Why aren't people having kids anymore???
You are a 36-year-old woman with a working uterus.
You are trying to have kids.
You have always wanted kids. Your husband has always wanted kids. You've been talking about having kids together since you first started dating.
You have been lawfully wed since 2017, when you were 27. You've been together much longer -- since you were just 21, engaged since 22 -- but you couldn't afford anything resembling a wedding for all those years.
You couldn't at 27, either -- in fact, you took your little bit of fun money and went on a vacation to Disney World, where you eloped. Even though you splurged a bit, you were Florida residents and budgeted well, so it cost tens of thousands of dollars less to do it this way than a wedding meeting everyone's expectations would have. Even so, you caught hell from your both of your families for not having a "real wedding" and still do from time to time.
You spent your entire 20s broke as a joke. Not from lack of trying to make your fortunes, of course. You have two degrees, a Bachelor's and an Associate of Science. Your husband has a PhD in engineering. You're both millennials, after all, members of the most educated generation.
Even so, you have both had a long list of silly little jobs that paid just enough to keep the rent paid and the two of you fed. Every now and again, you could afford a video game you had your eye on or to go see a movie. Life wasn't bad at all then, but it definitely would have become very difficult if you'd thrown a kid into the mix. So, being responsible and practical, you and your husband decided to put it off for later.
"When we get our shit together, we'll try."
Anyway, you both grew up knowing that you shouldn't have kids before you're ready.
Your husband's mother is a single mom and she struggled, not only with the logistics and financial burden of raising two boys on her own, but with harsh judgement from her own family regarding her "bad decisions".
And, you! Your entire adolescence was a long panic attack caused by the looming threat of pregnancy! Every snide remark at dinner from your parents about those Welfare Queens having kids they couldn't afford, every aunt who gossiped about your cousin's kid born out of wedlock, every look of pity for that one pregnant girl as she waddled down the aisle during high school graduation, every lecture from your health teacher, every TV comedian slamming Britney Spears for being a young mother, every pamphlet in the nurse's office, every heart-to-heart with your boyfriend's mom -- as far as you were concerned, it all had one point: If you have kids too early, your life and, by extension, your kid's life, will be completely ruined.
So, you did everything you were supposed to. You lived well within your means. When an opportunity arose, you moved where the opportunity was, whether you knew anyone in the new city or not. You were adaptable. When your first degree didn't open doors for you, you went back to school at a cheap, local community college and got a second, with honors this time. When your husband found that his true love and passion, teaching, just wasn't going to pay the bills, he started studying machine learning and accounting online in his free time.
Years passed. Finally, you two got lucky. After another big career pivot, your husband landed a good job and your art got some modest attention. And after some thought, it felt like you were stable enough to have children.
You were about 34.
Your parents, on the other hand, who always considered themselves solidly lower-middle-class, married in a church at 20. It was a cheap wedding, they said, but Mom had the most beautiful dress and Dad looked sharp and your whole family was there, smiling and throwing rice. They moved into a little house they bought in their city, and started their family a year later.
Your parents, lifelong conservatives with a major chip on their shoulder when it comes to people they consider "well-off", were able to raise three kids in a series of houses that they owned with money your dad made by himself. Your mom worked part-time for fun money, but during hard times, and there were a couple, she worked full-time. Thanks to that, and programs like SNAP, you never went hungry. You moved a lot, but you were always comfortable and never wanted for anything in a major way. Eventually, your family was doing so well, you ended up in a nice house with your own bedroom.
Your parents, who didn't pursue an education outside of their high school diplomas, made it work.
You were a lucky kid. A very lucky kid, compared to a lot of your friends. And your parents pushed you to get into college, so maybe one day you'd be even luckier.
College, of course, gave you an albatross of debt. Everyone in your life told you that it was a great investment in your future, and you listened to everyone because you were 18. It's debt you still carry with you, even though you're literally growing gray at this point.
Your debt is constantly changing hands and the laws around it are always shifting. On top of the stomach-churning anxiety of the debt itself, you are constantly tasked with recalculating how much you owe and for how long you'll be paying.
And, even if you were debt-free, there's no way you'll be able to afford purchasing a house or a condo in the city of your choice. You may very well be a renter for the rest of your life.
In fact, now that you think of it, a lot of your friends from similar backgrounds are only now accruing any type of wealth or financial stability, in their thirties. They are also staring down the choice of "live somewhere you don't like with fewer opportunities and own a house" or "just rent forever in a city you love". And those are the lucky friends.
Of course, it's such a common struggle that every election a lot of lip service is paid toward affordability. But, nothing seems to come of it. And our parents' generation is pretty content to blame millennials and Gen-Z for "not wanting to work" instead of looking at the reality of the housing economy and voting to change it.
In fact, it seems like our parents' generation is completely baffled by the financial reality of growing up and having children these days, no matter how much explaining you do. They seem incapable of internalizing how different times are.
As a society we are more productive than ever, but wages have stagnated for decades and those who've entered the job market in the last 20 years have faced difficulties their parents just never had to.
All the same, millennials are blamed for killing chain restaurant business and Gen Z are chided for spending less money on booze and dating.
But, it doesn't matter. You can easily raise a kid in a rented apartment, now. Your husband had a great job and having a baby finally felt manageable. True to form, you decided to jump into this baby-making business the right way.
You went to a gynecologist to make sure everything was in working order as soon as you stopped your birth control regimen. And your gynecologist was wonderful! She was warm and empathetic while refusing to bullshit you. She conceded that it might be harder to have kids past the 34-year mark, but there are so many options for women like you and you're far from too old.
You try, for a while. Nothing comes of it, so you do what any modern woman is supposed to do: You go to a fertility clinic you find on ZocDoc.
The fertility clinic is big and fancy and has a baby grand piano in the lobby for some reason. You and your husband take a bunch of awkward medical tests and, even though nothing is strictly wrong with your results, on your second visit to the clinic, they encourage you to get an IUI (think: turkey baster) and say you need to begin preparing yourself for IVF, in case that fails.
Both are expensive. They're not covered by your, or even most, insurance. And, despite our current president's promises to the contrary, IVF is not a free service and has not even been reduced in pricing during his term.
So, after some discussion with your husband, you email the fertility clinic saying that you want to try on your own for a little while before considering those options and thank them for their time.
A week later, they send you a bill for $900 for a test they told you was covered by your insurance.
When you call to argue, they drop the charge immediately. After your many years of experience arguing with clinics and insurance companies about high charges, you notice it is weirdly easy to argue out of this bill. You have a suspicion that this wasn't a billing mistake after all, but an honest-to-God shakedown. Worse yet, it probably works most of the time, because a lot of their clientele are wealthy (or extremely desperate) and pay these bills immediately, without thinking twice.
It makes you feel sick and so sorry for every woman who uses their service. Their Google reviews accuse them of doing this and even shadier things. But, for some reason they're still allowed to operate in your city and have made the owners extremely wealthy.
You wonder how many fertility clinics are like this.
But, just as you're beginning to realize how much our country's healthcare system rewards those prey upon desperate people, you're finally pregnant with no outside help!
Oh, but, whoops! You have new insurance now, and that cool, wise, older-sister-like gyno is no longer in your network.
You go looking for a new gyno. You'd prefer a woman, but there aren't any in your network in your city. You choose a female nurse practitioner who has a nice smile in her ZocDoc pic, but when you go in, you never actually get to see her. You see her boss, and he's...okay.
He talks really fast. He's been doing this for a long time and he's clearly very smart. But, he's also never had a uterus and only understands your symptoms and concerns in theory. And you're one of God-knows-how-many patients he sees in a day so he never remembers anything about you or your husband.
Anyway, he tells you to stay off of Google. That your body knows what it's doing. Try to relax.
You don't listen and you Google everything and you panic-download the What to Expect pregnancy app because it's the most popular and you've heard of the book with the same name. You give them your phone number and email address. They tell you how big the embryo is and you can never sleep at this point, so you stay up staring at the app night after night.
Until you miscarry. It sucks, but it happens. You have an easy, safe procedure done, and the abortion clinic who provides the service treats you like a princess.
Any inconvenient part of the process -- and there are a couple -- are directly related to the dumb laws that came about after overturning of Roe vs. Wade and the even dumber religious fanatics threatening the clinic's staff and patients.
Everyone who works there is genuinely there to help women and they deserve all of the credit in the world for doing so, especially while it's becoming harder for them to do so.
After the miscarriage, all of the friends and family you told are nice to you. You get flowers and gifts. But, you've never liked pity or being in the spotlight, so you're uncomfortable and weirdly pissed off for a while. Eventually, you get over it and everyone else does, too.
The What to Expect App sold your information to a bunch of baby-related companies. So you get tons of email and text ads for the pregnancy you no longer have and the baby you are not going to have anytime soon. To this day, 5 months later, you're still getting saccharine email ads from giving your information to one company. They hurt a little less all the time, but they still hurt.
And you spend a lot of time thinking about how horrifically nervous you were while you were pregnant and how easy it would be to fall for anything. You wonder how much money and materials and time are wasted on useless products taking advantage of that anxiety. It becomes a real hatred in your heart. You are suspicious of anything marketed to pregnant people or new mothers now.
Your gyno tries to help you a lot during that tough time. And he does...mostly. He's great at explaining how common, how routine, how downright regular it is to have a miscarriage. It's when he's trying to be sensitive and compassionate and flex his good bedside manner that he manages to say things that make you feel like shit.
He tells you to just stop trying for a while, and it'll happen when you least expect it. He laughs, "You'll get yourself a dog, and then you'll be pregnant again. I see it all the time."
Then he asks how old you are, and even though you've told him 100 times, you tell him you're 36. He visibly winces, "Oh, well, better make it sooner rather than later."
You know he doesn't actually understand. He's a man who's never thought he was getting something he's wanted for his entire life, only to have it slip away as soon as he was getting used to finally having it.
You think about getting a new gyno, but there still aren't any woman OBGYNs in your area that take your insurance. There is a man closer to your apartment who you set up an appointment with -- but his office emails you right away to tell you that his ZocDoc account is inaccurate and they don't actually take your insurance after all.
It's such a pain in the ass, you decide you can stick with your gyno for now. You guess. Maybe he isn't so bad.
After the dust has settled, it seems like everyone has an opinion about your age now. You know they assume your miscarriage probably happened because you're old, and you know they're right. Relatives almost twice your age talk about your body as if it's withering. Their continued, over-dramatic pity feels like swallowing a handful of tacks.
Even though you've been told it's an outdated term, "geriatric pregnancy" is thrown around often. It's strange, but you notice your male friends, especially, like to chucklingly say, "Geriatric pregnancy."
"Not that you're old, of course!" they add, "Haha! It's so stupid! What a stupid term!" because they're good feminist dudes or whatever, I guess.
There's this awful, unsaid implication that you've waited too long. And it feels like everyone knows it. Even after doing everything right, doing everything to avoid derision and scorn for having kids when you were too poor or too young -- even after being perfectly responsible, you still fucked it up.
You see celebrities around your age getting pregnant for the first time online, and while that makes you smile at first, the comment sections are full of people talking about how they're too old. How this is going to normalize unhealthy pregnancy ages. Normalizing waiting too long. Their children will be damaged for being born to an old woman.
Here's the thing, though: You're lucky! You're lucky you can get pregnant at all. And people think it's super helpful to tell you "At least you can get pregnant!"
You are operating under the belief that it is going to happen for you sometime, because it's still a possibility. So, "At least you can get pregnant" used to make you cringe, but now it galvanizes you. It gives you hope.
So, you decide to keep trying. It's hard and it sucks and the world is a different place than it was when your parents had you and there are so many people looking to make a buck off your very typical struggle, but you need to keep trying because it's what you want.
But there's still something that bothers you.
Over and over again, you see variations of the same article whenever you go online. It's definitely because you're oversensitive and you're hyper-aware of anything having to do with childbearing now, but the articles ask a question that feels like some sort of cruel joke on you, personally.
It feels like the answer is the most obvious thing in the world.
Major publications, tabloid rags, fringe blogs, politically biased pundits and well-meaning think-pieces are all asking the same, stupid thing:
Why aren't people having kids anymore?