America's Fertility Class Divide: What new numbers from the Center for Work-Life Policy and the Guttmacher Institute reveal. - By Sharon Lerner - Slate Magazine:
Why America's widening fertility class divide is a problem.
By Sharon Lerner
Since the average American woman has 2.1 children, you might think we aren't experiencing a national fertility crisis. Unlike some European countries whose futures are threatened by low birth rates, Americans, on average, produce just the right number of future workers, soldiers, and taxpayers to keep our society humming. Our families are also, on average, comfortably smaller than those in some developing countries, where high birthrates help keep women and children severely impoverished. But here's the problem: Because the American fertility rate is an average, it obscures the fact that our country is actually more like two countries, which are now experiencing two different, serious crises.
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