What If Both Sides in the Birth Rate Debate Are Wrong?

One hundred years ago, European fascists responded to population panic by constraining choices for women—in Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and Franco’s Spain. Mussolini imposed a tax on bachelors and gave preferential treatment to fruitful civil servants. Hitler’s marriage loan program required the wife to leave the labor force, then forgave a fraction of the loan for each child the woman bore. Franco offered family allowances, but they were paid as a supplement to the husband’s wages—not available to single mothers or families with unemployed men. And of course all these governments criminalized abortion and contraception. They would solve the birth rate problem by returning women to the realm of “strong, traditional families.”

On the other hand, there is the easy way to promote births, favored by liberals, which is about smoothing the path to successful parenthood. This includes work-family integration policies such as subsidized parental leave from work, preschool care, housing support, and progressive child allowances. Such policies have most thoroughly been implemented in the Nordic countries, and historically Sweden led the way, as has France.

One thing the hard way and the easy way have in common is that neither has shown stark success at raising birth rates. Hitler got a birth rate bounce in the 1930s (as did Hungary and Russia under recent authoritarian rulers). But they were fleeting at best, tending to affect birth timing but not increasing population growth in the long run. Liberal policies, too, especially childcare, increased birth rates by a little. But all the countries mentioned here have birth rates solidly below the so-called replacement levels of about two births per family—similar to the United States or lower—and still falling.