Inconceivable

Who can afford to have children in the 21st century? New Yorker journalist Anna Louie Sussman investigates the true cost of creating life in the modern world.
Reproduction has never been straight forward. Since the beginning of time, it has been intimately linked to questions of power and resource. But we have now reached a point where our capitalism has radically altered conceptions of the family, of children and our working lives for the worst – women and men can no longer afford to have the families they want, and in Europe, North America and East Asia birth rates are at a record low. But why?

In order to answer this question, Anna Louie Sussman takes readers around the world. She shows how economic conditions, and the circumstances they result in, have stymied family-building in settings as diverse as Denmark and South Korea. Even in an age in which our globalized economy promises limitless choices, the things we want the most are becoming harder to find.

This is a global story about how our reproductive lives have been disfigured by an economic system that has created a hostile environment for happy, healthy reproduction. We hear from educated women paying thousands of pounds to freeze their eggs, as well as the policy makers in Scandinavia who are actively encouraging their population to procreate. We travel to China, where pollution has rendered millions of men infertile, before diving into the growing fertility business in which venture capitalists gamble millions of dollars.