The ‘Make Birth Free’ movement falls for the progressive fantasy that any problem can be solved if the government throws enough money at it.

O ver the past two decades, I have paid for the births of seven children, all of whom were born at the same hospital and delivered by the same doctor. My first child, born in 2005, cost me $1,000 out of pocket with insurance covering the other 80 percent. Two years later, I was on the hook for $1,500. Three years later, I paid $2,100. The birth of my seventh child, born in 2023, cost me $3,300 — and that was the discounted rate after I had already spent my $5,000 deductible, a chunk of which went to useless weekly sonograms before birth because my wife’s pregnancy was labeled “geriatric.”

Even after spending this glob of my single-income teacher’s salary, I oppose the proposal of some pro-life advocates to make birth cost-free. Birth costs more in time, talent, and treasure than we can quantify — and these costs cannot be mitigated or redistributed through communities or nations. To attempt to make birth free is to disguise what it is: a life-changing event that requires parents to pay with permanent sacrifices, from how they spend their time to how they spend their money.

Advocates of “Make Birth Free” have presented a white paper that argues entirely in economic terms. The astronomical costs of giving birth dissuade some couples from having children and coerce others to have abortions. Fertility rates in America have plummeted as the costs have risen; abortions remain stubbornly steady at 1 million per year.

To reverse these dangerous trends, proposed policy solutions include adopting Medicare/Medicaid models and a monthly maternal stipend for the first year of a child’s life. Not surprisingly, given that the target audience is conservative pro-lifers, words such as “government,” “program,” and “tax” — as in, who will administer this plan and how exactly will citizens foot its bills — are absent. Considering how delighted conservatives are currently at the ways the government runs health care and education, it is not an accident that such key details did not make the final edition.

Opposition to free birth is not merely the knee-jerk reaction of an unrepentant supply-sider who has yet to learn the lessons of Trumpian populism. The fact is that making birth free, or paying parents to have more children, has a negligible impact on fertility rates. Catherine Pakaluk’s Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth makes this clear. Yet in the white paper, the authors’ own models are self-defeating. They laud Finland for offering “almost free” births in an especially safe and family-friendly environment. They omit that in 2022, Finland had the lowest fertility rate of all the Nordic countries at a jaw-dropping 1.32 children per woman. Money can’t buy happiness. It can’t seem to buy children, either.

Given the economic argument’s inability to persuade, free-birth advocates can rightly fall back to the heart of their position, which is cultural. These well-intentioned pro-lifers want women to choose life, and they believe that making birth free will help them do so.

But is birth really free, even if it doesn’t cost the parents a dime? Free things can be treated shabbily or received ungratefully because the recipient does not see their value. In trying to make birth free, are advocates inadvertently commodifying the gift of life? More poignantly, are they unwittingly sending the message that birth is “free,” meaning “easy” or “without work”?

Giving birth and then raising a child for over two decades carry infinite costs. The monetary ones begin with prenatal visits and continue through expensive sports and activities, the latest fashions, schooling, braces, university education, and even a wedding.

But it is really the opportunity costs, the nonmonetary goods eschewed when parents choose to have children, that dissuade 21st-century adults from having children.

For the married, family life differs in kind from the “dual income no kids” lifestyle. With birth come the sleepless nights and then the exhausting juggle of child-rearing for years on end. Mom and Dad may want to relax and go out alone, but their children’s activities impinge on their time. Parents’ former identities as individuals become subsumed by their new roles, as seen in epithets such as “soccer mom” and “girl dad.”

For the unmarried, aborting a pregnancy is ten times more likely than for married couples. But the opportunity costs weigh as heavily as the monetary in wrestling with abortion. For the New York Times’ latest representative seeking societal approbation for all abortions, opportunity costs — being a single mother, and not wanting a child diagnosed with a fatal abnormality — tilted the scales for the two she had. A governmental financial assist would not have changed her mind.

Preserving personal autonomy is the real reason citizens in developed nations are forgoing children, and government-sponsored economic incentives will not change their minds. Having absorbed the self-centered ethos of modern secular culture, Westerners know that children impede their personal self-fulfillment. Better to be childless with a cat than to have children who prevent women from climbing the corporate ladder. Better to have one or two children quickly and then elect sterilization than to have men endlessly beholden to childhood sports and activities.

The Make Birth Free movement falls for the progressive fantasy that any problem can be solved if the government throws enough money at it. But money cannot solve spiritual problems, which are at the root of the birth dearth and of abortion. Self-centeredness can be counteracted only through strong doses of religion and virtue that teach that personal fulfillment comes, paradoxically, in giving oneself away to others.

Giving birth is the antithesis of being “cost free.” It inaugurates lifelong costs of self-sacrifice as parents willingly place their children’s well-being before their own. To pretend that birth can be free distorts the reality of the costliest decisions adults ever make.

And we get what we pay for. Child-rearing returns joys and satisfactions that are qualitatively different from those received in our professional or personal lives. Receiving infant smiles, laughing at toddler remarks, teaching children to draw or throw or ride bikes, and watching adolescents graduate from schools generate love and exuberance that cannot be replicated by quotidian adults-only experiences.

Money can’t buy children. It also can’t buy love, which is the only power that makes birth affordable.