(New York Times, June 2025)

Byline: Based on research and framing by feminist economist Nancy Folbre, a founding member of IAFFE (International Association for Feminist Economics).

Link: Read the article

🔍 What It’s About.

The article explores the global decline in fertility rates through the lens of economic and cultural conditions, rather than personal or biological causes. It draws on the work of economist Nancy Folbre to argue that modern societies have created conditions that actively disincentivize reproduction—not because people no longer want children, but because the social contract around raising them has broken down.

Across countries—from Japan and South Korea to the United States and much of Latin America—women cite high costs, lack of childcare, poor work-life balance, and unequal domestic labor as core reasons for opting out of motherhood. The piece suggests that what’s often called a “fertility crisis” is actually a policy and infrastructure crisis: people are responding rationally to systems that make parenting unsustainable.

Rather than framing childlessness as a social problem, the article leans into Folbre’s long-standing argument that child-rearing is a form of social reproduction—a labor-intensive public good that modern capitalist economies have outsourced to unpaid women. Until states build the cultural, economic, and physical infrastructure to support families, birthrates will continue to fall.

✨ Why It Matters to My Work

This piece perfectly crystallizes the core thesis of my domestic labor curriculum and the chapters in both Nobody’s Job and No One Told Me This Was Work. It articulates, at a systemic level, the truth that:

“Children are not just a private joy or burden; they’re a public good—and parenting them is an act of civic labor that has been structurally abandoned by our institutions.”

This framing echoes the same intuition I’ve had across caregiving, creative work, and journalism: we are running on invisible infrastructure that’s being hollowed out by policy neglect and cultural individualism.

🧩 Parts That Resonated Deeply

1.

The Infrastructure Argument

“If countries want more babies, they must build the infrastructure that makes having them possible.”

This is the line I keep circling back to. It’s not about convincing people to reproduce—it’s about designing systems that make reproduction livable. That means child care, time, cultural dignity, shared responsibility—not just tax credits.

2.

Culture vs. Biology

“The fertility drop is less about biology than culture.”

This short line captures the invisible labor angle with precision. We’ve pathologized the choice not to have kids, without addressing how modern culture makes it nearly impossible to do so joyfully and equitably.

3.

Refusal as Resistance

Folbre positions non-reproduction as a rational act of refusal, not a problem to be solved. This maps beautifully onto my larger framework of “waiting as work”—that choosing not to act (yet) is still a form of labor, a negotiation with conditions.

💡 Questions This Raises for Me

• What does it mean to frame parenting as infrastructure maintenance in a failing system?
• Can this be a model for how we write about other forms of invisible work—like journalism, chronic illness, or emotional labor?
• What does it look like to refuse a role, not out of rebellion, but because no one has built a just and livable version of it?