When I was pregnant with my third child, several people thought it would be helpful to remind me of the peril in which I put us all by producing yet another mouth for our overpopulated planet to feed.

Actually, the birth rate was decreasing worldwide. The U.S. birth rate reached a historic low in 2022, and people are discussing policies like child tax credits and ideas for affordable childcare that might encourage people to have children. 

(So, yeah, I had three kids. You’re welcome.)

At the moment, the loudest voices expressing concern about the falling birth rate are conservative, whether religious, political or cultural. Their general counsel is to stop trying to do it all: Stay home and have babies. 

I’m intrigued by the significant number of young women who are responding to the pronatalist movement’s rhetoric. 

The “trad wife” (short for traditional wife) influencers are wildly popular on social media. Young women watch them while they make hundreds of thousands of dollars milking cows and modeling aprons with their six homeschooled children cavorting in the background.

They follow wellness-lifestyle influencers who encourage them to eat healthy food and stop taking birth control. They go to seminars that warn against equality in marriage and pursuing a career. 

The folks pushing the trad wife model constantly refer to the mythical miserable millennial women (ages 30 through early 40s) who are either exhausted juggling a 9 to 5 job and a family or are disappointed to be single and/or childless because they prioritized their careers over getting married and pregnant. 

 A 26-year-old interviewed for the New York Times said it this way: “I’m the product of the generation that said ‘Oh, the future is female, go after your career, family can wait. . . . Women like me are realizing climbing this corporate ladder doesn’t fulfill you. They realize ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve been taking birth control, now I want to start a family, but I’ve put it off.”

I feel conflicted by this young woman’s testimony. On one hand, I am annoyed. How long will women insist on fighting the mommy wars over working or staying at home? There are a million reasons for the choices women make, and none of them bring perfect happiness and peace. We’re all doing the best we can. 

On the other hand, I feel sadness when I read her words. She speaks an unfair truth: You can’t wait forever to have children. 

In a perfect world, women would get established in a career and become financially stable. They would travel, have new experiences and really get to know themselves. They would find the perfect partner and then have children. 

Men have been living this way for centuries, waiting until they are older to marry a young, fertile wife. 

But that isn’t how female biology works. Our ovaries and uterus perform best while we’re in our 20s. After a while, they don’t perform at all. 

Infertility is higher now than it used to be. I could throw statistics at you, but I know everyone reading this has either experienced infertility firsthand or knows someone who has. The inability to have children is heartbreaking, a loss that cuts to the very core of a person.  

Infertility is by no means always caused by the female. Thirty percent of the time it is the couple together that is unable to conceive. However, common sense says it doesn’t help the situation when women wait until they are deep in their 30s.

Several years ago, my husband and I had dinner with dear friends who revealed that they had been trying to get pregnant for a couple of years. Their disappointment and pain were palpable as they described their hellacious journey through doctors and dashed hopes. 

When we got back home, I called my daughters, both still in high school, to the kitchen and exclaimed, “Have your babies young! Find a man who will take care of them while you are in law school or whatever you want to do, but do not wait!” 

They rolled their eyes and chuckled, but I wasn’t really joking. We need to be honest with our young women about their options. Yes, they can have both careers and children — but it isn’t always easy and not always simultaneous or linear.

We can tell them from personal experience that children do grow up. There will still be decades of life waiting to be filled with work, travel and adventure. 

Every good thing comes with sacrifice and, in my experience, children are worth it.