Dr. Karen Guzzo
speaker
132 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Karen Guzzo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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There's a separate movement by black feminist scholars and activists called Reproductive Justice, which is about basically giving people the right to have children, the right not to have children, the right to have bodily autonomy as to when and under what circumstances, and the right to have children and raise them in a safe environment. And so we've often...
who demonized poor women and women of color for having children under the wrong circumstances. And yet, these are people who have made vibrant communities, and that's all they're asking for. But instead, we've sort of policed them.
So, you know, there's a lot of research on the violence towards families that is part of the foster care system, that we punish women for being poor and disrupt families. And so, We talk about being pro-family in the United States, but we are so anti-family to so many people and to so many groups.
And that's I think what's missing from the pro-natalist movement is actually attention to being pro-family. We have one of the weakest social safety nets of any industrialized country. And right now we're looking at chopping major parts of it, which sort of baffles me. If we really wanted to be pro-family, we would not be cutting programs like Head Start.
We would not be facing huge cuts to SNAP funding, you know, the food stamp program. And so, you know, to me, I hear these things and I'm like, $5,000 bonuses? And yet you're going to cut Head Start and you're going to raise prices on everything through tariffs? I'm like, that doesn't make sense to me.
They don't work. I mean, there's so much research on this that really shows that countries have tried this. And so they have this little tiny bump. They might change the timing. You might decide to go ahead and have that first kid, or you might decide to have your second kid a little bit sooner.
But by and large, they do not have any appreciable impact on birth rates overall or the number of births people have over their own lifetimes. They don't work because it costs on average something like $300,000 to raise a kid from birth to age 18. $5,000 isn't going to cut it. We had the expanded child tax credit of the American Rescue Plan in 2021.
That halved child poverty, and we did not vote to expand it or continue it. And so the idea that we would be revisiting this in a different way on a much more limited basis is really concerning.
And even these birth bonuses they're considering, they're not available to everybody. What was neat about the American Rescue Plan is that it wasn't something that was just you got money back at taxes. You got $300 a month if you had a child under age six. And you didn't necessarily have to pay income taxes. They expanded eligibility for it. So it went to everybody.
These new plans they're talking about, they're not going to give them to poor women, to the people who would really need them most. They are again trying to say, no, no, only some people should be having kids.
So the country that probably has had the most effective fertility plans is actually probably Israel because it makes IVF really widely available. So when people delay having kids, in part because they're getting education, they're building careers, that does seem to help Israel. But most of these other programs, they're very careful about how they extend them.
So many of these countries, again, don't give the benefits to single women or unmarried women, LGBTQ families. They don't have big impacts. They help a little bit on the margins, but for the cost of them, they are not having big impacts. But the ones that matter most are the things that actually make it easier for people to combine work and family.
So one of the things that people worry about is if we offer, quote unquote, too generous of a social safety net, people won't work. There's not a lot of evidence for that. People generally want to work. When they have kids, they want to work a little bit less. They want to stay home more, which is something we all think that would be great for kids.
We know that actually having parental leave is great for kids and for bonding, and it's good for both mothers and fathers. But investing in a robust child care infrastructure is really important.
Yeah, so that's interesting. So Sweden has also seen a decline in fertility. And so when I was giving interviews, you know, 10, 15 years ago, I'd say, oh, I wish we could be Sweden. That would help us. And of course, they've seen these declines, too. What I will say is Sweden's fertility rate is much, much, much better than Japan or China or South Korea.
where they have social safety nets, where they have child care programs and leave programs, but they don't have gender equality in any way, shape, or form in either the labor force or in the division of labor in the home. And so gender equality might be what keeps places from tipping over. well below replacement and into that super low levels that people start to really worry about.
And so I think that's what a lot of young adults are looking at. They're like, I think that's what I want. I think I want to have a partner who will help me out. And we're in this boat together. And what tends to happen is a lot of people have that thought before they have kids. And then the constraints of the labor market make it such that it's really difficult to have in practice.
So if you can't afford childcare, one of you is going to stay home. I And then you kind of default back into traditional divisions of labor, even though that's not what people originally wanted or at least said they wanted.
Yeah, it's a really big problem in the United States. And it's one that other countries, including countries that do have low birth rates, other countries have dealt with. In the United States, we have very much individualized, you know, if you're going to have a baby, you better figure out how you're going to pay for it and whether you can afford child care.
So, you know, budgetary rules, they recommend that child care should cost no more than 7% of your income. There is not a single state where that is possible. At the minimum, it's like 10 percent and it goes up to like 20 percent. And there are studies on child care deserts that compare the price of infant care to the price of a four-year college degree.
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