A little over a year ago, I interviewed a demographer for a piece about the possible causes of fertility decline. (The piece, sadly, was never published.) At some point in our conversation, she stopped me in order to clarify something: The problem with falling fertility, she wanted me to know, is not that people are choosing to have too few kids, but that they are having fewer kids than they’d like.
Stephanie H. Murray is public policy researcher turned freelance journalist and contributing writer for The Atlantic.
