Margaret Talbot reviews Anna Louie Sussman’s Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty — a reported social critique, not a policy book — and frames the fertility debate as two competing stories about what people actually want.

The first story belongs to the right: J. D. Vance deriding “childless cat ladies,” the Heritage Foundation blaming second-wave feminism, Elon Musk calling population collapse a bigger risk than global warming. In that telling, falling birth rates are a cultural failure — people no longer want children enough. The second story starts from the opposite premise: people still want children, often more than they end up having. What changed are the conditions for building a family.

  • A 2025 UN study of 14,000 people across 14 countries found most wanted two children; fewer than four in ten expected to reach that number.
  • Global fertility fell from about five births per woman in the 1960s to 2.2 in 2024. Roughly 70% of the world’s population lives in countries below replacement level.
  • The US rate is now 1.6; South Korea’s is below 1, where dog strollers outsell baby strollers.
  • Almost half of American women aged thirty are childless, against 18% in 1976.

Sussman’s catalogue of impediments is concrete: ruinous housing costs, expensive childcare, demanding and insecure jobs, student debt (one study found women with substantial debt were around 40% less likely to have children), dating apps shaped like online shopping, beauty standards requiring upkeep, a climate-changed future. Her subjects are specific too — Michaela, two hundred dates and no luck, who finally finds a partner in real life off a train conversation; Marwan, whose matches drop off when he leaves McKinsey for self-employment.

Talbot is most interesting where she pushes back on the framing. The desired-versus-actual gap is a murky measure:

  • Parenthood has become “much more resource and time-intensive,” and the hagwon cram-school culture of South Korea shows what hyper-competitive child-rearing does to the desire to parent at all.
  • In countries with the highest male involvement in childcare and housework — Norway, for instance — fathers tend to oppose having more children.
  • The policy record is thin. Birth allowances in eleven Swiss cantons raised fertility mainly among lower-income immigrants, then faded. Hungary’s Orbán-era family subsidies, about 5% of GDP, mostly nudged people to have the same children earlier. Sweden’s 1980s “speed premium” produced “a temporary baby boom, that was subsequently offset by a baby bust.”
  • Of family-friendly spending, early-childhood education and childcare does most — and even then, one study found each extra percentage point of GDP spent was associated with 0.2 extra children per woman.
  • Birth rates have plunged in social democracies and capitalist autocracies alike. Norway and the US are about equally fecund.

Talbot’s conclusion: because fertility falls everywhere regardless of social provision, and because a 2023 Pew poll found 71% of Americans call an enjoyable career very important to a fulfilling life against 26% for children, some of the decline reflects genuinely changed ideas about a good life — including real gains, like falling teen pregnancy and women’s expanded opportunities.

Her judgement on what to do with that follows: stop treating family policy as a lever for pushing out babies. The reason to fund paid leave and childcare — the US being the one wealthy country without national paid leave — is that they make people’s lives better and societies kinder, not that they move the birth rate.

“A record of frustrated longing” is Sussman’s phrase for the fertility slump, and it is the most useful thing in the book. The disagreement is about who is doing the frustrating.