Is it impossible to have a family in uncertain times?

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A new book unpacks why so many people struggle to build the families they want.

“From the outset, reproduction is a collaborative venture,” writes Anna Louie Sussman, a journalist who has spent years reporting how people all over the world try, and too often fail, to build the families they want. Her work explores how the collaborators of reproduction keep multiplying: doctors, employers, legislators, insurers, and a fertility industry that increasingly promises not just a baby but a better one.

In her new book, Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty, Sussman traces the economic, political, and psychological negotiations that stand between people and the children they say they want. Her reporting challenges the assumption that falling birth rates can be fully explained by metrics like income, marriage and education that demographers tend to focus on. She argues the answers are much more personal and resistant to measurement.

I wanted to better understand what Sussman meant by this idea of “impossibility of family” — and how one would even determine that, whether as a prospective parent or as a policymaker. What are the biggest barriers to having kids and how do people tell the difference between what they can’t afford and what they’ve come to believe they need? How much does the media conversation about these issues inform people’s choices?

I spoke with her about what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s egg freezing reveals about women who aren’t running for president, what countries that subsidize fertility treatment tell us about the demand going unmet here, and why she hesitates to say outright that having children is good. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

You started working on this book seven years ago. What has most surprised you about how the conversation around fertility and family formation has changed in that time?

There are some people on the left who have always paid attention to family issues, like Elizabeth Warren with her work on bankruptcy and the “two-income trap,” but I do think we’ve been seeing a lot more movement there, with groups like the Congressional Dads Caucus [in 2023], and care infrastructure ideas like those in the Build Back Better Act. There’s also been all this movement around paid leave in the states, 3-K and pre-K, and attempts for more affordable child care.

On the right there’s been the rise of this strange pronatalism and the turn that’s taken with what I’ve wound up calling “kid-maxxing.” Plus this embrace in Silicon Valley and among the super rich with so-called super babies and the really overt embrace of technology to make children on this industrial scale. I also did not expect Roe to be overturned. I would have hoped that would’ve come with a lot more attention on the right to support for mothers and children, but that really hasn’t come to pass in a big way.

I was startled to read that you found some philosophers attempting to reclaim the term “eugenics.” You cite one who wrote a paper called “Defending eugenics,” which sets out to “reclaim the spirit” of eugenicists like Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. You cite another who calls for “liberal eugenics” grounded in the freedom of parents to choose how to enhance their children in accordance with their own values.

One Oxford philosopher even says parents have a duty of “procreative beneficence” and should select embryos or fetuses “most likely to have the best life” based on the genetic information they have.