Anna Louie Sussman's "Inconceivable" Examines the Gap Between Desired and Actual Fertility

Key facts

• Anna Louie Sussman's "Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty" is published by Dey Street
• Sussman retrieved eggs frozen in Bologna six years earlier at age thirty-four and paid about three thousand dollars for an embryo transfer in Europe versus roughly fifteen thousand dollars in the U.S.
• Global fertility fell from about five births per woman in the nineteen-sixties to 2.2 in 2024
• About seventy per cent of the world's population lives in countries with fertility below the 2.1 replacement level
• The U.S. fertility rate is 1.6 and South Korea's is below one
• Almost half of U.S. women aged thirty are childless, compared with eighteen per cent in 1976
• A 2025 U.N. study of fourteen thousand people in fourteen countries found most wanted two children but fewer than four in ten expected to have that many
• A 2023 Pew poll found seventy-one per cent of American adults rated an enjoyable job or career very important to a fulfilling life, versus twenty-six per cent for children and twenty-three per cent for marriage