The 'Maybe' Generation, Examined by Camilla Cavendish: What Really Lies Behind the Fertility Gap?

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as she prepared to inject a hormone-filled needle into her midsection, laughed at the camera and said she knew well that, yes, people were certainly free in Congress. Eggs, and she sought to bring her online audience along with her.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughed on camera as she prepared to stick a hormone-filled needle into her midsection, adding that she was well aware that, yes, people would definitely be weirded out about it. At the age of 36, the congressman started freezing her eggs online. Straight to the vexed question of how an ambitious woman should manage her fertility.

This is a serious concern: around the world, birth rates are falling sharply. "Only the Black Death in the 14th century is comparable to what is happening now," notes Financial Times journalist Camilla Cavendish in a new book exploring why. Setting aside the most toxic narratives of the gender war, "the standard explanation is that when women are educated, they prefer freedom and autonomy to family." As Cavendish explains, however, this is not "the whole story."

His book seeks to present a more nuanced picture, relying on a wealth of reports. Cavendish begins with the "fertility gap"—the formal name for the difference between the number of children people say they want and the number of children they actually have—and moves backwards, focusing on the lived experience of men and women who have fewer children than they expected. What stopped them?

Cavendish's double quotation mark shows the gap between common fertility tips and actual conversations. Potential parents have

For some, the main obstacle is finding the right partner in time. For others, it has to do with the rising costs of raising a family (of which housing can be a factor in particular) and the enormous difficulty of balancing work and caregiving, especially when it takes longer to establish a professional foundation in the first place. There are others: a "rational pessimism about the prospects for the next generation" in an unstable world, the stigma of accepting motherhood, the dearth of stories celebrating fatherhood, the pressure to do "intensive parenting," the lure of well-compensated but pervasive "greedy jobs," and so on. There is also sheer exhaustion in caring for a small child. The headwinds are strong.

All in all, says Cavendish, "the happy, messy, life-giving task of raising a family has turned into something more like a chore, lonely and expensive." We've slowly but surely moved towards treating parenting like an arbitrary lifestyle choice. It's your job to deal with it." These are not abstract observations. Cavendish herself is a working mother of three who knows all too well the difficulties of supporting a family and managing a career. He has no illusions about how difficult it can be, and no interest in pretending otherwise. "I've been amazed at how much has changed in the workplace in the last 20 years, despite the rhetoric about flexibility," she notes. "I think what's changed is how realistic these young players are now about the trade."

"Production is like the whole ball game, and who controls it is the most fundamental question," said leading feminist Gloria Steinem in a 2015 interview with David Remnick. Generation Maybe shows how authoritarian governments in China, Russia, Iran, and elsewhere have responded to declining birth rates with a variety of repressive pronatalist policies—banning child marriage, making divorce more difficult, and denying access to abortion. The Trump administration's attacks on reproductive rights and federal child care funding follow suit, relegating women to domestic roles. A simple solution to the birth shortage problem is to force women to reproduce.

Developing effective pronatalist policy interventions that encourage rather than trap may not be easy—but not impossible. Cavendish looks at what's worked and what hasn't in Singapore, Scandinavia and France, and lays out just a dozen ways to help people choose to have children, from building more housing to providing parental benefits and even giving children themselves the vote: "Almost every policy that might help raise the birth rate can also help human flourishing."

There is no Hector or finger-wagging in this book. What is offered instead is an empathetic and curious approach to a perfectly logical dichotomy. In doing so, Generation Maybe sheds light on the huge gap between popular talking points about fertility and the actual conversations potential parents have. For Cavendish, the real goal isn't to convince someone to have a baby. It's simply "making children a real choice."

The Maybe Generation: Why We're Having Fewer Children and What It Means for Us All by Camilla Cavendish is published by Bodley Head (£25). To support The Guardian, order your copy. Delivery charges may apply.