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THE COST OF CHILDREN IS TOO DAMN HIGH  
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Nancy Folbre
September 2, 2025
Dollars & Sense
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_ Most so-called pronatalist policies seriously underestimate the
costs and risks of raising children in today’s economic environment.
_

Sketch by Nancy Folbre based on a photo by Stephen Shames in Outside
the Dream: Child Poverty in America, Aperture, 1991

 

Pronatalists show remarkably little concern for the well-being of
children already born—or their parents. 

As an advocate for profamily policies that support commitments to the
care of dependents, I am sometimes grouped with pronatalists who, like
Elon Musk, believe that below-replacement fertility is an immediate
threat
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the future of civilization. 

Those who believe they can overcome this immediate threat include the
vocal and media-savvy Simone and Malcolm Collins, who have
proudly announced
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they have frozen 32 embryos as part of their effort to advance the
movement to Make America Procreate Again. 

No, I am not a part of this movement. 

Panic about underpopulation is now reaching levels similar to earlier
panic about over-population, and it can serve as clickbait. A
recent _New York Times_ article describing my research on the
remarkably high cost of childrearing in the United States was
headlined “The Feminist Case for Spending Billions to Boost the
Birthrate
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My main point was quite different—that most so-called pronatalist
policies seriously underestimate the costs and risks of raising
children in today’s economic environment.  

The tension between pronatal and pro-family policies arises from what
many economists coldly refer to as a quantity/quality tradeoff. In
this context, “child quality” is typically defined as time and
money spent per child—implying that richer families have
“higher quality” children. 

This definition is inaccurate and off-putting. The real trade-off lies
between the number of children and their well-being. Many parents
limit their family size in order to provide better care for the
children they have. The most common reason
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people give for seeking an abortion is that they are not financially
prepared to become parents. Child poverty
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opportunities, wastes human resources, and often imposes social costs
on the rest of us. 

The gradual fertility decline that has taken place in most areas of
the world over the last two centuries has contributed to a significant
improvement in living standards, including dramatic reductions in
infant mortality. Indeed, for much of the 20th century, explicit
efforts were made to introduce family planning and lower fertility
precisely because of their positive economic impact
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Yet the so-called pro-life movement (which, by the way, does not
approve of freezing embryos) implicitly endorses pronatalism, with
little regard for the consequences. The oft-repeated promise that
states would respond to restrictions on abortion access by providing
more support for mothers has proved completely empty, apart from the
occasional donation to a baby shower. 

State policy patterns exemplify
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contrast between pronatal and pro-family policies. Of the eight states
with child poverty rates
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20% in 2025, seven have greatly restricted
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rights. No state that has banned abortion offers  paid family and
medical leave from employment, and none of the 9 states that offer
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family and medical leave   has banned abortion. 

The coercive pronatalism driving efforts to restrict reproductive
rights is by no means limited to the legal arena. Economic
strangulation also comes into play. The Hyde Amendment, passed in
1976, prevented the use of federal Medicaid funds for abortions,
leaving many low-income mothers without recourse. The recently
approved Big Beautiful Bill contains little-publicized provisions that
are designed to drive Planned Parenthood—a major source of
contraceptive and gynecological care for low-income women—out of
business
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in states that protect reproductive rights. A recent opinion piece
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Wall Street Journal_ described the bill as “the most significant
pro-life law ever.”

Some on the left argue
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coercive pronatalism reflects the interests of employers hoping to
increase the size of the reserve army of labor. These interests may
well come into play, but don’t seem salient in a world with a large
global supply of workers and growing capabilities for lowering labor
costs. 

Perceptions of collective interests based on gender and race are
probably more consequential. Reproductive rights have contributed
enormously to the economic empowerment of women, enhancing their
ability to compete with men in the labor market, and the pronatalist
movement has some obvious eugenic undertones
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Women currently bear a very large share of the costs of care
provision—the production, development, and maintenance of human
capabilities, sometimes referred to as “social reproduction.
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While these activities clearly offer intrinsic rewards, they don’t
help pay the bills. As I’ve been explaining
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many years, both unpaid and paid care work are penalized in the labor
market and a large percentage of mothers in the United States are
raising children on their own, without much financial or other
assistance from fathers. 

The voices of U.S. mothers in a recent set of video interviews
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even more loudly than the numbers. Many spoke about the “motherhood
penalty
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and the financial burdens of having children: “Motherhood should
come with a warning label,” and “I’m being penalized for giving
birth.” The more than 50-year transition to birth rates that are too
low to replace the existing population can’t be construed as a
simple “birth strike,” because it represents the outcome of many
individual decisions rather than a collective bargaining strategy.
However, both women and men are responding to an economic environment
that can only be described as hostile to parents, especially those
already struggling to find decent jobs and affordable housing. 

Many pro-family policies “socialize” some of the costs of raising
the next generation by providing more public support. Such support may
well have some pronatalist effects, but comparative international
research shows that such effects are small. They have a greater
positive impact on the well-being of both parents and their
children—what we might call the quality, rather than the quantity of
human life.  

As Dean Spears and Michael Geruso put it on page eight of  their new
book, _After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for
People_
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“If we want there to be a thriving future, then it’s time to start
taking better care of one another and our caretakers.” 

In the meantime, we should pay attention to just how costly children
have become in the United States—the topic of my next post.   

Published in: Left Hook Economics
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_Nancy Folbre [[link removed]] is
Professor Emerita of Economics at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst. Her research explores the interface between political economy
and feminist theory._

_Dollars & Sense is a non-profit, non-hierarchical, collectively-run
organization that publishes economic news and analysis, with the
mission of explaining essential economic concepts by placing them in
their real-world context. We publish a bi-monthly magazine, as well as
economics books that are used in college social science courses, study
groups and other educational settings._

_D&S publications question the assumptions of traditional academic
theories and empower people to think about alternatives to the
prevailing system. We cover issues that are ignored by mainstream
media and misunderstood by orthodox economic analysts. The magazine
includes regular reports on economic justice activism, primers on
economic topics, and critiques of the corporate media's coverage of
the economy. Our readers include professors, students, journalists,
activists, and anyone who values well researched, clearly written,
relevant news and analysis._

* children
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* economics
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* birth rate
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