We're worrying about the wrong thing. Low birth rate isn't the crisis: Child care is. | Opinion
Elon Musk says America's declining birth rate is about the disappearance of civilization. I'd say he's already destroying its foundations.
Let’s just get this out of the way: The birth rate is a red herring.
It’s been a common refrain that if the Trump administration and congressional leadership truly wanted to make it easier for families in America to grow and thrive, they would turn to policies like national paid leave, affordable child care, maternal health care and home and community-based services for our aging and disabled loved ones. They would be investing in early education and the caregiving workforce. They would be supporting commonsense accommodations like remote work. They would be growing social safety nets.
But they’ve done none of that. Their response to child care is to send in grandma. They’ve said next to nothing about paid leave.
What they apparently have suggested instead is both hilarious and dystopian. A medal for women with six or more children? Classes on your own menstrual cycle? Coupons for minivans?
And instead of investing and building for the future, they’re slashing and burning. From fertility and maternal health programs, to food and farm assistance, to Medicaid and Social Security, they’re going after all the powerful things our country has built to sustain life.
Musk and Vance are out of step with Americans
Elon Musk says the birth rate crisis is about the disappearance of civilization. I’d say he’s already destroying its foundations.
The real crisis is one of care. As baby boomers age, more and more of us are taking care of our parents and children all at the same time, with little help, and drowning financially and emotionally. No federal paid leave, in many counties without access to child care. The answer to the real crisis is not what we can gut and burn and take away from people, but what we can give them, the world we can create.
My organization, Paid Leave for All, is asking people to envision their lives if they had the guarantee of paid family and medical leave ‒ if they knew no matter where they worked and the joy or loss they faced, they could maintain their life and their livelihood. Imagine the businesses and ventures that might be started, the families that could be sustained, the moments we wouldn’t miss. Imagine the peace of mind, the paychecks kept, the lives saved.
What Musk, President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and beyond are suggesting isn’t about any of that ‒ it’s not about affording working families the security and dignity of being able to take care of themselves and each other. It’s simply code for hatred and bigotry, driven less by concern for families than by a desire to preserve a demographic majority.
But the good news? They’re still at odds with supermajorities of Americans. They’re overplaying their hand, ignoring the desperate real needs of working families and missing a political opportunity.
Americans want paid leave and child care. Will politicians listen?
In April, House Speaker Mike Johnson went to great lengths to try to kill a bipartisan measure to simply allow new parents in Congress to vote by proxy ‒ a pro-family protocol that would cost nothing.
A lot of people had never heard of it, but message testing found that when you told people even a little bit about it and Johnson’s unprecedented moves to kill it, their support for the measure jumped up to 23 points. This was true across every demographic group tested, across gender, race, age and ideology. What’s more, their support for broader federal policies like paid family and medical leave shot up as well.
In polling done in battleground states just before the 2024 election, there was record-high support for paid leave across party lines and walks of life, however you sliced it. That included 90% of independents, 96% of suburban women and 97% of low turnout Democrats.
Commentary and post-election analyses have pointed to the family policies like paid leave and affordable care that would have offered tangible improvements in people’s daily lives and stress, and could have changed the political landscape and outcomes.
“We didn’t deliver what people wanted ‒ help with child care, help with elder care, more security in their lives,” said Ron Klain, a former chief of staff for Joe Biden.
And that’s the task ahead ‒ not just to respond to dangerous and very real threats to our families and communities, but to also counter with a vision of how much better our lives could be, and a plan to achieve it. To outline the damage they're doing to people’s wallets and freedoms, and opportunities, and then to contrast with the policies that enable us to hold onto jobs and care for our own families.
The desire to succeed in life, to be able to afford one, to be able to support your loved ones, is universal. It’s not a liberal fantasy, it’s an idea of strength and dignity.
Making more babies by threat, faux incentives or even force is not a goal or a solution. But the idea of supporting families and allowing all of us to live healthier and richer lives is one we should be restoring front and center, and a conversation we should be having.
This is the project facing all of us who actually care about the survival of civilization.
Dawn Huckelbridge is the founding director of Paid Leave for All.