Women, declining birth rates, abortion: What is really going on?

By Barb Adamson, Op-ed contributor Wednesday, February 04, 2026

From an early age, I knew I wanted to be a wife and mother. Even as I grew older and began to plan for college, I knew marriage and motherhood would be my priority, regardless of what career path I might pursue. I did not realize at the time how unusual my priorities had become.

The prevailing assumption of young millennial women was that college was necessary for a successful career and that the subsequent career would translate into economic prosperity.

If I declared my future life goals were to marry and start a family, the response would have been something like, “That’s nice, but what else?” In a world where women now have endless “choice,” why would you just be a wife and mother? Marriage and motherhood were not perceived as bad, but they were no longer an inevitable or necessary measure of success or achievement.

No longer constrained to their biology, women are now free to engage with the world like modified men, which makes having children a “lifestyle choice.” This vision of independence subtly molds women’s identities during formative years, teaching them to understand themselves through achievement and external success. Motherhood is seen as an interruption to be avoided, and the widespread availability of contraception and access to abortion has resulted in a culture that implicitly communicates to women that becoming a mother should be an active choice.

The consequences are increasingly visible. Women are waiting for the “right time” to have children, often delaying well into their 30s or forgoing childbearing altogether.   

If the global decline in birth rates persists, it will lead to disastrous socioeconomic consequences worldwide, and many of the proffered explanations do not fully account for the cross-cultural consistency of this trend. To understand the birthrate decline, we must first understand why women are choosing to delay or avoid motherhood altogether and how modernity has transformed the way women construct their identities and find meaning.

Delayed motherhood and the birthrate decline

Both the prevalence of abortion and declining birth rates stem from the same underlying reality: women choosing to have fewer children, or forgo childbearing altogether, enabled by modern medical technologies.

Understanding why women choose abortion can provide a deeper understanding of why women are making the fertility choices that have led to the decline in overall birth rates. Whether through abortion following an unexpected pregnancy or through intentionally delayed childbearing, the outcome is the same.

This makes abortion decision-making research a valuable tool for understanding broader fertility trends and for examining the role identity plays in women’s choices.

Women report multiple reasons for choosing abortion, including financial issues, partner-related concerns, and education or career interference. Most women seeking an abortion are also unmarried. Even across cultures, timing, life plans, and fear of disruption are recurring themes.

In one major U.S study, the most frequently reported reason for abortion was, “Having a baby would dramatically change my life.” 

What is often overlooked when evaluating women’s decision-making is the existential concern women experience when faced with an unexpected pregnancy. Material concerns are certainly a factor, but an unexpected pregnancy also appears to be perceived as a threat to their very identity.

Agency and ‘the plan in women’s decision-making

Vitae Foundation’s qualitative research on abortion decision-making provides vital insight into this dynamic, revealing that women have an internalized “plan” that acts as a coherent narrative about who they are becoming and what their life is supposed to look like. This plan provides a sense of order and control and is deeply embedded in their sense of self.

When an unexpected pregnancy occurs, a woman filters the news of the pregnancy through this internalized narrative, and if the pregnancy is perceived as taking her too far off course, abortion becomes likely because it feels like the only viable option. In this moment, abortion can feel like an act of self-preservation rather than a moral choice.

Not all women respond to the perceived disruption of an unexpected pregnancy in the same way.

Research on abortion decision-making also shows that differences in locus of control — how individuals perceive their own agency — play an essential role. Though women have their “plan” through which they filter decision-making, it can function as a means of perceived control over one’s life, especially if some women feel as if they have little control over their lives.  

This study found that differences between women with an internal locus of control (a sense of having agency over what happens in one’s own life) and those with an external locus of control (a sense of having little agency; life happens to them) impacted decision-making when faced with questions regarding unexpected pregnancy. Women with an internal locus of control were far less likely to choose abortion and more likely to be resilient and hopeful about the future. They were better able to reorder priorities and make pragmatic decisions.

Women with an external locus of control, however, often feel bound by their circumstances and at the mercy of external events aligning before they can move forward in life. These women may feel they must wait for the right man, the right job, or the right level of financial stability to manifest in their lives. In this mindset, motherhood is never seen as a feasible option, because life feels like it is happening to them rather than perceiving themselves as having agency to influence their own life events.

This commonly ingrained framing also helps illuminate broader fertility trends. When women believe that the “right time” must arrive before they can act, marriage and motherhood are easily delayed indefinitely.

Developmental idealism and global fertility collapse

These patterns in women’s sense of self are not isolated to the individualism of Western cultures. Modernity’s impact on identity formation is predicated on what is known as Developmental Idealism — a concept originating from Enlightenment thinking and more broadly applied after World War II.

According to demographer Lyman Stone, this concept essentially describes the propagation of Western cultural norms to less developed countries around the world through various mechanisms, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), media or direct governmental programs. Individuals in these developing countries, seeking to improve their economic circumstances, perceive Western cultural norms as the path to a better life, leading them to adopt a model of striving and self-improvement. In doing so, they also inadvertently import Western family norms as well, seeing the entirety of the Western lifestyle as the path to prosperity. Consistently across cultures, marriage and childbearing are delayed, and birth rates fall, sometimes before economic growth even arrives.

It is important to note that marriage is still one of the key predictors of fertility, so when individuals delay marriage, they ultimately delay or forgo childbearing. Developmental Idealism thus helps explain why declining birthrates are not limited to the West but increasingly characterize countries worldwide. 

Within Western culture itself, this paradigm continues to shape women’s identities. Now decades on within the social experiment, women continue to strive within the meritocratic, individualistic system, measuring their level of success and, therefore, their level of status by the same standards as their male counterparts. When external accomplishments outside the home become the benchmark for self-actualization, marriage and motherhood can easily be delayed indefinitely, as motherhood detracts rather than contributes to one’s identity development.

The path forward

Women haven’t simply rejected traditional roles; they were conditioned to believe that they should “have it all,” and that their identity could only be found by looking to their male peers, structuring their life’s plan around educational achievement and career success. Developmental Idealism helps provide context for the global decline in birthrates, but it does not offer solutions.

Women delay marriage and motherhood until the “right time” because they have a vision for their life, an internalized narrative of who they are becoming and what they will achieve. In a culture that values individual autonomy and visible success, women find themselves with conflicting priorities on an unforgiving timeline.

As women plan their lives around pursuits that do not include or accommodate motherhood, they are then faced with difficult tradeoffs when they do consider becoming a parent.

However, women with an internal locus of control are poised to lead us into the future, demonstrating that women can and do choose differently. Changing one’s internalized narrative is possible for those who possess enough agency to change their priorities and revise their life plan to include marriage and children sooner.  

If we are to address women’s existential response to motherhood and avert the fertility crisis, cultural change is unavoidable. It is imperative that we teach future generations that the “right time” never arrives on its own, but rather, is deliberately chosen. Marriage and parenthood must once again be presented as esteemed paths for both men and women. Recovering this sacred vision of interdependence is nothing short of necessary for the flourishing of humanity.