The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

NY Times Keeps Lying About Everything, Including the Basic Facts of Life

Posted on | April 14, 2026 | No Comments

It should go without saying that you should never trust anything published by the New York Times, but Dartmouth College economics professor Paul Novosad has done a great service with this latest demonstration of the NYT “fake news” phenomenon.

The Upshot is a section of the New York Times that advertises itself as providing “analytical journalism in words and graphics,” which is to say, this is the part where they try to add the aura of statistical certainty to their dishonest propaganda: “See? Here’s a chart — numbers don’t lie!”

Last week, they published this steaming pile of poo:

“Fertility delayed is fertility denied” is one of the great maxims of demographics. As a matter of statistical average, postponing parenthood means reducing the total number of children. It requires a few more sentences to explain why this is true, but the fundamental fact is that every woman begins her fertile years at puberty (menarche) and concludes her fertility at menopause. Biology establishes a window of roughly 30 years (roughly ages 15 to 45) during which pregnancy can occur. Let us suppose that the reader is among those who feel a sense of horror about “teenage pregnancy.” While I could argue that this attitude is irrational, I’ll not belabor that point here. But in seeking to eradicate teenage motherhood, what you are attempting to do is to subtract five years from the potential baby-making years of the female population.

Stipulating, then, that no woman should ever give birth before age 20, you still have (in theory) a 25-year period during which births can occur. Ah, but biological fertility declines significantly after age 30, and the risk of birth defects (particularly Down syndrome) increases after age 35. The window for successful childbearing, you see, is actually narrower than the menarche-to-menopause span of 15-to-45 would suggest. That five-year delay you demanded to prevent teenage motherhood has consequences down the line, which is why in recent decades we have had so many 30-something women in crisis at the ticking of their “biological clock.” We cannot go back in time to take advantage of opportunities we have already passed up — fertility delayed is fertility denied.

Liberals don’t want to acknowledge this reality, and for many years have been selling false hope about egg-freezing, IVF and other advanced medical treatments as a panacea for the problems created by attempting to beat the biological clock. Even if you are buying what they’re selling — i.e., that becoming a mom at 45 is medically feasible — does it make sense that any large number of childless women would pursue these expensive procedures? You’ve gone childless for decades, and now at middle age, you’re going to pay tens of thousands of dollars to make a baby? Do you want to be the only 50-year-old mom at your kindergartner’s PTA? And then you’ll be eligible for Social Security by the time this kid graduates high school. This kind of choice just doesn’t make sense, which is why very few women actually do it. Yet the New York Times assigned Claire Cain Miller to keep selling this unrealistic idea:

Fertility in the United States has been declining since the Great Recession, and reached a new low last year, according to federal data released Thursday, causing some to fear a baby bust.
But it’s not clear that will happen. Instead, there could be a lull, demographers say — a period of very low fertility that could eventually rebound.
That’s because of a drastic shift among American women who are now of childbearing age: They are waiting longer to have babies. They’ve become much less likely to have them in their teens or 20s — and much more likely to in their 30s or 40s.

This is not true. Women are no more “likely” to become mothers in their 30s and 40s than they were when I was born in 1959, when my mom was 30 and I was her second child. In fact, the birth rate for women in their 30s and 40s is much lower now than it was during the Baby Boom.

Miller tries to sell this with a chart showing percentage increases in births to older women, but as Professor Novosad demonstrates, this misrepresents the change in the actual number of births.

While it is true that, compared to 2007, there were about 120,000 more births to women 35 and older in 2024, this is a drop in the bucket compared to 1.2 million fewer births among women under 30.

The question of what can be done, as a matter of public policy, to reverse the current alarming trend of below-replacement fertility has perplexed the intellectuals and politicians of our age, but we can never fix a problem by denying the problem exists, which is what Claire Cain Miller is doing with her dishonest chart. Miller and the New York Times are still committed to promoting the same anti-marriage/anti-motherhood feminist propaganda that got us here in the first place. They are still part of the problem, and therefore cannot be part of the solution.



 

Category: Media Bias, New York Times

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