Oh, come on, millennial women. Just look at us.
Frantic and apologizing, overwhelmed between staff meetings and gymnastics, shamed for bottle-feeding, booted for breast-feeding, passed over for promotions, denied on the day-care list — isn’t this what you’ve always dreamed of?
No thanks, they’re saying, to today’s lovely vision of motherhood. And in huge numbers.
The American birthrate is sinking: 3.8 million babies were born last year — the lowest number in three decades and down 2 percent from 2016, according to a new report by the National Center for Health Statistics.
It’s a decline that is alarming demographers and social scientists — many of them men who chart womb activity like the consumer price index or manufactured-goods sales.
Babymaking dropped in the 2008 recession and kept sliding. That makes sense to the charts-and-graphs people. But by 2016, the economy was roaring, business was booming and experts kept wondering when, exactly, women were going to crank the baby factories back up.
But it’s not. And there are plenty of reasons. Some have to do with moms like me who work outside the home.
Then there are the personal finance considerations. More than $900 billion of the nation’s $1.4 trillion in student loan debt belongs to women, who make up more of the nation’s university students and are more likely to take out loans, according to a study by the American Association of University Women.
“She left a message saying, ‘When Trump was elected, I didn’t need your class to decide,’ ” said Ann Davidman, whose niche as a “Motherhood Clarity Mentor” puts her in touch with hundreds of women struggling with motherhood.
But none of these factors make sense when you look at a place such as Sweden or Denmark, where women are empowered, they have generous maternity leave and progressive men named Bjorn who wear Baby Bjorns. Their birthrates are declining, too.
It’s not childless. It’s #ChildFree.
“The child-free movement is very much linked to women having more choices,” said Amy Blackstone, a sociology professor at the University of Maine who staged a decidedly nontraditional shower (It’s a . . . Blog!) when she launched her journal of her child-free life with her husband.
Correction: An earlier version of this column misstated the amount of U.S. women’s student loan debt. It is more than $900 billion, according to the AAUW study, not $900 million.