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The summer I turned 39, my husband and I moved from Brooklyn to a darling little village in upstate New York. Our parents were thrilled, their unspoken hope that leaving the big city might be a sign that we were settling down—that as my fertility began to sunset, we’d turn one of our house’s three bedrooms into a nursery. And we were having that conversation, too. We owned a home with ample space and an affordable mortgage. I worked for myself and had maximal flexibility. He had good health insurance and a great if demanding job. Did we want to have a baby?

As late summer melted into a vibrant fall and then into the cold of upstate winter, I knew my answer: No.

My husband worked in the city three days a week; I worked from home. I pictured my haggard self, pacing our living room begging a wailing infant to please calm down, alone in our big house, trying to figure out how to shovel the snow out of the driveway before packing the baby into the car and driving 20 minutes to the grocery store on icy country roads. In this picture I am despondent, resentful, rageful. And the image was informed by the fact that I saw, in real time, the fellow transplant friends we invited to dinner scrambling to find a babysitter in our small town and inevitably coming up empty. I listened to their appreciation for our little community but I witnessed their frustration at the lack of childcare, the lack of diversity, the lack of ease that had characterized their lives back in the city.

I also saw a life, a career, and a marriage I treasured, and imagined all of the ways in which having a child would compromise what I had spent decades building. I didn’t have a deep desire for a child, just a generalized sense that I should consider it before it became impossible. But the sacrifices it would take to make parenting possible simply didn’t feel worth it. A child would surely be wonderful in many ways. But I also looked in at myself as a mother through the leaded-glass pane of our very lovely living-room windows, and I saw a washed-out woman worn down to the thinnest thread.

And then we moved again. A job change took us to Hong Kong, where rents are high but childcare is high-quality and reasonable. Our parent friends there traveled often. They held interesting full-time jobs. Dinners were not canceled for lack of babysitters. I pictured myself as a mother, this time through the square frame of my little box of an apartment stacked among thousands of others in Hong Kong’s endless high-rises: a partner who was an equal participant at home and now had reasonable work hours and a very short commute; a doctor’s office within walking distance; a two-minute stroll to the grocery store; parks and promenades; nannies and preschools; excellent healthcare that wouldn’t bankrupt us (delivering a baby in Hong Kong’s best public hospital will cost you roughly $50; you can pay the bill with your metro card). The question of whether or not to try to have a child shifted away from logistics and toward desire.

As Republicans and Democrats alike grapple with declining birth rates and the economic impacts of an aging population, the consensus seems to be that people should have more babies. The right has generally coalesced around a strategy of blaming, shaming, and bullying: blaming (white) women for not marrying or reproducing; shaming women whose lives don’t follow a traditional path; bullying young women into traditionalism with threats that they will wind up, per Vice President J.D. Vance, as childless cat ladies whose lives lack purpose and have no investment in the nation or its future. Democrats have done better in terms of talking about paid parental leave and universal healthcare, but at the end of the day, they’ve barely budged the policy needle. The policy laundry list pushed by Democrats and progressives is no doubt the right way forward. But leaders on both sides of the political aisle need to start thinking about these issues differently.

“How do we increase birth rates?” is a question that can come with a lot of ugly answers, as well as many unintended consequences (banning abortion, it turns out, has coincided not just with an increase in the abortion rate, but has caused a number of fertility-ending complications for women who were trying to have children). But those of us who support abortion rights also tend to support true reproductive choice, and need to grapple with the reality that many people are not able to choose to have the families they desire. Nearly 40 percent of Americans over 50 without children say they wanted them at some point; an additional 24 percent say they weren’t........

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