It’s a truism that every child should be wanted. While there are plenty of exceptions, the birth of an unwanted child often turns out badly for both mother and child (and father, if they are present). Sometimes, once a child is born, the fact that they were initially unwanted fades into irrelevance, and the bond between parents and child is as strong as with a planned birth. But this isn’t true on average: children born after their mother was denied an abortion (due to time limits) experience, on average, more poverty and poorer maternal bonding The extreme case is that of Ceausescu’s Romania, where abortions were banned, and the resuling unwanted children received miserable upbringings in orphanages.

The birth of an unwanted child can be an economic as well as a personal catastrophe. This is crucial to understand when we are assessing claims that “the economy” would benefit if families had more children than they currently choose.

Raising a child from birth to adulthood requires huge inputs of labour, time and money. In the context of a loving family, these parental inputs are more than offset by the joy of having children. Because this context is assumed, most estimates of the costs of raising children typically focus on the financial costs incurred by their parents. That’s been estimated at 13 per cent of a family’s disposable income on the first child and a further ten percentage points for each child after that. For median couples, that amounts to about $300,000 over 18 years for the first child. Subsequent children would be about $230,000 each. 

Credit: Boston Public Library,

That’s a lot of money. But if the main work of parental care is replaced by paid workers unrelated to the child the cost is stupendous – in Australia $100 000 a year for foster care and as much as $1 million a year for high-needs children. And in the case of an unwanted child raised by their parents, the same work must be carried out without pay.

On top of that, there is public expenditure on schooling and childcare, around $20 000 per school-age child per year or another $ 300 000 by the time high school is completed. On average, this a good investment for society considered purely in financial terms. The extra earnings of more educated workers are shared with society as a whole through the tax system and are sufficient to cover the costs of schooling with a surplus left over. But that surplus is tiny compared to the public and private costs of raising a child.

The policy implication here is that there is no point in trying to induce women, and their partners, to have more children than they currently want. However the economic costs of raising unwanted children are divided between parents and the states they far exceed the benefits accruing to society as a whole [1]

The only way to increase birth rates is to remove obstacles to childbearing for those who want more children than they already have. Those obstacles include infertility, the lack of a suitable partner and economic insecurity. We could probably do more on infertility (including options like surrogacy) but addressing the other big obstacles would require huge social changes. Many of these, such as a reduction in the time demands of paid work, would not be welcome to some of the advocates of higher birth rates.

fn1. Of course, once a child is born their interests count just as much as anyone else’s. But we do no harm to any of the uncountable trillions of possible children by not bringing them into existence in the first place.