Money and Motherhood.

What a new study teaches us about our fertility crisis.

A December 2025 working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago has quietly laid bare a choice that most policymakers, pundits, and cultural commentators refuse to acknowledge. The paper, “Fertility and Family Labor Supply,” by Jakobsen, Jørgensen, and Low, uses decades of Danish register data to demonstrate something that should stop us in our t…