Sarah McCammon

All of that has led women to make different choices.

The last thing I will say is when Emma was talking about, you know, sort of making a choice, picking a lane, I was thinking about a conversation I had very recently for a story about

with three women in Atlanta, a mother, well, three generations of women.

The grandmother was in her 90s.

The mother, the middle generation, was in her 60s.

And the daughter was in her 30s.

The daughter, the youngest one, did not have children and kind of is leaning against it.

But her mother, Cynthia, talked about being a lawyer, being a working woman, born in, I think, the early 1960s, having children.

her babies in the 90s, and really being in like a transitional generation where women were taking on all of these professional responsibilities, but also still having these domestic responsibilities for those who chose to have them.

And she told me this really poignant story about this one moment when her baby was crying and she came back late from a trial and she needed to nurse her and the baby was upset.

And she just thought, you know, is this worth it?

And I guarantee you,

Well, I can't guarantee you, but I suspect that every working mother has had those moments because it is a whole lot to juggle.

And, you know, researchers I talked to here in the U.S.

and in Greece and elsewhere have echoed this and said, you know, I think it was Alexandra Tregaki, who is an economic demographer in Greece, told me essentially that.

the world has changed.

Women's roles have changed dramatically, but policy and culture and society have not kept up.

And I think that forces some very difficult choices for a lot of women.

I think one of the reasons over the last, you know, 10 or 15 years that demographers have paid more attention to this is

the sort of escalation in the decline.