Many on the right say no. The state has no business judging its citizens’ household arrangements, they say. We don’t want politicians declaring the number of babies being born is too low or the number of single women is too high.
If there are things that are distorting people’s decision-making, then maybe we can tweak those, some libertarians admit. If young people are putting off marriage because of crushing college debt, then maybe we need some form of relief. If families can’t afford housing big enough for their desired number of children, then maybe we need better housing policy.
But family policy? No. As long as no one is preventing people from marrying and having kids, then government should stay out of it. Let everyone make their own choices, and things will work themselves out.
Sydney Smith was a big believer in letting things work themselves out. In an article for the Edinburgh Review in 1810 on women’s education, the liberal clergyman mocked the idea that anyone should worry that giving ladies too much schooling might unfit them for motherhood. “Can anything,” he wrote, “be more perfectly absurd than to suppose that the care and perpetual solicitude which a mother feels for her children depends upon her ignorance of Greek and mathematics, and that she would desert an infant for a quadratic equation?”
An admirable sentiment, but is it completely true? Can we just assume that the impulse to form families is so strong that society can always trust that people will find a way to satisfy it?
Nearly 25 percent of Millennial women are now projected to have zero children in their lifetimes. Less than 5 percent of women say when asked that they want no children. That leaves the other 20 percent — millions of women who will die childless, not because they wanted to, but because they couldn’t put the pieces together in time.
“Nearly 25 percent of Millennial women are now projected to have zero children in their lifetimes.”
One factor might be the very subject Smith was discussing: education. Women have outnumbered men on college campuses for decades, resulting in an imbalance between the number of college-educated single women and the number of college-educated men available to them as partners. Yet women’s standards for marriageability have remained as high as they were when the imbalance was in men’s favor, wanting a partner who earns more and is at least as educated. This mismatch is one reason the share of American adults who have never married has reached a record high of 35 percent, up from 21 percent twenty years ago and 9 percent in 1970.
