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IN EARLY American women in the 1970s gave birth, on average, to 2.12 children each. By 2018, that figure had fallen to 1.73. Many changes in people’s lives have been cited to help explain this change, including the fact that women are now better educated, more likely to have jobs or run businesses, and have better access to contraception. than their track record of five decades ago. In addition, the demand for children to work as extra pairs of hands on family farms has declined.
However, none of these explanations perfectly overlap with birth charts. Other factors must also be at work. And Jordan Nickerson and David Solomon, respectively finance professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston College, think they’ve found a surprisingly counter-intuitive solution: America’s increasingly protective child car seat laws.
Their study, “Car seats as contraception,” published in SSRN, a repository for so-called pre-print articles that have not yet undergone formal peer review, examines the effect that car seat policies may have had on U.S. birth rates between 1973 and 2017. In the Reagan era, only toddlers aged under three years – normally had to be secured in child seats. But state governments have since gradually increased the requirements. Today, most places in America require children to sit in safety seats until their eighth birthday. This concern for the safety of young people has had the unintended consequence, suggest Dr Nickerson and Dr Solomon, of reducing the number of families with three children.
To reach this conclusion, they correlated the census data with changes in national safety seat laws. They found that tightening these laws had no detectable effect on the birth rates of first and second children, but was accompanied by an average decline of 0.73 percentage points in the number of women giving birth. birth to a third while the first two were young enough to need safety seats. It might not sound like much, but it is a significant fraction of the 9.36% of women in the sample who became mothers for the third time.
The authors also made two other relevant observations. The reduction they saw was limited to households that actually had access to a car. And it was more important in households where a man lived with the mother. This last point is relevant, they think, as this man would take up space in a vehicle that might otherwise be occupied by a child.
And the space in the vehicle is the crucial factor. In the days leading up to the safety seat, hugging three young children in the back of a family living room was a perfectly achievable proposition. Most of these cars, however, can only comfortably accommodate two safety seats. So the older a child has to be before a safety seat is required, the longer a family has to wait before a third child can get into the car. Sometimes this expectation means that no third child will ever be conceived and born.
Unless, of course, the affected family buys a bigger car. And here things get even more interesting, for the obvious reasons not to – big cars cost more and are more expensive to use – may not be the only drag on change. Dr Nickerson and Dr Solomon have found, in fact, that third-child deterrence seems stronger among wealthier families. As they observe, “Big cars like minivans also have overtones of class and aesthetics that can make people reluctant to change, even when they can afford it.
Rear driver
Oddly, however, the authors do not stop there. Instead, they cite previous studies which suggest that for children over two years of age, safety seats are no better than seat belts at protecting against death or serious injury during a ride. accident. They estimate that laws requiring children to sit in special seats until the age of eight saved an estimated 57 lives in 2017, and compare that number with the 8,000 children who could have been conceived and born in it. absence of such rules. There is, they conclude, no “compelling social interest” in requiring child seats for children over four years of age.
It sounds weird. To compare the putative lives abandoned with the lives actually saved is, to put it politely, a strange moral calculation. And its empirical basis is in any case doubtful. Alisa Baer, a pediatrician in New York who specializes in car seat safety and who claims to have installed at least 15,000 such seats over the years (she is known as the “Car Seat Lady”), states that this part of the document is “Completely absurd”. Child car seats, she says, “save the quality of life” for children who would suffer higher rates of injuries compared to the simple strap-on, including massive abdominal trauma and paralysis. A recent study by Mark Anderson of the University of Washington and Sina Sandholt of the University of Columbia confirms this point.
However, this does not detract from the larger observation Dr Nickerson and Solomon make that well-intentioned actions can have surprising ripple effects. And one of them, it seems, is that the back seats of American cars, once known as places where children were conceived, can now, themselves, act as contraceptives.■
This article was published in the Science and Technology section of the print edition under the title “Berth control”
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