Why is having a child so increasingly out of reach, economically, socially, and emotionally? And for those who choose to have children, why does the burden feel so massive? Political realities influence our most intimate of choices, whether we want them to or not. Journalist Anna Louie Sussman is interested in how, when, and why people become parents, and in the political decisions that affect our experiences of parenthood. In her new book, Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty, she traces the factors that make parenthood so difficult through the stories of several people weighing the choice to become a parent. We cover a lot of ground in this interview, including: How economic uncertainty puts parenthood out of reach for so many. This is a political choice, not an inevitability. So why is it the one we make? Whether parenting really is harder now than it was a generation or two ago. The shame of struggling in a culture that makes parenting feel impossible. Anti-child bias, its role in cultural life, and how child-free spaces exclude mothers and therefore women. How motherhood as an identity so often undermines everything else women do. The sickness of busyness: both the display and performance of busyness as a status symbol, and also “greedy jobs” that force us to be busy just to remain afloat. How the pressure to earn money turns our closest relationships into financial commodities, and forces us to put a dollar value on everything we do. As always, you can find Anna’s book, and all books I recommend on the podcast, in the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop. About Anna Louie Sussman Anna Louie Sussman is a journalist reporting on gender, economics, health, and reproduction, and a contributing Opinion writer at The New York Times. She is the author of the book “Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty,” which looks at the challenges people face in starting and growing their families. It builds off her New York Times Sunday Review cover story, “The End of Babies,” and was published in September 2026 by Dey Street Books. Her first story, an engrossing account of the hunt for the perfect prom dress, appeared in Teen Vogue circa 1999. A decade later, she was reporting from the Middle East on women’s lives, and in 2011, became the senior writer and editor of Newsweek/The Daily Beast’s Women in the World Foundation. Since then, she has reported extensively on finance and the economy, covering the shipping and energy industries for Reuters, and economics and the labor market for The Wall Street Journal. She researched and helped write “Fast Forward,” a book on how to advance women and girls in the global economy, with a foreword by Hillary Clinton. She has interviewed Thomas Piketty about income inequality, heard a Yemeni imam justify contraceptive use with Quranic citations, and gotten Jeff Koons to explain why artists should embrace the market. She has reported on Polish women who can’t access their own frozen embryos, how abortion politics and the gruesome history of medical experimentation conspired to exclude pregnant people from clinical trials, and the brutal economics of egg freezing. 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. She lived and worked for five years in the Middle East, spending time in Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul, Damascus, Tunis, Rabat, and Sana’a. She was born and raised in New York, enjoys reading and sewing, and was the parent of one outrageously wonderful dog, Stewie. She lives with her daughter in New York.
