When safety culture backfires and becomes anti-family

Laws meant to save kids' lives actually prevented 145,000 people from ever being born

Credit: Dall-E 2

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Last year, I wrote a piece for the Deseret News about my frustration with car seat laws. The gist was that laws have become dramatically more expansive over the last few decades, meaning kids are required to sit in car seats for many more years than they did when I was a small child in the 1980s.

My biggest practical gripe with this trend boils down to cost¹. By lengthening the time kids have to use car seats, families end up needing multiple seats at the same time. So a family with two kids needs two car seats. A family with three kids needs three car seats, and so on.

That means the cost of the car seats themselves adds up², but the bigger expense is for vehicles. Most sedans can’t accommodate three car seats — or can’t do so easily — so families with three or more kids end up buying either a minivan or an SUV. Certainly, there are families who for a variety of reasons make do without one of these larger vehicles³. But for many families, a big car feels close to obligatory. And the result is that having a third kid often comes with a bill of $40,000 or more — on top of any medical expenses associated with a birth — for transportation⁴.

The obvious result is that people get priced out of having kids. And significantly, this is a relatively recent phenomenon; laws that keep kids in car seats well into elementary school mostly sprang up in the 1990s and later.

But now, thanks to some research that an eagle-eyed friend of the blog recently sent me, we have some hard numbers to describe what’s going on. In a paper titled “Car Seats as Contraception,” professors from the University of Washington and Boston College found that in 2017, car seats saved the lives of 57 children in the U.S. Which is great.

But the researchers also found that car seat laws “led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births” in just 2017 alone. Since 1980, car seat laws have prevented a staggering 145,000 births.

The paper goes on to note that for each additional year kids have to stay in car seats, the probability that women will have a third child goes down. And it notes that if kids only had to stay in car seats until they were four years old, rather than eight (the current median age across various jurisdictions), women would actually have more kids⁵.

Interestingly, the paper also argues that car seats themselves are not more effective at preventing serious injuries or death than seat belts when it comes to kids older than two. The authors seem almost puzzled, in that light, by the aggressive expansion of car seat laws. And they speculate that regulators may not realize what’s really happening, and that people may perceive car seat laws as “virtually costless.”

But of course such laws are not costless, and the paper concludes by describing the current situation as having a “perverse effect” that results in “large reductions in birth rates.” The paper’s final line sums things up nicely, saying it’s “difficult to imagine the compelling social interest in existing policy arrangements.”

Now, obviously — and the paper notes this as well — car seat laws were created with the best of intentions. But the numbers are pretty clear. In the course of just one year, they cost 7,943 lives (8,000-57=7,943). To borrow a phrase from the paper, it’s “difficult to imagine” any way such a number can be construed as a victory.

I know there will be a debate about comparing the lives of actual flesh and blood people to those who haven’t been born⁶. But even if you don’t see that as an apples-to-apples comparison, I think most people would agree that we have an ethical obligation to think about people in the future. It’s why we are concerned about climate change and social security. It’s why the world is dotted with great works of art and architecture that were designed to enrich future generations.

But in this case we’ve rolled out policies that prevented members of those future generations from existing in the first place. It's an anti-family outcome to a pro-family idea.

Even without weighing the present against the future, the research raises questions about how extensively regulations should be allowed to dictate reproductive choices. Consider the paper’s title: “Car Seats as Contraception.” Imagine if there were other mandated uses of contraception. For instance, what if we imposed a tax on sex so that each time a couple wanted to be intimate they had to pay a fee. It feels ridiculous even writing such a sentence because no one would ever support such a policy.

But the research suggest that car seat laws, well-intentioned as they may be, effectively function in a similar way. They just impose the fee at a different and later point in the reproductive journey.

This situation has an array of implications. Obviously pricing people out of the ability to choose their family size cuts against the idea that we should all get to pursue happiness as we see fit. The story of progress in a liberal democracy is the story of extending more choices and more opportunities to more people. But imposing onerous regulations with dubious results restricts opportunity and limits choice.

If that argument feels too touchy-feely, consider also that many parts of the world are beginning to grapple with serious population declines; if birthrates fall too low, there won’t be enough young people to take care of the elderly or to continue supporting the economy. It’s a serious problem. Some countries are responding by handing out huge tax benefits, free childcare, IVF support, parental leave and an array of other incentives in an effort to convince people to have kids⁷.

A lot of those policies spring from good ideas worth considering no matter what country you live in.

But another good idea is to stop, or better yet reverse, the creeping expansion of policies that impose massive mandatory costs on would-be parents. Don’t make it harder to have a family. Make it easier. Because at the end of the day, good intentions are a lot less important than results.

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Headlines to read this week:

The Malthusians Are Back

“In recent years, many climate advocates have emphasized human population itself—as opposed to related factors such as consumption and technology—as the driving force behind environmental destruction. This is, at bottom, a very old idea that can be traced back to the 18th-century cleric Thomas Malthus. It is also analytically unsound and morally objectionable. Critics of overpopulation down through the ages have had a nasty habit of treating people less as individuals with value and agency than as sentient locusts.

[…]

And these concerns are being raised at a peculiar moment in human history. The total population of human beings on Earth is expected to peak and decline later this century, not because of war, famine, or disease, but because of secularly declining fertility. The challenge that nations including Germany, South Korea, Japan, and even India and China are dealing with today is underpopulation, not overpopulation. Migrants, particularly those who are young and skilled, will be crucial to generating economic growth in these countries. This makes the neo-Malthusian dismissal of technology, infrastructure, and growth particularly troubling. Supporting an aging population will require an economic surplus that has traditionally been supplied by a favorable ratio of younger workers in the labor force to retirees. As that ratio reverses, it is not clear how infrastructure maintenance and social-services financing will fare.”

1. Another complaint I have is that this situation makes kids passive backseat passengers who are taught to understand themselves as surrounded by danger and in need of ever escalating safety devices.

2. When I was a kid, we got a hand-me-down car seat, then passed it down so all of my siblings used it. Today, hand-me-downs are often viewed as unsafe, and you can’t use the same seat for multiple kids because they all need their own seats simultaneously.

3. We were briefly that family, loading our three kids into a two-door coup. It wasn’t easy, but it was doable. But it was interesting to see the responses from other parents, who seemed to regard us with a mixture of curiosity and pity. Eventually, as I have written previously, we bought a larger vehicle from my family.

4. The best solution is to simply build communities where driving isn’t necessary. Walkable communities are common across the world, but regrettably rare in the US, and they allow people to get around without either the cost of car-related safety equipment or the dangers associated with ditching that equipment. It’s literally the best of both worlds. But this isn’t an urban planning blog, so I’ll leave it there.

5. The authors also found that car seat laws influenced fertility despite the fact that it’s “rare to find people who will openly state that car seats concretely stopped them having a third child.” In other words, few people are going to explicitly say that they were priced out of having a kid because of car seat laws, but the data shows that that’s exactly what’s happening.

6. Though there is increasing pressure in some arenas to weigh the interests of future lives against those of people living now. In urban planning, for example, experts will often advocate on behalf of a neighborhood’s future residents and oppose policies that would exclude those future residents from ever actually materializing.

7. The U.S. population isn’t shrinking yet, but its growth slowed to a snail’s pace of 0.4% in 2022 — and most of that growth came from immigration, not a high fertility rate. So a shrinking population is likely in the cards for us Americans as well.