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 keep him and his wife from trying for the family they've always wanted, and a Polish lawyer barred from receiving IVF as a single woman. She shows how young South Koreans' disgust with a hypercompetitive education system and job market have helped bring the country's fertility rate to the lowest in the world, and why even the stellar family policies of the Nordic states are not enough to combat the sense that the future grows more uncertain and inhospitable to children with every passing day. The stories she shares illustrate the profoundly human cost of what happens when those who dream of having a child are unable to experience that love.

A singular and timely investigation into how everything from partnership to education to the very process of creating a baby has been altered by a capitalist system run amok, Inconceivable is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the universal challenges (and triumphs) of building families in our uncertain age.

Anna Louie Sussman is a journalist reporting on gender, economics, health, and reproduction, and a contributing Opinion writer at The New York Times. A former staff reporter at Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, she now contributes to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, New York, The New Republic, The Nation, The Guardian, Elle, and other publications. She has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, residencies, and awards, including from the Logan Nonfiction Program, MacDowell, the Fetisov Journalism Awards, the Kavli Science Journalism Awards, the Hambidge Center, the Greater Good Science Center, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the DeGroot Foundation, and others. She was a member of the 2022 Class of New America Fellows, the 2024 cohort of Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellows, and an Omidyar Network Reporter in Residence in the fall of 2024. She has reported from two dozen countries in the Middle East, South America, Europe, Asia, and North America.