In April, the federal government reported that America’s total fertility rate — the number of children a woman is statistically expected to have over her lifetime — had dropped to 1.57. The alarm was immediate, with lawmakers and pundits invoking the specter of a graying, shrinking America unable to fund its elders. ...In other words, teach women that they have the unilateral power over birth control and abortion, and they will stop having babies.The explanations for why Americans are having fewer children, or having them later, aren’t mysterious. They follow from changes most people wouldn’t want to reverse.
Goldin points to women’s agency as the main variable. In virtually every country where fertility has fallen, she says, women have gained increased access to education, careers and the ability to invest in their own futures.
The article discusses financial difficulties and how IVF could be used more. But the poor are having more babies than the middle class, and people have reproduced for millennia without ivf.
There is, of course, one obvious answer to the worry that there won’t be enough young workers to support an aging population, and that is immigration. Bring in working-age people and a populace can rebalance the retired old with the productive young without waiting 20 years for babies to grow up.The WSJ is conservative on some issues, but it is always finding excuses to import foreign labor. No, that is not a solution.

