Inconceivable. The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty

For generations, creating a family was an ordinary part of human life. But today, there’s a marked gap between how many children people want to have, and how many they actually will. As birth rates plummet around the world, this book answers the urgent question: How did such a fundamental human experience drift so far out of reach? Spurred by the unexpected obstacles she encountered in her own quest to become a parent, journalist and cultural critic Anna Louie Sussman explores what is keeping us from having the families we desire. She asks, in this era of extraordinary opportunity for women, soaring income inequality, and incalculable environmental change, who gets to have children, and why? Through intimate portraits of individuals and couples who find their parenthood project stymied by barriers their own parents could never have imagined, Sussman shows how decades of policy choices that elevated profits over people and individualism over community have left young people increasingly unable to envision a future in which they and their would-be children might thrive. In this wide-ranging and deeply reported analysis, Sussman introduces us to an American nurse whose student loans…

Издательство

HarperCollins

Год

2026

Страниц

248

Язык

английский

ISBN

9780063046351