Are Millennials Too Poor To Procreate?

The average twentysomething is surely able to tell you where babies come from, but quiz him or her on the likelihood of conceiving one at their age and you’ll probably receive a wrong answer. Gen Y women and men are operating under a number of erroneous assumptions about fertility and how it changes with age.

According to recent research from Chapman University published in the UK’s Human Reproduction journal, 67% of college-age women and 81% of college-age men inaccurately believe that female fertility drops dramatically after age 40 (hint: the drop is actually around 27 - 35), with 31% of women and 52% of men believing this decline occurs after age 44. Both groups also significantly overestimated the success rate associated with reproductive interventions such as in-vitro fertilization treatments.

So what?

Scaremongering about our collective biological clock is nothing new. A decade ago, Sylvia Hewlett released Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children and appeared on Oprah to draw attention to the idea that delaying childbirth to focus on their careers could leave women with permanently empty nests. A lot has changed since then. For Gen Y, the choice is no longer as simple as kindergarten vs. the corner office. Young women and men are facing a host of other factors – economic, social and educational - that are causing them to delay child-bearing and turn a blind eye to fertility facts. And while they may harbor misconceptions – pun fully intended – about their fertility, even with correct information, Millennials are hard-pressed to indulge their hardwired urge to procreate. Biological clocks be damned, their lifestyles and financial status simply don’t allow for it. Here's the grim reality:

• With the unemployment rate for new grads hovering at 50% and sluggish youth job stats predicted to last until 2016, Gen Y lacks both job security and disposable income, both of which are handy to have before reproducing, especially when it comes to health insurance and childcare expenses, respectively. Unfortunately, the proportion of full-time  18 - 24 year-old workers with insurance through their job is plunging - it's dropped by 12.8% in the past decade -  and the proportion of workers aged 25 to 34 with coverage through their employer has declined by 8.5% according to Demos. Their research also found that the price tag for daycare for two children exceeded annual median rent payments in all 50 states. Not exactly affordable on a retail pay check.

• And along with low wage jobs that don't pay enough to support child-bearing ambitions, many Millennials are battling record levels of debt. The average student debtload is $25 000. Student loan debt has tripled over the last decade; it's now the second biggest source of consumer debt behind mortgages. Student loan defaults are also on the rise. And while some might argue that letting your debt fall into default isn't automatically life ruining, starting a family when you don't even qualify to rent a car or have difficulty convincing a landlord to let you sign a lease is less than ideal.

• And speaking of rent, sleeping in your childhood bedroom is one thing, having to convert it to a nursery is entirely another. 29% of 25- 34 year-olds have lived with their parents at some point during the Great Recession and 61% say they have friends or family members who've returned to the nest, the Pew reports. For Millennials who can't make the rent, passing on their genetic material rightly ranks below being able to pay for the necessities of life.

• The marriage age has been steadily increasing over the last three decades. Currently, it's at 28 years old for men and 26 for women. While marriage certainly isn't a prerequisite for procreation, for those who want the former before the latter, a delay in taking the plunge - whether dictated by finance, education or career factors -  means that babies also get backburnered.

That the birth rate declines during tough economic times should surprise no one and in light of the persistence of abstinence-only sex ed, the ignorance of college kids about the more technical aspects of the birds and bees does make a certain sort of sense. But what also makes sense is that Gen Y’s  blindness to the facts of fertility can be contextualized within the broader phenomenon of delayed adulthood and that their lack of knowledge is both a product of being light years away from economic and emotional readiness for procreation and youthful naiveté that the option to become parents – just like marriage and home ownership -  will still be available for them when or if they’ve finally achieved a lifestyle that supports this ambition.

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