Who gets to have children? Anna Louie Sussman investigates the true cost of creating life in the modern world.

For generations, creating a family was an ordinary part of human life. But today, there’s a stark divide between how many children women want to have, and how many they actually will. As birth rates plummet around the world, this book answers the urgent question: how did such a fundamental human experience drift so far out of reach? Spurred by the unexpected obstacles she encountered in her own quest to become a parent, journalist and cultural critic Anna Louie Sussman explores what is keeping us from having the families we desire. She asks, in this era of extraordinary opportunity for women, soaring income inequality, and incalculable environmental change, who gets to have children, and why?

Through intimate portraits of individuals and couples who find their parenthood project stymied by barriers their own parents could never have imagined, Sussman shows how decades of policy choices that elevated profits over people and individualism over interdependence has left young people increasingly unable to envision a future in which they and their would-be children might thrive.

In this wide-ranging and deeply reported analysis, Sussman shows how young South Koreans’ disgust with a hypercompetitive education system and job market have helped bring the country’s fertility rate to the lowest in the world, and why even the stellar family policies of the Nordic states are not enough to combat the sense that the future grows more uncertain and inhospitable to children with every passing day. From the American nurse whose student loans keep him and his wife from trying for the family they’ve always wanted to the Polish lawyer who was barred from receiving IVF as a single mom, the stories she shares illustrate the deeply human cost of what happens when those who dream of having a child are unable to experience that love.

A singular and timely investigation into how everything from romance to education to the very process of creating a baby has been altered by a capitalist system run amok, Inconceivable is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the universal challenges (and triumphs) of building families in our uncertain age.

Inconceivable: Reproduction in the Age of Uncertainty

Inconceivable: Reproduction in the Age of Uncertainty