When news articles talk about the county’s declining fertility, there tends to be a tone of panic and often of judgment. But what is the truth of fertility rate declines? What role does policy play in impacting these rates? And how does the nature of fertility rates influence policy?

In this episode, Sarah Edwards (MPP 20) turns to a local expert, demography PhD Leslie Root. Leslie helps us unpack this specific intersection between demography and policy, and what it means for our future.

Curious for more information on changing fertility rates and policy implications? Check out the following:

1. Leslie’s Washington Post Op-Ed: "Don’t Panic Over Declining Fertility Rates—And Don’t Let Anyone Guilt You”
2. The Shift Project, which Leslie mentioned in the podcast. This research effort by Berkeley and UCSF researchers has advanced our understanding of the nature of shift work and the implications these policies have.
3. Paid Leave US, an advocacy organization working to expand paid leave policies in California and the nation.

Transcript

Sarah: [00:00:00] From time to time, the news picks up a somewhat frantic sounding piece.

News Reporter 1: [00:00:04] Alert, the number of babies born in America last year falling to a 32 year low. More than 3.8 million babies were born in the U.S. last year. That's the lowest number since 1987.

News Reporter 2: [00:00:17] Fertility rates across the U.S. Have dropped to another all time low.

News Reporter 3: [00:00:22] Last year's drop in the nation's birth rate, about 2% overall, was the largest drop in a single year since 2010.

Sarah: [00:00:30] But what about this is true and what's just hype? In this episode, we'll be looking to answer that. We'll explore what exactly is happening with trends in birth rates in the U.S. and California, what might be a blip and what might be a new normal, and how birth rates tie to other policies. I'm Sarah Edwards, and this is Talk Policy To Me. This is one of our episodes in our series around demographic shifts. We're asking what are the changes in the demographic makeup of our country and our state. Are policies keeping up with these changes? When we thought about fertility rate changes, we knew this was a perfect topic for the podcast. There are large policy implications. There's a complicated history and it's inherently personal. Fertility rate changes also have some really important ramifications for other policies as we'll get into more in this episode, policies ranging from parental leave policies to our retirement system actually can be tied in to changing fertility rates in our country. I turn to an expert, Leslie Root is a Ph.D. student in demography here at Berkeley. She helps us unpack the different demographic definitions in this space where the common narrative gets it wrong and what these changes need to mean for policymakers. Today on the podcast, talking policy and fertility rate changes.

Sarah: [00:02:03] We've kind of seen some news headlines about changing fertility rates and replacement rates. And some of them have kind of this tone of panic of like, we're not having enough babies, populations are declining. It's a problem. Can you walk us through like what these mean and what the data actually looks like and kind of what these different things actually are?

Leslie: [00:02:28] The U.S. birthrate right now is 11.6, and the total fertility rate is about 1.73 as of 2018. But those numbers by themselves, like, what does that mean? Right?

Sarah: [00:02:42] Leslie explains that demography measures both a birth rate and a fertility rate. We sometimes talk about them interchangeably, but they're actually really not the same thing. The birth rate is a measure of babies born compared to the population at large. This number is usually compared to the death rate, which means if the birth rate is bigger than the death rate, the population as a whole is growing, which is what's happening right now in California and our country as a whole. The fertility rate is a measure of the number of children the average woman is having. The tricky part with fertility rates is it's not how many children you have had by the time you stop having children, it's how many children you're expected to have based on your age today.

Leslie: [00:03:25] So if you're 15 now, you're subject to the 15 year old rates right now. And each year of your life, you're aging forward. And what 30 year olds are doing right now might not be relevant to what fertility looks like when you're 30. But we don't have that data yet, right? So we just use this year's rates to calculate a number like 1.73. Right? The problem with that is that in a society where births are getting later in the way, of course, which is absolutely happening in the US and in most developed countries, you end up with an artificially depressed total fertility rate.

Sarah: [00:04:02] This doesn't necessarily account for the types of shifts that we're seeing. As Leslie explains, this is a big part of why fertility rates can look low, but doesn't necessarily mean that we aren't having kids at the rate to replace ourselves

Leslie: [00:04:18] The replacement rate is a really important concept to understand because it doesn't necessarily mean what people think it means. So replacement TFR is 2.1, meaning that women would have to have an average of 2.1 kids to replace their generation. But this actually comes from a mathematical model that we call a stable population, where we assume that you freeze today's fertility and mortality rates and they're the same for at least a human lifetime. So if for the next 70 years we had a TFR of 1.73 every single year, the population would shrink, but a TFR of 1.73 in any given year doesn't mean that the population is shrinking because people have, you know, 30 years to have their kids. And whether or not they're doing it in one specific year doesn't matter.

Sarah: [00:05:07] Would you say, generally speaking, as news articles are talking about it, they're not talking about it right?

Leslie: [00:05:12] Yeah. And often you see this line that's like fertility is below 2.1, the rate needed for a stable population and there's nothing unstable about our population. 2.1 is what you would need to have exactly zero population growth. And there's some assumption in these articles that zero growth or positive growth are good and negative growth is bad. And I think that the assumptions behind that go really unexamined.

Sarah: [00:05:41] What are the assumptions behind that?

Leslie: [00:05:42] The argument is that this is a crisis because of economics and specifically because of population aging generally retirement and care of the elderly is to some extent publicly funded. Right. And you need to have a growing population if you're going to have that specific publicly funded scheme and keep tax rates for working people low. And so as the population ages, you end up with more retirees per working person. And that's the fear behind low fertility that there won't be enough workers in the future to fund retirement. But I think that that's often made out to be a more immediate crisis than it actually is, partly because immigration is one way to get more workers in your society, right? Partly because, like I said, the TFR is that we have look like they mean the population is shrinking, but the population is not in fact shrinking. And partly because there are probably better ways to solve that than panicking about how many kids people are having. Pro-natalist policy is not very effective. And so we probably need to think about other ways to solve that problem of funding pensions and social Security.

Sarah: [00:06:59] One of the places that it feels like there's a big intersection between this demographic shift and policy comes in the conversation around it and then the potential solutions. So one of the things that I feel like I've noticed from reading about this is it feels like part of the like quote unquote panic is specifically that there are fewer white babies being born as opposed to children of color. And I think as we're looking at our country moving towards a majority minority demographic population, that's sort of one piece of it. And another thing, as you mentioned, an easy answer to increasing our population growth is improving our immigration policies. How can we kind of separate the data from the politics and that if we were to change our policies, what might we expect to see?

Leslie: [00:07:45] I think that it's actually impossible to separate the data from the politics. Demography, especially, was born out of sort of bureaucratic techniques for managing population that emerged in the 19th century. So, for example, the concept of a majority minority population that you mentioned, that's basically a political concept, right? It has all of these assumptions behind it. First of all, it has often really narrowed definitions of race. Often, we're counting by single race on the birth certificate. The mother can only specify one race. And for a lot of people, that doesn't reflect their identity, Right? There's no way to separate the data and the politics, which is why I think that we need to be really careful about the way we talk about these things.

Sarah: [00:08:29] And, you know, it's so hard because the U.S. is not a static, singular thing, right? As it's such a big country. There's so much range in terms of race, age, socioeconomic status. What does it look like when you actually zoom in a little bit?

Leslie: [00:08:43] Okay. So the first thing is age. The way that fertility rates have been changing is very different for different age groups. So we've seen this decline in fertility basically since 2007. There was a little bump in 2014, but basically starting with the economic crisis, fertility has dropped. And this is what a lot of people these pop articles are concerned about. Right. That the economy got better, but fertility hasn't bounced back. And part of that is that fertility for younger women, 15 to 24, has really, really dropped. Teen pregnancy rates have fallen a ton. And also for that 20 to 24 age group, which used to be the age group with the highest fertility in the U.S., now both 25 to 29 year olds and 30 to 34 year olds have higher fertility. And part of that is because a larger share of the population is going into higher education. Right. And so people are delaying and working towards a college degree before they have kids. Okay. So age, it's the first part. So by race and ethnic origin, white women have lower fertility and tend to have their children a little bit later. Black and Hispanic and Native American women have slightly higher fertility and have their children earlier. Native born women have lower fertility than foreign born women. Although this idea that foreign born women are coming and like immediately having these so-called anchor babies, that's not really true. Most foreign born women who have babies in the U.S. have already been here for many years. And then by education level and socioeconomic status, the differences are a little bit complicated there. Yes, women with lower levels of education up to a bachelor's degree are more likely to have children and have more children. But the share of women who are childless, who have higher education has fallen a lot in the last 30 years, partly because having a higher education is more normal now, right?

Sarah: [00:10:33] Interesting, because I feel like that's kind of in the like, pop culture conversation around it. It's a little bit like, oh, you know, these women are just like prioritizing their career and their education and like, not having babies, but it sounds like that's not what's happening.

Leslie: [00:10:47] Right. They are more likely to be childless than women with less education again. But it used to be women with a Ph.D. 35% of them didn't have kids, and now it's fallen to 20%. So that's a really big difference.

Sarah: [00:11:03] Okay, So now we kind of understand what the landscape actually looks like when we're thinking about these changes. And when we talk about these numbers as a whole, it can feel really removed from the individual choices that each person having kids or each family having kids might make. So when we come back, Leslie and I will talk about how to better understand this intersection between policy and demography and what role something like MTV might actually be playing in the space.

Sarah: [00:11:42] Students of color in public policy or SCiPP will be holding its 10th Annual Race and Policy Symposium from Monday, April 6th to Friday, April 10th. The theme this year is collective reimagining, telling our own stories, and it promises an incredible week of keynote speakers, panels, workshops and events. Our classmates on the SCiPP leadership team worked tirelessly all semester to put together a radical and thoughtful schedule of events that is sure to inspire. Stay tuned for more information about Speaker's daily schedules and ways to get involved. But for now, save the date.

Sarah: [00:12:26] Welcome back to Talk Policy To Me. Today we're talking about the policies tied to changing fertility rates. Before the break, Berkeley demography PhD student Leslie Root gave us some strong definitions to work with. She debunked the view that a reduction in the fertility rate means doom and gloom for our country. In the second half of the interview, we'll talk more about the policy implications of these changing fertility rates.

Sarah: [00:12:52] A very different piece of this. But that I found fascinating is that decrease in teen birth rates. It seems like, from what I'd read, people don't entirely understand why, you know, there's like increased access to birth control, increased education. There's this crazy article about how MTV's like 16 and Pregnant is why people are not having babies at 16. I'd be curious to hear a little bit about your understanding of it.

Leslie: [00:13:21] Yeah, that 16 and Pregnant article is really popular. There are definitely some statistical criticisms of the approach and the amount of causality that you can actually attribute to it. But I think it's an interesting piece of it. There are certainly a lot of different things going on that have contributed to this. Right. And so culture and watching that TV show and seeing that it really sucks to be 16 and Pregnant might be part of it. Part of it is teens are having less sex now, but I think that really the contraceptive piece is a really big part of it. So there's been a huge change over, I'd say, even maybe the last ten years in the use of what we call LARCs, long acting, reversible contraceptives. So things like IUDs. Another big piece of it is that under Obamacare, they are free for a lot of women. And, you know, it used to be I I'm 35, so I remember this. If you want an IUD, you had to pay $300 upfront. And that's a huge barrier for a lot of people. Right. And now it's super easy and you go and get one. It's fully covered. So the change in use of contraception and the change in the kind of contraception that teens are using is a big part of it.

Sarah: [00:14:36] Definitely, it seems like that that policy aspect is incredibly important, helping people to have the opportunity to choose when they're having their kids and really plan that in a more purposeful way feels really important. And to me, I feel like this leads us to something kind of on the podcast. We're always talking about how policy is personal. I think in this realm it feels even more so, right? Like when you're choosing to have children, if you're choosing to have children, what that looks like for you, that's incredibly personal. But I think in me, like overarching look at what it means to our country. It feels like it can it can get a little bit intrusive. I would be curious to hear your take on what is the role of policy, what is the role of society and kind of what's the role of the individual in this space?

Leslie: [00:15:20] This is something that I'm really interested in because demography has this history of really prioritizing the good of the population over the good or the rights of the individual right. It's really, really hard to separate out the individual and the society and the policy. They're all so deeply intertwined. What we want out of our lives, not just about childbearing, but everything is deeply conditioned by the society we're in, right? All of this stuff is so intertwined. And of course, the policy environment is also a really big part of that. When I said before, demographers don't think that pro-natalist policies help that much. Sort of the reality is that the holistic environment and the the overall level of support does matter. Maybe a lot. Individual policies like one policy that gives you $1,000 for having a kid doesn't really seem to do much. But the overall child friendliness or family friendliness of a society can really change what what people think about what it means to be a parent, and not only how much work it's going to be, but what value it brings to you as a family, but also to the society.

Sarah: [00:16:37] If the population does actually decline, like is that a good thing or is that a bad thing? I feel like it's talked about as like, oh, it's this big problem, but is there actually a silver lining in that?

Leslie: [00:16:47] Yeah, I think that I prefer to think about population growth and population decline, not as good or bad things, but as things that happen and things that we have to learn how to manage. And the reality is that the human population in this century or the next century is going to decline. I don't think that the population size is is something that should really be an object of policy, right. But it's something that we can deal with. And yeah, there are going to be other reasons in this century and actually in this decade to change the way our economic system works. You know, it's pretty clear that we have some deadlines to meet with climate change and slowing population growth and eventually negative population growth are going to be things that help that happen. Yeah. So I think we're going to see this like panicked rhetoric, this right wing rhetoric, this concern about, you know, not enough weight babies. It's. When you get a lot worse because this is where the world is headed. More than half of the world now lives in regions with sub replacement fertility, and the rest of the world is headed there as well.

Sarah: [00:18:08] So it feels like we need to like look at the policies that just need to change for the changing world. Right? We talked about aging and sort of our Social Security tax system. Maybe those are really where we need to be focus our energy rather than like this panic about who's having babies when and why.

Leslie: [00:18:25] Right. Yeah. So, for example, with Social Security. Okay, so there's this idea that you need to have a larger working age population vis a vis the retired population. But you can also think about, you know, the amount of productivity per worker. And if that goes up, then each worker is producing more and there's more to go around. And, you know, that model relies on a straightforward idea of working age. People are working and retired age people are not working. And so these people who are like, Oh, we need more babies to get more working age people. Okay, well, if each woman is having three babies, then a lot of women are no longer going to be working. Right. And that also depresses labor force participation. So, yeah, basically everything is a lot more complex than just like a baby panic.

Sarah: [00:19:09] Definitely one in the series. We're going to be looking a little bit at aging, but I was doing some research into it and it's like, yeah, people are living longer, so their retirement savings needs to cover them for more years. But we could look at like, do we retire a little bit later? Access to health care is better if we're generally healthier at 65 than we were 50 years ago. Should we maybe work five more years? I know that doesn't work for everyone and there's like a lot of assumptions in what type of you're working in a physically demanding job. That doesn't make sense, you know, But I think there's there's a lot of room for policy in that rather than saying how do we get more workers to, like, put more money into Social Security?

Leslie: [00:19:49] Right. And I think there's a little bit of like a sexist assumption in people who are like, oh, we can't raise the retirement age because it's politically unpopular. But like, somehow it doesn't matter whether it's politically popular to get women to have more kids. How we feel about having kids doesn't matter as much as like retirees who are never going to vote for raising the age of retirement. But yeah, you're absolutely right. People who are in not very physical jobs can and often want to work longer. My parents are both officially retired and they're both still working, right?

Sarah: [00:20:21] Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's interesting. We can't and shouldn't like make women have more children. So it really just feels like that conversation is that and just really shame me about, you know, these millennials making their choices. You know, it's it's not a productive policy movement. It's just judgy and shaming. And like, I feel like you had a you had a tweet, but something about like the solution to fertility problems is not to make women feel bad about not having babies.

Leslie: [00:20:50] Yeah, totally. And this comes back to the question you asked about, like the intersection of the personal, the social and the policy aspect and these people who are, like, so concerned about what millennials are doing, they're just imagining that it's all personal. But yeah, that we're not having kids for fun.

Sarah: [00:21:07] Right? It's not because, you know, we're facing larger student data. It's more challenging to buy a home and we're trying to be financially responsible before we have our babies, like.

Leslie: [00:21:15] Yeah, or they're like, you know, oh, the optimal age from a medical perspective is like 23. It's like, Oh, great. Well, I definitely was married and had, you know, a three bedroom apartment, whatever, whatever or whatever when I was 23. The one thing that we haven't really talked about that I think is super important in this conversation is the amount of childbearing that is still unintended in the U.S.. I definitely said some things earlier about like everyone's able to control their fertility, blah, blah, blah. That's not entirely true. And the U.S. has historically had a very high rate of unintended fertility. It's hard to measure because after a kid is born, people, you know, in surveys don't really like to say like, oh, I didn't actually intend to have this kid, but there are some ways to measure it. As of 2010, it was about 38% of births were unintended. And that means both mistimed and like unwanted, right? So not not just like, oh, I don't want to have a kid, but more like, oh, I was intending to have a kid maybe next year. But I got pregnant this year, which are obviously two very different situations. Right? Almost half of pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended. Obviously, some of those are terminated or miscarried, but still, we're at now somewhere around a third of births. Low 30% of births are unintended. So if it was 38% in 2010, obviously that's fallen a lot. That's great. So a lot of this concern about there not being enough kids or people aren't having babies is imagining, you know, women who are in their thirties and haven't gotten around to having kids yet. And this shaming idea. Right. When actually a big part of the story is that fallen teen births and that fall in births at 20 to 24 and those IUDs that people are getting now and people managing their fertility better and being able to plan more. And so I think that's really important to keep in mind that when we look at the good old days when fertility was closer to replacement, well, that was actually bad for a lot of people.

Sarah: [00:23:14] Right, and it seems like the policy changes that we've had to improve access to like those resources for women to be able to control when they're having their children like that has had a huge impact.

Leslie: [00:23:27] People assume that if if people are having more kids unintentionally and, you know, maybe it works out and it's not so bad for them, or maybe they're blaming the people and like, okay, well, you you got pregnant, whatever. Deal with it. This imagined straightforward connection between, you know, preventing abortion, making abortion illegal, for example, and higher fertility is not actually very clear cut, because often what happens is you have an unwanted or a mistimed birth and then you don't have a kid later. Right. It's not straightforward that like, okay, I was going to have a birth at 30 and 35, but I had one at 20, so now I'll have one at 20, 30 and 35. But no, it changes the entire path.

Sarah: [00:24:07] What do you what do you think we would need to be able to like? We've that into the conversation in the way that it seems like it's like largely being forgotten.

Leslie: [00:24:15] It's hard to imagine what that would look like because that particular part of the conversation is so partizan right now. And I don't think that there's a very large share of the population that you can say like, okay, well these are the facts about what access to abortion does for women's life. There aren't very many people who are going to be like, Oh, actually that convinces me it's much more. Yeah, the rhetoric is just so like moralizing right now.

Sarah: [00:24:43] So I feels like there needs to be a way to, like, get over that and then actually have a conversation about like what the policies are and what the data is and like what the results are. But I don't exactly know how we get there.

Sarah: [00:24:55] That's something we absolutely can't leave out when we're thinking about changing fertility rates. The policies that are enabling people to make the decisions that they want to make about when they're having children are incredibly relevant. Access to reproductive health care, including abortion, is a really important part of this picture. And while it can be hard to separate the data from the politics, it's something that's worth revisiting through this different lens. Zooming out to think about the questions that we raised at the beginning of this episode. If these hyped up news articles are really telling the right story. I think the answer is a clear no. Our birth rates and our fertility rates, while based on people's individual choices, do play a really important role when we think about demographic shifts. We're not done talking about the role of demographic shifts in policy. In our next episode, we'll explore another aspect of our changing population and check in on how well policy is keeping up. To learn more about Leslie's work, see her shownotes for a link to her published op-eds.

Sarah: [00:26:10] Talk Policy To Me is a production of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans. Our executive producers are Sarah Swanbeck and Bora Lee Reed. Michael Quiroz is our sound engineer. Music heard on today's episode is by Pat Mesiti-Miller and Blue Dot Sessions. I'm Sarah Edwards. Catch you next time.