Is it harder to have kids today? Or is it harder to want to?

Anna Louie Sussman’s book, Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty, arrived as Rep.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been documenting her egg freezing journey. | Sarah Rice/Getty Images “From the outset, reproduction is a collaborative venture,” writes Anna Louie Sussman, a journalist who has spent years reporting how people all over the world try, and too often fail, to build the families they want.

Her work explores how the collaborators of reproduction keep multiplying: doctors, employers, legislators, insurers, and a fertility industry that increasingly promises not just a baby but a better one.

In her new book, Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty , Sussman traces the economic, political, and psychological negotiations that stand between people and the children they say they want.

Her reporting challenges the assumption that falling birth rates can be fully explained by metrics like income, marriage and education that demographers tend to focus on.

She argues the answers are much more personal and resistant to measurement.

I wanted to better understand what Sussman meant by this idea of “impossibility of family” — and how one would even determine that, whether as a prospective parent or as a policymaker.

What are the biggest barriers to having kids and how do people tell the difference between what they can’t afford and what they’ve come to believe they need? How much does the media conversation about these issues inform people’s choices? I spoke with her about what Rep.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s egg freezing reveals about women who aren’t running for president, what countries that subsidize fertility treatment tell us about the demand going unmet here, and why she hesitates to say outright that having children is good.

Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

You started working on this book seven years ago.

What has most surprised you about how the conversation around fertility and family formation has changed in that time? There are some people on the left who have always paid attention to family issues, like Elizabeth Warren with her work on bankruptcy and the “two-income trap,” but I do think we’ve been seeing a lot more movement there, with groups like the Congressional Dads Caucus [in 2023] , and care infrastructure ideas like those in the Build Back Better Act.

There’s also been all this movement around paid leave in the states, 3-K and pre-K, and attempts for more affordable child care .