Several weeks ago, David Brooks of the
New York Times wrote a column entitled "Red Diaper Babies" which praised couples who bucked social trends and raised large families. He broadly implied that couples who stop at one or two kids or--gasp--forego children altogether are selfish and, dare we say, a tad unpatriotic.
Well, he's at it again. In Saturday's Times, he cites a Gallup Poll finding that 70 percent of childless women in their 40s regret not having had children I'd like to see the wording of that question: that number strikes me as fishy. But I digress...
Brooks then tiptoes through the minefield of work-family issues, and makes a few semi-sensible suggestions to help couples who want to start families earlier in life.
Unfortunately, he spoils the evening with the following pronouncement:
I suspect that if more people had the chance to focus exclusively on child-rearing before training for and launching a career, fertility rates would rise. That would be good for the country, for as Phillip Longman, author of "The Empty Cradle," has argued, we are consuming more human capital than we are producing - or to put it another way, we don't have enough young people to support our old people. (That's what the current Social Security debate and the coming Medicare debate are all about.)
Brooks just let the cat out of the bag: the Right's next big effort will be aimed at getting us to make more babies. ("Us," of course, means white, college-educated, middle-class couples, the kind who gravitate to the exurbs Brooks loves so much.) And they think they've found a winning issue: injecting America's fertility rate into the Social Security debate.