The West’s demographic dearth is capturing the attention of growing numbers of public officials. Speaking on October 14 after a meeting with Italian president Sergio Mattarella, Pope Leo XIV expressed concern about fertility decline, endorsing economic proposals—such as tax breaks for young families—to counter those trends. Separately, at an October 22 Washington meeting marking the fifth anniversary of the Geneva Consensus Declaration (a multilateral statement that there is no international right to abortion), Hungarian foreign minister Peter Szijjártó highlighted what he called his government’s comprehensive pro-natalist tax policies.
The pope is right to call attention to the birth dearth, but he should focus less on urging economic stimuli to promote childbearing and more on reminding people of the cultural and theological goodness of getting married and having children. This aspect has been lost even among Catholics.
People marry in the West later than ever before. All sorts of informal “arrangements” and “partnerships” compete with marriage. Even when people finally do tie the knot, there still seems to be a cultural detachment between marriage and parenthood. It’s as if the latter requires a separate decision.
Yes, parenthood is distinguishable from marriage but, in the ordinary run of things, marriage leads to parenthood. The fact that these only theoretically distinct institutions have now in practice become separate, and that parenthood somehow seems to require justification even after marriage, is not Catholic thought. That this statement may shock some people suggests how far even Catholics have drifted from thinking like Catholics.
Economic factors do have major impact on young people’s decisions to become husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. I do not deny the need for socio-economic reforms to counteract those negative influences. Somebody with post-college debt who can’t get a solid starter job or needs to “prove” himself in that job is deterred from marriage and family. That should not be the case. As Szijjártó stated, “children are a blessing,” a blessing that should not be contingent on money nor make a young family socio-economically worse off if they receive that blessing. I’d like to hear that more from popes and bishops than foreign ministers.
But while economic factors affect decisions about marriage and parenthood, they should not fully define them. Most people don’t say, “Hey, the standard deduction for dependents went up, let’s have a baby!” The fertility uptick in countries that have enacted aggressive economic support for family life is nothing to write home about: Hungary’s fertility rate in 2023 was 1.51, far below the minimum 2.1 level necessary for population stability. The limited impact of economic incentives tells us that the roots of this problem are cultural.
We often prioritize the economic over other aspects of life. When parents talk about grooming their child for “success,” that usually means the “right” schools for a “good” job. Rarely does it mean finding a good spouse and being prepared for marriage. Which is why perhaps the pope repeatedly has talked about loneliness: If we overvalue career and undervalue family, why are we surprised people live and die alone?
That’s why I caution against separating the economic from the cultural aspects of the parenthood crisis while also insisting that the latter takes priority over the former. In American experience, the uneasy political bed shared by economic and social conservatives almost always led to the priorities of the former being top of the list while the “social agenda” was pushed to the bottom.
If we think the fertility crisis can be solved by tax exemptions, expanded childcare, and loan forgiveness, we are in for a rude awakening. Those things can help, but not unless parenthood is once again valued in and of itself. Until it is, the buffering effect of those social and financial benefits may simply reinforce a self-centered lifestyle focused on one’s own wants and pleasures. Consider housing: Zillow has been called the “new porn” of thirty- and forty-somethings who are fixated on looking at house profiles. Declining libidos now seem to get their rise from imagining buying expensive McMansions with nobody in them. Why? What’s a house for?
Once we recover the value of parenthood, then the “boost” those socio-economic policies might afford can redirect energies in the right direction. But the cultural baggage that has devalued parenthood is formidable; its votaries still loathe to leave the stage. When elites still talk about the “wanted” child as the North Star, inbuilt is the assumption that children can and sometimes should be “unwanted.” When “planning” for parenthood takes center stage, unplanned parenthood is inevitably seen as anything from an “accident” to a curse. When economics trump family, children (to borrow Brad Wilcox’s terms) cease being a “cornerstone” of marriage and become “capstones,” the crowning achievement in the résumé of life. It’s why people defer parenthood until late in their childbearing years. They then demand a technological fix for their disappearing fertility, manufacturing their babies in test tubes to carry out their late-blooming “parental project” (as former Paris archbishop Michel Aupetit called this process). It’s a process shaped by parents in their interests and specifications, not the child’s good and his unique characteristics.
Fixing the fertility problem first requires fixing the culture. In that respect, while his lobbying is appreciated, Pope Leo XIV might best begin by talking about the ongoing truth and relevance of Humanae Vitae.
