On Syracuse University Week: The fertility rate in the United States may pose challenges in the future.
Leonard M. Lopoo, Paul Volcker Chair in Behavioral Economics, says certain policies may do more harm than good.
Leonard M. Lopoo is the Paul Volcker Chair in Behavioral Economics; Associate Dean and Chair of the Department of Public Administration and International Affairs; and Director and Co-founder of the Maxwell X Lab. His research is interdisciplinary, and his interests primarily involve the family: fertility, marriage, maternal employment and the social welfare policies designed to assist the low-income population. He has a forthcoming book from the University of Chicago Press titled “Wanting Children: Family Planning Policies and the Re-Engineering of America.”
Lopoo received a Ph.D. from the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago in 2001 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University from 2001-2003.
Why Government Policy is Much More Effective at Reducing Births than Generating Them
Total fertility rates in the United States have been falling for decades. A total fertility rate is the average number of children a woman should expect to have over her lifetime. Replacement level fertility, or the average number necessary to sustain the size of the population, is 2.1. Today, the United States is around 1.62. Given these numbers, fertility is starting to make its way onto the political agenda in the United States as the Trump Administration has highlighted it as a concern.
Research suggests that government policy is not an effective tool to encourage births. It is much better at reducing them. For example, in 2020, there were around 5.4 million pregnancies in the United States – 17% ended in a legal abortion. Further, while the number of abortions dropped immediately following the Dobbs ruling, a decision that gave the right to states to legislate access to abortions, the number of abortions today exceeds the 2020 number. Scholars have also shown that our publicly-provided family planning programs, such as Title X and Medicaid, among others, have reduced the number of pregnancies each year by around 2.2 million.
Studies on pronatalist policies, on the other hand, such as baby bonuses, family leave, and childcare subsidies show weaker results: often these studies find no effect at all and when there is one, it’s usually a small positive change.
The important distinction between the anti- and pro-natalist policies involves the massive cost of having a child, which includes multiple components. Consider, a conservative estimate of the financial cost of a child through age 18 is around $250,000 and that does not include additional expenses after secondary school or the opportunity and psychological costs of parenthood. Becoming a parent is a huge investment. Government benefits are never large enough to make a dent in these enormous costs, which is necessary to promote fertility. However, efforts to avoid that big investment, such as family planning and abortion, have been quite successful.
