In a 2021 interview on the Tucker Carlson show, vice-presidential nominee JD Vance said that “we’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats . . . by a bunch of childless cat ladies miserable at their own lives.” The resulting performative wrath over “childless cat ladies” is obscuring a trio of truths: the flight from marriage and kids is real; it is re-making reality in ways that are ever more visible; and it raises once more the question of whether today’s radical atomization is transforming the world for good, or ill.
From shuttered kindergartens to perennially under-staffed nursing homes, the facts behind the theories of a “graying West” are ever more inescapable. As summer tourists in Europe will know, for example, there’s a new meaning to that phrase “the Old Country.” My family and I happened to visit Spain during the week of Orgullo Madrid, one of the largest annual Pride celebrations in the world. Across the city, men and women—mostly men—filled the streets, celebrating their freedom from social convention. And on those same streets, other people who are traditionally the fruits of social convention were conspicuously absent: babies and children.
The arithmetic of demographic freefall is simple. In Spain, which has the lowest European fertility rate outside Malta, women now bear their first child between the ages of 30 and 39. “We have provinces in Spain where for every baby born, more than two people die. And the ratio is moving closer to one to three,” explains one researcher. By 2050, the country is projected to have the highest percentage of elderly people in the world.
As in some other Western countries, dogs now outnumber children in households; in Madrid, there are more cats and dogs than children under 10. Across the map, materially advanced nations are shunning births at similar rates. In Japan, stuffed dolls substituting for absent humans have helped turn one vanishing village into a tourist attraction.
Once, human beings fled the presence of other, more dangerous species. Now, many are fleeing our own species. Is this a problem?
Though today’s partisan sniping pretends otherwise, political leaders of all stripes increasingly say yes. The shrinking tax base imposes new costs, including cuts in social services and rising ages for retirement. Hence President Macron in France has called for “demographic rearmament.” Other leaders across the spectrum agree. Meanwhile, because geriatric populations depend on younger workers, continuing immigration into the West seems all but inevitable, and with it, chronically inflamed domestic politics.
Many authorities agree that the birth dearth amounts to some kind of social problem. But what if it’s even worse than that? Consider the findings of so-called “happiness studies” across the West.
The “paradox of female unhappiness” has been studied in detail for over fifteen years. Surveys taken in different waves of time suggest that many women across the West are ever less content with their lives, even as what are said to be proxies for female happiness have improved (access to education, health advances, cheap and easy birth control). The latest expert look, published in 2022 by the National Bureau of Economic Research, summarizes:
. . . one part of the female happiness paradox is very robust: when answering questions about negative affect, women are always and everywhere more unhappy than men. This is true across time, country, and across different metrics of negative affect. . . . it is also true with respect to . . . [indicators] such as being depressed, downhearted, tense, lonely, frustrated, stressed, sad, and having restless sleep and other measures.
This misery is indeed a puzzle if happiness consists in material accumulation alone. But what if there’s a non-material explanation for that widespread discontent? What if nurture is like a muscle, whose exercise may be critical to long-term fulfillment—and what if the unbidden need to work that muscle is especially acute for women?
Judging by the incensed reaction to “cat ladies,” the suggestion is scandalous. But it does have explanatory power. After all, no other theory makes sense of the data out there about rising unhappiness amid material plenty.
Or consider other unexplained numbers from the documentation of social isolation across Europe, North America, and East Asia. According to sources from the pope and Taylor Swift to the American Medical Association, an “epidemic” of loneliness has set in, one that is worst for those in old age, and worst of all for women. Once more, today’s laissez-faire attitude toward marriage and children confronts reality. Why are so many older people alone in the first place? Aren’t vanishing progeny and vanishing extended family the most obvious causes?
Yet family creation, many insist, is socially neutral—whereas other forms of investment in the future are deemed mandatory. About health, everyone agrees that society and one’s 80-year-old self will thank one’s 30-year-old self for quitting smoking or eating right. And almost no one applies that logic to other forms of self-sacrifice made for the future well-being of society and self—like marriage and children.
But what is more likely to put a smile on that 80-year-old self: triceps that are the envy of a 60-year-old; or the uncalculated embrace of a grandchild?
In sum, vanishing bassinets matter not only because old societies cost more, but because of a non-economic truth that endures no matter how angrily it’s denied. From the point of view of the end of life, the deferred gratification that leads to more loving faces over time is not only a social plus. For most, it’s the ultimate consolation prize.
As has been pointed out ad infinitum, not everyone can start a family, and not everyone wants to. As has not been pointed out, and needs to be: a world of falling birthrates shrinks the extended family more than ever, rendering everyone, including in those groups, more vulnerable to loneliness than before. Beneath today’s furious insistence that proliferating childlessness is cost-free, reality says otherwise. The long-term consequences of today’s flight from marriage and children will be profound. And the social toll to come might pale before the other ones.
Mary Eberstadt is a senior research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute and author most recently of Adam and Eve after the Pill, Revisited. This essay is adapted from “La opcion de la natalidad,” a piece that first appeared in ABC, Madrid, on July 30, 2024.
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Image by Georgios Jakobides, provided by Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Image cropped.
