Beyond Birth Rates:
Advancing a Pro-Alignment Approach to Low Fertility in North America
WHEN: August 20, 2026 (all day)
WHERE: Hybrid Conference
In-Person: Arts Building, Room W-120, 麻豆社,
Online: Zoom
TO REGISTER:
ANY QUESTIONS, contact Jennifer Proudfoot at jennifer.proudfoot [at] mcgill.ca
Worried about low and declining birth rates? Is there really a fertility 鈥渃risis鈥�?
Learn from experts from across North America how we can face our demographic future with facts, not fear, and develop policies that respect reproductive autonomy, promote gender equality, and support all types of families.
This hybrid event, sponsored by 麻豆社鈥檚 Centre on Population Dynamics and the Vanier Institute of the Family, will bring together leading demographers, family scientists, economists, reproductive health researchers, and policy analysts to examine the implications of low fertility, dispel common myths and misperceptions, and propose pro-alignment policies to help people avoid both unintended and unrealized fertility and foster demographic resilience.
What is a pro-alignment approach to low fertility?
A pro-alignment Approach has two main goals:
1) Help individuals align their fertility outcomes with their fertility desires, regardless of whether they do or do not want to have (more) children.
2) Develop population policies, including economic, family, aging, health, and immigration policies, that align with existing population sizes and structures and reflect the growing diversity of contemporary families.
AGENDA
9:00 a.m.-9:30 a.m.: Registration and Light Breakfast
9:30 a.m.-9:45 a.m.: Welcome and Introduction
Erin Strumpf (Director, Centre on Population Dynamics, 麻豆社)
Martin Settle (Acting Executive Director, Vanier Institute of the Family)
9:45 a.m.-10:45 a.m.: Two Contrasting Approaches to Low Fertility
Chair: Sarah Brauner-Otto (麻豆社)
The Decline in Fertility and the Rise of Pronatalism
Karen Benjamin Guzzo (University of North Carolina)
What is a Pro-Alignment Approach 鈥� And Why is it Needed?
Shelley Clark (麻豆社)
10:45 a.m.-11:00 a.m.: Coffee Break
11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.: Replacing Fear with Facts: Countering Hyperbolic Pronatalist Claims
Chair: Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue (Cornell University/Population Council)
Pronatalist Claims vs. Demographic Reality: A Brief Guide to Demographic Measures and Methods
Leslie Root (University of Colorado, Boulder)
The Macroeconomic Effects of Fertility Decline
Joshua Wilde (Oxford University)
12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m.: Lunch
1:00 p.m.-2:30 p.m.: Challenges to Meeting Fertility Goals
Chair: Sonia Laszlo (麻豆社)
Unintended Births: Access to Contraception and Abortion Care
Laura Lindberg (Rutgers University)
Unrealized Births: Distant and Proximal Uncertainty, Intensive Parenting, and Fertility Goals
Luca Badolato (Oxford University)
What if Fertility and Gender Equality Were Linked? Lessons from Quebec
Sophie Mathieu (Universit茅 de Sherbrooke)
Overcoming Challenges to Reproductive Autonomy for 2SLGBTQI People
Eric Freeman (Egale Canada)
2:30 p.m.-2:45 p.m.: Coffee Break
2:45 p.m.-4:15 p.m.: Pro-Alignment Population Policies
Chair: Mahjoube AmaniChakani (麻豆社)
Maternal and Reproductive Health Policy in an Era of Low Fertility
Alison Gemmill (UCLA)
Impact of Parental Leave Policies on Fertility in Canada
Beno卯t Laplante (INRS)
Beyond Fertility: Measuring the Social and Economic Impacts of Parental Leave Policies
Catherine Haeck (UQAM)
Members, Not Numbers: Immigrants and Demographic Resilience
Leafia Ye (University of Toronto)
4:15 p.m.-4:30 p.m.: The Way Forward: Facing a New Demographic Horizon
Sarah Hayford (Ohio State University)
笔谤别蝉别苍迟别谤蝉听
Shelley Clark
Prof. Clark is a demographer whose research focuses on gender, health, family dynamics, and life course transitions. After receiving her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1999, Dr. Clark served as program associate at the Population Council in New York (1999 to 2002) and as an Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago (2002 to 2006). In the summer of 2006, she joined the Department of Sociology at 麻豆社, where in 2012 she became the founding Director of the Centre on Population Dynamics. Much of her research over two decades has examined how adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa make key transitions to adulthood in the midst of an on-going HIV/AIDS epidemic. Additional work has highlighted the social, economic, and health vulnerabilities of single mothers and their children in sub-Saharan Africa. Recently she has embarked on a new research agenda to assess rural and urban inequalities and family dynamics in the United States and Canada. She recently co-edited a special issue of The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences on "Growing Up in Rural America." Her findings have been published in leading journals, such as Demography, Population and Development Review, Social Forces, and Journal of Marriage and Family, and presented to policy makers at influential international organizations, including the World Bank, WHO, UN, and the Population Council.
Karen Benjamin Guzzo
Karen Benjamin Guzzo听is a family demographer and sociologist. She serves as Director of the Carolina Population Center and is a Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Guzzo鈥檚 research has been funded by multiple grants from federal agencies, including the NICHD Population Dynamics Branch (PDB), the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) within the Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Science Foundation. She served as a Board Member for the Population Association of America and the National Council on Family Relations. She has been a Deputy Editor for Demography since 2017 and serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Marriage and Family, Family Transitions, and Journal of Family Theory and Review. She is the chair of the American Sociological Association鈥檚 (ASA) Sociology of Population section. Dr. Guzzo鈥檚 research has been published in top demography and family science journals, and she frequently appears in major news outlets, such as NPR鈥檚 Fresh Air, The New York Times, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal, to provide insight into contemporary childbearing patterns in the U.S.
Leslie Root
Leslie Root is a demographer and assistant professor of research in the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is also the associate director of the University of Colorado Population Center. Her research is in the fields of fertility and sexual and reproductive health, and current projects center on the effect of social forces - contraceptive access, the COVID pandemic, and pronatalist policies - on individuals' fertility over the life course. She also studies population politics, abortion, and the demography of pregnancy and the perinatal period. She has regional expertise in the United States and the former Soviet Union. She holds a PhD in demography from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an MA in Eurasian, Russian, and East European studies from Georgetown University.
Laura Lindberg
Laura Lindberg is a professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health in New Jersey, where she directs the program in sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. As a social demographer by training, her research examines the trends, determinants, and consequences of sexual and reproductive health in the U.S., with a particular focus on the experiences of adolescents and young adults. Her current work includes a five-year project funded by the National Institutes of Health to create a comprehensive, open-access data dashboard of state sexual and reproductive health policies that combines rigorous legal coding with accessible tools for researchers, policy makers, and advocates. Before joining Rutgers, Dr. Lindberg spent nearly two decades as a Research Scientist at the Guttmacher Institute. She is a founding member of Youth Reproductive Equity, a collaborative dedicated to advancing equitable access to sexual and reproductive health services for young people. Dr. Lindberg is the recent recipient of the New Jersey Health Foundation Excellence in Research Award, the Society of Family Planning Mentorship Award, and the Carl S. Shultz Lifetime Achievement Award from the Sexual and Reproductive Health section of the American Public Health Association. When she鈥檚 not thinking about data, Dr. Lindberg is thinking about the next Broadway show on her calendar.
Luca Badolato
Luca Badolato is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Demography at the University of Oxford, where he is affiliated with the Department of Sociology and Nuffield College. His research examines the drivers and consequences of population change in both low-fertility contexts, particularly in the United States, and high-fertility contexts across sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on reproductive rights and justice frameworks, his work illuminates the barriers that prevent individuals from achieving their reproductive goals and how social inequalities shape reproductive experiences across the life course. Luca received a Ph.D. in Sociology from The Ohio State University, where he was affiliated with the Institute for Population Research, and an M.Sc. in Economic and Social Sciences from Bocconi University. His doctoral dissertation examined childlessness by combining demographic analyses of trends and patterns in childlessness across low-fertility contexts, computational analyses of motivations and experiences of childfree individuals using large-scale data from Reddit, and longitudinal qualitative interviews with young adults in the United States about their family formation and broader life plans. Luca鈥檚 work contributes to ongoing debates on fertility decline by emphasizing the needs, agency, and well-being of individuals. While acknowledging the real consequences of population change, it focuses on fostering societies in which everyone can thrive and achieve their aspirations.
Eric Freeman
Eric Freeman is the senior staff lawyer at Egale. Prior to joining Egale, Eric began his career as a commercial litigator, working at a national law firm in Toronto. In 2021-2022, Eric clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada for Justice Suzanne C么t茅. He also clerked for the Judges of the Court of Appeal for Ontario in 2019-2020, where he completed his articles. Eric graduated from Osgoode Hall Law School, where he served as a senior editor for the Osgoode Hall Law Journal. Prior to law school, Eric obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Mount Allison University and a Masters degree in Political Science at 麻豆社.
Beno卯t Laplante
Beno卯t Laplante is Full Professor at the Centre Urbanisation Culture Soci茅t茅 of the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), Montr茅al, Canada. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Universit茅 de Montr茅al. His research lies at the intersection of family demography, sociology of education, and the historical sociology of family law. Methodologically, he specializes in quantitative methods, particularly longitudinal approaches and event-history (survival) analysis. Professor Laplante鈥檚 research has focused primarily on family demography. His work has examined the diffusion of common-law unions in Quebec, addressing both their demographic dimensions and the social transformations associated with them, including changes in religious norms and the evolving legal framework of family relationships. He has also explored differences in fertility between common-law unions and marriage, as well as the impact of family policies on fertility behaviour. More recently, his research has focused on fertility intentions and their realization in Canada. In parallel, he pursues comparative work in Latin American family demography, examining fertility, family formation, and the social and institutional contexts that shape demographic behaviour. In the field of sociology of education, his research has examined the role of the educational system in processes of social reproduction in Quebec, with particular attention to the ways families use educational pathways to maintain and transmit social advantage across generations.
Catherine Haeck
Catherine Haeck is a Full Professor in the Department of Economics at UQAM and holder of a new Chair on child well-being. A specialist in the economics of education, labour, and health, she studies the human capital development of children and youth and the intergenerational transmission of income and education. Drawing on large representative microdata sets, her work focuses on programs and policies affecting inequalities in educational achievement and health. Her work was published in the American Economic Journal : Applied Economics, the Journal of Labor Economics, JAMA Pediatrics, the Canadian Journal of Economics and Canadian Public Policy, among others.
Leafia Ye
Leafia Ye is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, where she is cross-appointed at the Institute for Life Course & Aging and affiliated with the Global Migration Lab and the Centre for Global Social Policy. Dr. Ye is a scholar of international migration and aging. Her work identifies barriers to immigrant integration into host societies by documenting how and why socioeconomics and health inequalities evolve over the life course. She has particularly strong expertise in the well-being of immigrants in the U.S. and Canada as they navigate aging and retirement. Her work has received funding from the National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health, and awards from multiple sections of the American Sociological Association.
Sarah Hayford
Sarah Hayford is Robert T. Lazarus Professor in the Department of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University. She studies childbearing, family formation, and reproductive health, primarily in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa. She is interested in how people make plans about these behaviors and who is able to carry out their plans. Recent and current research topics include uncertainty in fertility intentions and desires in the United States, cultural models of parenthood, the transition to adulthood in low- and middle-income countries, and how reproductive trajectories shape women鈥檚 long-term health and well-being in rural Mozambique. Hayford鈥檚 research has been funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and by private foundations.
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