What We Got Wrong
About Babies, Safety Nets, & Who Deserves to Grow Up
It started with a baby boom & a white picket fence.
Post-WWII America, flush with victory & GI Bills, sold a vision: two kids, one car, & a husband in a fedora kissing his wife goodbye while she waved from the porch. This 1950s mythology of prosperity was marketed as universal, but it was never accessible to everyone. It depended on mass exclusion—of Black families redlined out of homeownership, of Indigenous families whose kids were still being stolen into boarding schools, of immigrants, of queer folks, & of anyone who couldn’t pass for "model citizen."
But behind that image, something big was happening. The federal government, burned by the misery of the Great Depression & fearful of postwar instability, invested in people. Social Security expanded. Public education surged. Veterans got subsidized college, job training, & mortgages. New Deal safety nets, imperfect but real, gave just enough security for families to plan for the future.
And they did. From 1946 to 1964, US birthrates soared. This was the era that birthed the Baby Boomers—& the beginning of a story we still don’t tell straight.
The Rise (& Fall) of Support Systems
In the 1960s & 70s, civil rights movements forced the country to expand that dream. Head Start. Medicaid. Medicare. Title IX. School lunch programs. Affirmative action. Roe v Wade. Protections for kids with disabilities in public schools. There was a real shift—not perfect, not complete, but real.
But then came the backlash.
By the 1980s, with Reagan in office & the Moral Majority howling on the airwaves, a new narrative took hold: the problem wasn’t inequality, it was people "gaming the system."
Enter: welfare reform. School privatization. The war on drugs. Mass incarceration. The rollback of reproductive rights. The shredding of disability services. By the 1990s, Clinton-era Democrats were bragging that they'd ended "welfare as we know it."
What had been built as a support beam became a target.
A Manufactured Crisis: "Nobody Wants Kids Anymore"
Fast-forward to today. We keep hearing about the “fertility crisis” in the US. Birthrates are down. The population is aging. Economic growth is slowing. Fox News blames it on feminism & avocado toast. The Right is banning abortion & forcing people to have kids they can’t afford to raise.
But here's the real headline: We built a society that punishes people for having kids.
Paid family leave? Not federally guaranteed
Childcare? Often costs more than rent
Healthcare? A minefield
Housing? Out of reach
Disability supports? Waitlisted
College? Drowning in debt
Jobs? Fewer benefits, lower wages, more instability
And then we wonder why people don’t want to bring a child into this mess?
If You’re Going To Force Birth, You Better Fund Life
Let’s say the quiet part out loud: If the US is going to ban abortion, it damn well better be ready to raise the children it mandates into existence.
That means:
Universal childcare
Free school meals
Fully funded special ed
Mental health care
Paid leave for all parents
Housing security
Debt-free higher education
And if you’re not willing to fund that? You’re not pro-life. You’re pro-control.
Because here’s what’s actually happening:
We’re telling people: “Have kids. But only if they’re healthy. Only if they can become profitable. Only if they don’t need too much.”
We’re stripping away the very safety nets that made the Baby Boom possible, while scolding Millennials & Gen Z for not procreating in an economy that actively punishes them for existing.
What If We Flipped the Script?
Imagine a country that made raising kids a public good.
Like Finland, with universal baby boxes & family stipends. Or France, where childcare is affordable & abundant. Or Japan, currently paying families monthly to have children.
It wouldn’t be impossible. We had pieces of it before. And we could have it again.
But first, we’d have to stop lying to ourselves about what really ended the Baby Boom: we took away the support, & we kept the shame.
TL;DR
If you want people to have babies, you have to make it possible to raise them.
That means funding the future. Not criminalizing it.
Until then, it’s not that people don’t want to start families. It’s that the country we live in doesn’t seem interested in helping them survive.
And that’s not a fertility crisis. That’s a policy failure.
I'm so happy to call the policies of the conservative movement anti life. I've always said that liberals are the pro life people. I know. I was a midwife. But one large piece here and also related to pro life is the environmental degradation of the planet. Even people who can easily afford to have children are deciding it's too risky with the massive fires, droughts, hurricanes, heatwaves, etc. Thoughtful people realize that humanity isn't smart and loving enough to support the massive growth in population we've had in the last 250 years. Maybe it's good we are slowing down. It will hurt those on the frontlines financially but maybe it can save life on earth. Just maybe.