Some Couples Postpone Having Kids as Costs Rise

Expanding your family is often a difficult financial decision to make. I would know: A few years ago, I had an abortion because it was not financially feasible for me to be pregnant or have a child.

At the time, I was still breastfeeding my one-and-a-half year old, and my use of breastfeeding as birth control had failed. (Breastfeeding a newborn at consistent intervals can sometimes be used as a form of birth control because it can prevent ovulation. It tends to be effective only for about six months, according to Kaiser Permanente.)

It was the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. My husband and I were already caring for a toddler and my 9-year-old stepson during lockdowns, and I was a full-time college student pulling double duty as a stay-at-home mom. We could not bring a new baby into our life.

My OB-GYN had also previously told me that another pregnancy could kill me. During my first pregnancy, I was rushed to an emergency cesarean section because my daughter became trapped inside my birth canal after 45 minutes of pushing. My doctor flat out told me that I could choose to give birth again, but making that decision could leave behind my husband to raise our family alone as a widower.

In the three years since I had my abortion, I have graduated with my bachelor’s degree and am closing in on my master’s degree. I’ve been promoted into a full-time job as a manager at a nonprofit, and upgraded to a bigger house.

My husband and I finally felt ready to expand our family again, so we began the process of becoming licensed to foster. Recently, however, we paused that process. My husband is paying tariffs on supplies for his small, construction-related business. My employer is state-funded, and possible funding cuts threaten one of my contracts. This means that raises or cost-of-living adjustments are harder to budget for.

Financial stress is prompting life-altering decisions across the country. Many people across the United States are postponing or fully rejecting the decision to expand their families. I spoke to three of them about how the economy—and specifically, President Donald Trump’s recently-passed tax reconciliation bill, marketed as the “big, beautiful bill”—is affecting their family-planning decisions.

Many said that the nation’s affordability crisis, along with the restrictive reproductive policies of the post-Roe v. Wade era, have played a significant role in their decision.

Rapidly rising costs

“Building a family is expensive,” Mrinmoyee Chatterjee, a senior social science research and data analyst for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said in an interview with Rewire News Group.

Chatterjee’s research focuses on gender equity, women’s work, and fertility, and she provided RNG with her data.

(Read more: Babymaking Sex Can Be ‘Some of the Worst Sex People Have’)

Chatterjee noted that while the costs of raising a child are increasing all over the world, they are especially staggering in the U.S. The most conservative estimates put the cost of raising a child at nearly $30,000 a year—up more than 35 percent from 2023 due to increasing costs of food, day care, and insurance, research from online lending marketplace Lending Tree shows.

About 21 percent of American households do not even make $35,000 annually.

In addition, Chatterjee said, the weakening economy has an outsized impact on women in the workforce. When the economy is weak and child care is not affordable, for example, mothers are more likely to stay at home for longer after giving birth and less likely to return to the workforce.

Returning to paid work after a yearslong hiatus can be difficult. That certainly was my experience after staying home with my daughter for nearly three years.

“The gains in women’s employment and in closing the gender wage gap … are always less likely to happen if the economy is overall weak,” Chatterjee explained.

One example of a cost that is continuing to rise, Chatterjee said, is the price tag of a college education. Since 2006, out-of-state tuition and fees at public universities have gone up 24 percent, according to inflation-adjusted data from U.S. News. In-state tuition and fees rose 29 percent during the same period.

College costs are not counted in official estimates of the lifetime cost of childrearing, which is often calculated to the time a child is 17 years old. Because food, child care, and education costs keep rising, estimating the real lifelong cost to raise a child can be tricky, but Chatterjee tried.

“The actual cost of raising a child from birth to age 17 is nearly $300,000,” she concluded.

Facing that sum, the government’s newly created baby bonds, or “Trump accounts”—which are meant to incentivize couples to have babies—are, Chatterjee said, “a drop in the bucket.”

The economic toll

For the people I spoke to who decided not to pursue a pregnancy, financial security was a major factor in the decision.

Hailey, a former teacher in the South Bend, Indiana area, and her partner have put their plans to have their first child on hold for now. Hailey requested to only use her first name to maintain privacy as she seeks new employment.

Hailey and her partner have owned their house for more than a year, and they find that home ownership is actually less costly than renting. But Hailey recently quit her job as a kindergarten teacher after five years because she was burnt out, she said.

She is looking for a new career path in part because she worries that the mental and emotional exhaustion of teaching could impact a potential pregnancy and parenthood.

“‘Am I doing more harm to my body with the stress [of] being exhausted in my job?’” she asked herself this past school year. “I would never be able to balance [teaching and motherhood] because I would never be able to give 100 percent to either.”

Hailey said she will have to find another job to make parenthood possible at all; her partner’s stable income as a website editor won’t be enough to expand their family.

“The cost of living here is expensive,” she said, of South Bend.

Overall, South Bend costs less to live in than the national average, but median households earn less too.

“Growing up with financial struggles, it’s always kind of in the back of my head,” Hailey said.

Keith, 30, is a manager at a financial institution living in Denver. (Keith asked to only go by his first name to maintain his family’s personal and professional privacy.) His wife works as a case manager for a Medicaid contractor.

Together they make just over $100,000, putting their income in roughly the top 40 percent of households nationwide. Yet they’re postponing having a first child, too, in large part for financial reasons.

“The cost of living in the Denver metro area is ridiculously high,” Keith said.

Keith and his wife live in a one-bedroom apartment, and they shell out $2,300 a month for that space.

“Interest rates and inflated house prices keep us locked into renting because the down payment goal post keeps moving faster and faster,” Keith said. “The economy and country seem very unstable, and have for most of my adult life.”

Keith noted that owning a car is essential there, too.

“Public transportation exists,” he said. But “it’s not conducive to keeping stable employment” he added, citing a lack of routes and times.

Abortion bans and Medicaid cuts add to the equation

Waning access to contraception and draconian new restrictions on abortion compound families’ decisions of whether to have a child.

Indiana’s anti-abortion laws, for example, have forced Hailey and her family to discuss what they would do in the event of a reproductive or pregnancy-related emergency.

Hailey worries that if she miscarries, doctors could deny her the treatment needed to clear her body of the failed pregnancy—despite the fact that, medically, procedures for abortion and miscarriage are typically the same. But in Indiana, anti-abortion laws are so strict that she may not be able to receive medication or procedural abortion care.

Lindsay, an auditor from Maine, echoed Hailey’s concerns about anti-abortion laws. She and her partner have been trying to have a baby for over four years. Earlier this year in 2025, she got pregnant—but the pregnancy was ectopic, a dangerous condition where a fertilized egg implants outside of the uterus.

“For the states like Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, and others that prevent abortion completely or after six weeks, I would have either died in those states or had to travel elsewhere to treat my ectopic pregnancy,” Lindsay said. “It was the worst thing I’ve ever had to go through since we desperately wanted that baby.”

They have suffered financially, too, in their attempts at growing their family.

(Read more: Infant Mortality Rises in States With Restrictive Abortion Laws—New Research)

Lindsay, with her partner by her side supporting her every step of the way, has done three years of fertility treatments including intrauterine insemination (IUI), acupuncture, prescription medicine, over-the-counter supplements, and in vitro fertilization. Lindsay estimates the couple has spent over half of their household income on trying to get pregnant.

“We already have so much medical debt,” she lamented.

Republicans, she said, are making the financial pain of this process worse with their failure to act to make reproductive healthcare interventions, like IVF, more accessible for those who are not wealthy.

“They are making it impossible for those of us going through extreme measures to try by withholding financial access to treatments,” she added.

Federal spending cuts, particularly to the public insurance program Medicaid, could also affect pregnant people’s medical care.

Chatterjee explained that Medicaid expansion previously increased pregnant people’s quality of care by increasing how many pregnant people were attending prenatal appointments and how early on in their pregnancy they were doing so. Previous restrictions on Title X funding led to health-care losses and contraceptive deserts.

“[With] slashing programs like this and other state/local programs, health outcomes will be worse,” Chatterjee said.

Birth rates lower as cost of raising children raises

All of this past research and data, historically, does not bode well for birth rates.

On July 24, 2025 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report that found the U.S. fertility rate had dropped to an all-time low in 2024. Last year, the total U.S. fertility rate was just under 1.6 kids per woman, down from 1.621 in 2023.

Birth rates have been dropping worldwide for decades, and researchers have attributed the drop to fears of climate change, fewer teen pregnancies, and gender equality, among other reasons.

“The drop in birth rates that has happened in the past is a symptom of the economy that makes it harder and harder for families and caregivers to have and raise children,” Chatterjee said. “The current administration’s efforts do not seem to be making it easier, especially for the families that need the most support: ones with women of color, immigrant women, single-parent families, [and] families with low household incomes.”

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