Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All.

Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All.

Credit...Em Wall for The New York Times

By Anna Louie Sussman

Ms. Sussman, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the forthcoming book “Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty.”

Raleigh Rivera and her husband had spent five years fine-tuning their parenthood plan: In 2025, they would move from Los Angeles, where they have been living since 2023, back to Ms. Rivera’s hometown, Minneapolis, where they could afford to buy a home and start their family. “We both have been baby- and kid-crazy for our entire lives,” she said.

They had planned to start trying when Ms. Rivera turned 30, a birthday she celebrated last summer. But that same year, everything that had felt stable to them started to crumble. It began with the Palisades and Eaton fires decimating parts of the city they called home. The prospect of a first-time home buyer credit, something Kamala Harris had campaigned on, had disappeared. By summer, Ms. Rivera’s parents in Minnesota were choking on smoke drifting over the border from Canadian wildfires. Her husband is a citizen, but since he is Mexican American, she worried that racial profiling policies put a target on his back. Ms. Rivera, who has a master’s degree in public health,........

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