Pew Research Center released a report titled Cultural Issues and the 2024 Election last week, and one question in particular seemed to capture the essential difference between the Republican and Democratic parties.
Asked if society is better off when people make marriage and having children a priority, 59% of those who voted for former President Donald Trump said yes, compared to just 19% of those who voted for President Joe Biden.
These results are in line with previous studies showing that Republicans do, in fact, have more children than Democrats and that childless adults are more likely to be Democrats.
But why exactly don’t Democrats want children?
According to a new book by two Democratic women, one a mother and one not, the answer appears to be politics.
“For progressives, waiting to have children has also become a kind of ethical imperative,” Dr. Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, the authors of What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice, wrote this week in the New York Times. “Gender equality and female empowerment demand that women’s self-advancement not be sacrificed on the altar of motherhood.”
The belief that gender equality is more important than family is not confined to the dozens of Democratic women with college and advanced degrees that Berg and Wiseman interviewed for their book. It reaches to the highest echelons of Democratic power.
Witness Biden’s recent issue brief on the nation’s record-low fertility rates. To Biden’s credit, the paper acknowledges that the decline in births presents economic problems for the country, specifically in the form of slower economic growth, unsustainable benefit programs, and lower standards of living.
But instead of attacking the problem at its root, which is the decline of marriage, Biden instead called for policies that force mothers out of the home and back into the workforce as quickly as possible. Subsidizing mothers to work outside the home so they can then pay other people to care for their family is how Biden wants to address the fertility crisis. Never mind the fact that most women would rather work either part time, or not at all, and care for their family themselves, then work full time and pay someone else to raise their children.
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The economy, the country, and the world are better off because women are now accepted and protected in the workplace. It would be a huge loss to go back to an economy and a society where women could not pursue professional fulfillment. President Theodore Roosevelt recognized this fact over 100 years ago when he wrote, “There is a real need for a certain number of women doctors and lawyers.”
But female professional success does not appear to be as fulfilling as Democrats think it is. Few demographics are as unhappy as young liberal women. Maybe they would be happier if they prioritized marriage and family over maximum professional success.