In so many ways, the 2024 election is about gender. There’s the obvious – if Kamala Harris is elected, she will be the first woman to be President of the United States. There’s also the fact that our political divide has become gendered. A poll from ABC news/Ipsos published on August 30th found that women support Harris by a 13-point margin and men support Trump by a 6-point margin. However, this election also addresses broader issues and concerns about gender – especially about fertility, childbearing, and of course, abortion.
It’s important to understand a lot of the anxiety about gender within the context of a global decline in fertility rates. A report from the OECD (which includes 38 countries in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific) found that fertility has been consistently declining since the 1960s, and in 2022, there was an average of 1.5 child per woman (below the population replacement number of 2.1 children). In 2023, the birthrate in the U.S. reached a historic low, falling 3% from 2022.
There are many reasons that people are having fewer and fewer children. Having children is expensive, stressful, and can completely change one’s career trajectory. People may also be worried about how having children will impact the environment and what the future may look like for their children, given the potential devastating effects of climate change. While family-friendly leave policies, child tax credits, and the availability of affordable childcare options may help increase rates of having children, people may also be choosing not to have children because they do not see having children as a way to find meaning or purpose in their lives (Emba, 2024).
So what does it mean if birth rates are declining, and how does it affect the election? Declining birth rates are a problem because it means that we won’t have younger workers to support older members of society – which would be a major disruption to labor markets and financial stability. Ironically, one solution to this problem is immigration – another hot-button topic in this election (Peri, 2020).
However, in this election, immigration has been framed as a problem rather than as a solution to fertility declines. Instead, this election has centered issues of fertility and parenting in different ways. When J.D. Vance criticized “childless cat ladies,” he was making a real claim that people who have children should have a greater political voice. The implication here, as discussed in a podcast by New York Times reporter Ezra Klein, is that, as citizens, we should be obligated to have children in order to support society. This is the same impulse that wants to restrict abortion rights. However, it’s problematic to try to solve the fertility crisis by forcing people to have unwanted children. Instead, policies that support families (such as family leave policies, child tax credits) are more in line with a reproductive justice framework and may be more effective. Nevertheless, if people don’t see meaning in having children (as argued by Christine Emba in her Atlantic Monthly article), even these family friendly policies wouldn’t solve the fertility crisis.
Given these election dynamics, I would want to introduce the following discussion questions to students:
- If they are not parents, do they want to have children? What factors influence their thoughts on this? What policies could the government pass that would encourage them to want to have children?
- Do they think declining fertility is a crisis for societies, or are there advantages to declining fertility rates?
- What is their reaction to the discussion around “childless cat ladies”?
- In what other ways have they noticed that anxiety about gender has influenced the election?