Earlier this month, NBC’s website ran a story on America’s falling birth rate. It’s a subject I’ve recently covered, too. And I think NBC gets an important part of the picture wrong.

Its reporters quote Dr. Helen Kim, a professor at Northwestern University’s medical school.

Moreover, Kim said, the concept of the ideal family size may be changing. “There are shifts where having smaller families is a trend,” she added. “I can’t speak on this as a sociologist, but this is what I’ve seen among my peers and colleagues.”

It is certainly true that there has been a trend toward smaller families—that is, after all, just another way of describing the phenomenon that we’re trying to explain. But it does not follow that “the ideal family size” now includes fewer children. As Lyman Stone points out in a recent report, the number of children that American women say they want has modestly increased over the last twenty years (see his Figure 10). They have, on average, wanted more children than they end up having for about fifty years.

The NBC story is much closer to the mark when it notes that the trend toward marrying older has contributed to the decline in births. But it then veers off course again, speculating that technology could come to the rescue of the birth rate.

And while women’s fertility takes a hit with age, younger women have an option that wasn’t available until fairly recently: egg freezing.
In vitro fertilization “is becoming more and more popular,” said Dr. James Grifo, program director for the NYU Langone Fertility Center. And “more young women are choosing to freeze their eggs to protect themselves in the future.”

No doubt these new possibilities will somewhat offset the decline in births from later marriage, but I suspect that a combination of technology, economics, and culture will keep them from offsetting it all that much.

(H/t Tim Carney)