The Baby Boycott.

• Author: MENCIMER, STEPHANIE
• Position: Decline in birth rates attributed in part to Family Leave Act

Conservatives thought that if they only made it harder for mothers to work, women would stay home. Instead, women stopped having kids.

REMEMBER THE BAD OLD DAYS when Congress and the White House were at war over the Family and Medical Leave Act? It seems like ancient history now, that day in 1990 when George Bush vetoed the bill, arguing that business couldn't possibly afford to allow workers 1.2 weeks of unpaid leave after the birth of a child or to care for aging parents. The family leave act was a critical piece of legislation for women, 50 percent of whom were already in the workforce. Federal law had barred pregnancy discrimination, but it didn't mean much if women could still be fired or forced to quit after actually giving birth. But during the debate, Bush's press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, neatly summed up the Republican approach to dealing with such touchy work and family problems. If your job didn't offer maternity leave or let you attend to your dying mother, the solution was simple: "Look for other jobs," Fitzwater said.

The family leave act would languish another three years, as conservatives and right-wing pro-family groups argued that it would only encourage more women to abandon their God-given roles as mothers and seek the monetary rewards of the workplace. Opponents characterized the bill as an attempt by women to have their pursuit of pin money subsidized by the taxpayer. Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) dubbed the act "another example of yuppie empowerment."

In 1993, 10 years after the bill was originally introduced, Bill Clinton made it the first piece of legislation he signed as president. Since then, 20 million Americans have taken advantage of the law, and the economy, far from being dragged down, experienced the largest boom in U.S. history. Yet the family leave act was the first and last successful attempt in the past decade to drag this country into the modern era where the majority of women are in the paid workforce.

Nearly every national initiative since then has been met with similar resistance, as conservatives have both refused to pay for measures that might ease the strain of working families and insisted that any efforts that "encouraged" women with children to work were detrimental to the traditional family. As Richard Lowry explained last month in the conservative National Review, "Working moms are at the center of a variety of cultural ills."

But if conservatives had hoped that withholding public support for working mothers would bring back June Cleaver, they were badly mistaken. Instead, a growing number of American women have found another way around the problem: They've stopped having children.

Between 1976 and 1998, the number of women between the ages of 40 and 44 who were childless doubled. Now, 20 percent of baby boomer women are childless and likely to remain so, and demographers predict that as much as a quarter of American women born between 1956 and 1972 will never have children. The numbers go up with education and income levels; fully one-third of women in their late 30's with graduate degrees have no children. Meanwhile, the number of women with only one child has doubled since 1976, to 18 percent, and the Brady Bunch has gone on the endangered species list. In 1976, a whopping 36 percent of all women had a brood of four or more kids. Today, that number has shrunk to less than 10 percent, according to U.S. Census data.

For all the prosperity of the last eight years, a significant percentage of women of all races and ethnic backgrounds are behaving as if the country were in the midst of a famine. In fact, the birth rates among native-born women are lower today than they were during the Great Depression. Many things can reduce the birth rate, including lower child mortality, greater educational opportunities for women, escalating costs of raising children, urbanization, and lower levels of religiousness. These factors help explain much of the birth rate decline that took place in the early part of the 20th century, when lots of people were getting off the farm and no longer needed 10 kids to help out, and Progressive-Era reforms outlawed child labor.

But none of this answers why, today, 40 percent of American women are sharply curtailing or abandoning motherhood altogether. Various other explanations have been trotted out in a string of recent books on the subject: the desire for "freedom," baby -boomer self-absorption, new lifestyle choices, and infertility. In typically American fashion, the trend has even been dubbed a "movement," which now has its own "child-free" lobbying groups that are demanding such things as kid-tree zones in restaurants and workplace accommodations such as paid leave usually reserved for parents.

But the idea that mass childlessness is the product of a "lifestyle choice" or a political movement defies common sense. We are, after all, highly evolved primates. Reproductive instincts are hard wired in our brains, and historically, only events of serious magnitude--wars, depressions, famine, and seismic shifts in the economic system, such as the industrial revolution--have caused large numbers of women to forgo having children. When resources are scarce, and when they don't have much help, women will postpone motherhood. And despite the romantic myth of the self-sacrificing mother, if given the option, most women will choose to advance their own position before bearing more children. That's because in the long run, a woman's improved status benefits her children. It's a pattern replicated all over the natural world, and has been for thousands of years.

Our failure to...