Reminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read.
In most places around the world, birth rates have marched steadily downward for the past two decades, even where economies have grown and working women’s male partners handled more household tasks. What unites these disparate cultures is young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for
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 Rivera’s hometown, Minneapolis, where they could afford to buy a home and start a family. “We both have been baby- and kid-crazy for our entire lives,” she said.
They had planned to start trying when 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 US presidential candidate Kamala Harris had campaigned on, had disappeared. By summer, 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. Rivera, who has a master’s degree in public health, worried about sending a future child to school with unvaccinated classmates.
