second daughter has never been to Europe."

Is this man a candidate for the Medal of Freedom, or what?


"'Human capital'

But the pundits aren't done with me. In the Wall Street Journal, author Jonathan Last says the recent election has occasioned much talk about whether America is really declining. But the issue "isn't about political ideology at all," he insists. Romney, Obama"“ it doesn't matter, because our "human capital" is declining.

The message is clear: I'm personally responsible for America's imminent collapse. So why am I dodging this pregnancy draft? Is it my materialist, feminist ego?

My husband and I have personal reasons for delaying pregnancy when our parents did not. I can show you my student loan debt or our staggering health-insurance bill. But the fact that I can barely afford my own health care, let alone a child's, is apparently irrelevant to these self-appointed family counselors.


High-risk pregnancy

Besides, I'm feeling pressure from doctors as well as pundits. Each week, it seems, brings a grave new health article that blames everything from autism to ADHD on parents who wait until their 30s or, God forbid, their 40s to reproduce. These stories may motivate some women to have children sooner rather than later. But they may persuade others to avoid parenthood altogether.

Last week I met a lovely woman who was six months pregnant. It's a "high-risk pregnancy," she confided"“ her doctors are worried because she's 35.

But what about the women of my parents' and grandparents' generations "“ many of whom had large, healthy families spaced over a number of years? Didn't they regularly give birth in their 30s and even 40s without sending their doctors into a panic?

A year or two left?

My own grandmother didn't marry until she was 26 (practically an old maid, back in the 1940s). She went on to bear five children over the next decade or so, without being lectured about doing her patriotic duty — or, apparently, being threatened with C-sections because of her advanced age.

In contrast, my own doctor told me two years ago, when I was 27 and in good reproductive health, that I had "maybe a year or two" left in which to become pregnant safely.

So here I am, childless by choice at the ripe old age of 29— a time bomb on the inside and a disgrace to America on the outside.

Sorry about that. But as demographers, demagogues and doctors alike are discovering, I'm not sorry enough to rush the most important decision of my life.♦


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