In "Could Peer Influence Be the Cause of the Baby Bust," NYT opinion writer Peter Coy (metaphorically) strokes his chin while standing over a plexiglass container occupied by female humans - women and teenage girls - who are drawn to or repelled by droppers labeled, respectively, "Baby Infusion" and "No Baby, Thank You."
Males are notably absent from the experiment, indicating not only that their behavior has no influence on impregnation, but also that, more critically, they apparently play no biological role in the citizen-manufacturing process. Coy writes as much in his musing over whether peer effect can explain less baby-making:
"If there is a peer effect [responsible for the 'baby bust'], the same women causing it are also being affected by it..."
Setting aside Coy's decision to present as a dispassionate scientist observing other people’s experiments with what may well be female lab mice capable of immaculate conception, his interest seems to be in the "why?" of the most frequently cited reason fewer people are having children, which, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, is that they simply don't want to. Had Coy consulted the Pew survey during the course of his otherwise in-depth exploration of peer pressure's impact on female self-impregnation, he'd have found that "men and women are equally likely to say they will probably not have kids."
Consideration of the other essential variable in the procreative equation (for the purposes of this response I will refer to that variable as the "male") might also have led Coy to a July 2022 study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family that found "a growing share of childless men do not want children and increasingly, a lack of children would not bother them at all."
Coy’s problems with investigating cause and effect continue when, to illustrate in more detail the complexity of a peer-effect impact on pregnancy, he cites studies of teenage girls that show an increase in pregnant classmates is associated with a "greater likelihood of a teenager herself" spontaneously impregnating.
And while spontaneous impregnation isn't the term he uses, he implies it by failing to take an extra step to account for the introduction of "teenage boys" into the environment, one in three of whom between the ages of 15 and 17 report feeling pressured to have sex (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2003) and whose "limited contraception knowledge" reduces his contraception use (or alternatively, one could surmise, increases it when that knowledge is not limited), according to the findings of Gabriela Vargas, Joshua Borus, and Brittany M. Charlton of the Division of Adolescent/Young Adult Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital.
As we know, high pressure to have sex combined with low contraception use can lead to high impregnation figures. And vice versa. The researchers he cites need not have reported it for Coy to find it, himself.
Coy's only acceptably female-specific supposition, and coincidentally the most salient - and short enough to have been issued as a tweet - is that "researchers have claimed to find peer effects on obesity, smoking, and drinking, so it's plausible that they influence fertility."
Yes. As with other things that can negatively impact our health and finances, we are less inclined to do them when we see others benefiting by not doing them.
Or, to put it in a different light, we are inclined, research shows, to be motivated by positive role models.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy my novel The Age of the Child, in which an overturn of Roe v. Wade forces a woman who never wanted children to continue with an unwanted pregnancy - and that unwanted child changes the country’s reproductive future.
“Something interesting and endlessly thought-provoking that The Age of the Child captures are the multiple sides of pregnancy — wanting to be pregnant, not wanting to be pregnant, and what right the government has in controlling pregnancy. This isn’t the first piece of dystopian fiction to consider these questions. The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm, to name a couple, have opened the dystopian genre to questions about reproduction; however, The Age of the Child is one of the first I’ve read to really consider the issue of reproductive rights and attitudes so deeply.” — Goodreads Review
“Scathing social commentary.” — Goodreads Review