Friday, May 9, 2008
Once again, Americans have conjured a baby boom out of a national tragedy. What better way to create a happy ending?
Sep 3, 2002 | The nation is alive with the sound of crying infants and cooing parents. It's been nearly a year since the Sept. 11 attacks, and according to the New York Times Magazine, CBS News, and the Tulsa World, among others, we are in the midst of a correspondent baby boom. Obstetricians have their hands full; maternity wards are jammed with tiny new customers. Americans all over the country -- suffering from what Newsweek calls "post-traumatic sex syndrome" -- have created life as a response to death. They've given birth to babies who constitute nothing less than a salve for our sorrow --"signs of hope in a city devastated by loss and grief," in the words of one New York Daily News report.
But this baby boom, as healing and heartwarming as it may seem, doesn't appear to exist. It's true that there are couples who decided to conceive as a result of the attacks. People like Stacey Stapleton and her husband Paul -- who successfully conceived after hearing fighter jets fly over their Manhattan apartment, according to an Associated Press report in November -- are not exactly unique. They can be found in cities and towns all over the country. But for every couple who decided to have children in the wake of the disaster, there seems to be one or more who decided not to bring new life into an uncertain post-9/11 world, or, even more likely, simply did not see the attacks as an impetus for parenthood.
Preliminary reports from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) suggest that the birthrate was essentially flat in 2001 and most demographers expect 2002 to follow a similar trajectory. If there is any change at all, history suggests that today's teetering economy will likely lead to a slide in the birthrate as potential parents wait for rosier financial fortunes.
And even if the statistics eventually reveal that a population spike has occurred (the final figures won't be tallied until after the end of the year), 9/11 may not be the cause. Americans have been birthing a larger collective brood for most of the last decade. The children of baby boomers in particular -- as they reach childbearing age in increasingly large numbers -- have led an incremental wave of family growth, with birthrates increasing by about 2 percent every year since 1994, according to NCHS statistics. Some studies done before 9/11 even predict that this so-called "echo boom" will outpace its predecessor, with more children being born in 2010 than in 1957, the peak year of the original baby boom.
Most news accounts of a post 9/11 baby boom have ignored this long-term upward trend and the argument that a weak economy leads to fewer births. Instead, hundreds of feel-good stories revolve around burgeoning bellies and fresh-faced newborns as beacons of hope. In lieu of data and its skeptical analysis, the dominant formula has relied on cheery anecdotes -- a phenomenon that is timeworn in the wake of crisis.
"It's a cultural habit," says Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at New York University. "[Birthrates] are watched like the stock market."
Ever since the 1930s, in fact, Americans have conjured baby booms and busts in the wake of recessions, wars, blizzards and blackouts. Disaster, we reason with amateur zeal, begets increased intimacy, which in turn begets sex, which, with luck, yields children -- innocent, untainted vessels of everything that is right with the world. And simple laws of cause and effect guarantee: The more significant the disaster, the larger the baby boom will be.
So far, no evidence seems strong enough to undercut our faith in this baby logic. Neither history, nor data, nor the efforts of a few media realists -- the Chicago Tribune among the most recent -- have significantly shaken our stubborn belief that babies grow like new branches from a painfully pruned nation. We are as in love with the idea of children as healers as we once were with the idea of the Internet as a money machine. It's a birthing bubble -- as fragile and subject to bursting as its cyber counterpart.
Why do we shun the truth to fuel a fantasy? Are Americans simply scrambling to create a silver lining where none exists? Or, does our abiding faith in the 9/11 baby boom reveal that we cling to the idea of national renewal out of fear that the terrorist attacks, as devastating as they were, failed to shake us out of our day-to-day melodramas? Are we reluctant to accept that seemingly life-changing attacks have failed to produce permanent change in our lives and culture?
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