Long are the days when women’s primary (if not only) role was to have babies. Nowadays, women have as many opportunities as their male counterparts, plus they are the only ones who can have babies. And the women who are having babies, are having them later on in life.

I believe this is a good thing. Women deserve to have higher education if they so desire, they deserve to have a career if that’s their ambition.

I admire Rihanna, the singer and entrepreneur who just became a billionaire. I admire Whitney Wolfe Herd who founded the dating app Bumble who also became a billionaire. Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors. These are strong women who have decided not to have children or to have them later on, after stablishing their careers.

Let’s face it. The burden of raising a child falls disproportionally on women. This becomes a real challange when there is no affordable child care, or there is inadequate parental leave, and other basic support systems. Couple that with skyrocketing housing prices, high rates of student loan debt, and stagnant wages and it’s no surprise that so many women are passing on the opportunity of having more babies.

Birth rates are declining among women in their 20s, ticking up slightly among women in their 30s and 40s and, decreasing the most significantly in areas where employment is growing. In other words, the women who are driving this downturn are those who have the most advantage and the greatest range of choices, and whose prospects look brightest.

On the other side of the coin, I believe that women who are having financial difficulties, who have trouble paying the rent, should try to avoid having more than one or two babies. Those kids will lack the resources to compete in an ever more competitive world. It breaks my heart when I hear of a single mother, with more than two kids, who is struggling to pay the rent.

Further, while birthrates are dropping, the total percentage of women who are mothers has risen, in part thanks to older women, college-educated women, and unmarried women being more likely to have a baby than they had been. If a woman hasn’t found the ideal man, they can always get artificial insemination.

Childbearing remains overwhelmingly the norm: 86 percent of American women ages 40 to 44 are mothers. Motherhood isn’t on the decline so much as motherhood is delayed, and families with one or two children are ascendant.

Thanks to feminist cultural shifts, and better access to contraceptives, more women now approach childbearing the same way we approach other major life decisions: as a choice weighed against other desires, assessed in context. Without compulsory childbearing, this assessment continues throughout women’s childbearing years. The 24-year-old who says she wants children someday but is focusing on her career can easily turn into the 30-year-old who says she wants children but with the right partner. Later, she can easily become the 45-year-old who has a meaningful career, a community of people she feels connected to, and a life rich in pleasure and novelty that she doesn’t want to surrender.

Likewise, a mother sold in theory on three children might discover her family is complete with two, or one. Is that a woman who had fewer children than she intended? Or is she someone whose intentions were largely abstract in the first place, and they shifted as she did?

It is still revolutionary to consider childbearing in the context of desire. Throughout human history, parenting was simply an assumed part of adult life.

But intentionality matters. Women who plan their pregnancies wind up happier, better educated, and with less relationship conflict than women whose pregnancies are unintended. The Institute for Family Studies found that women who have more children than their ideal are less likely to report feeling happy than women who had their ideal number and women who had fewer children than they said they wanted.

In most countries, the highter the level of education, the the fewer babies they have. And of course, the lower the level of education, the more baby they have. The reason is because women with higher education, have more alternative in life other than having more babies.

And countries where women have the most opportunity to pursue higher education, live independently and work for pay also tend to have a higher average age of first birth and lower birth rates overall.

At the heart of declining birthrates in the world’s most prosperous countries might be the matter of meaning. Historically, men dominated the realms of paid work, politics, economics, and world affairs, while motherhood was the clearest and most acceptable path to adulthood, community respect, and purpose for women. As more women either find jobs that bring in a paycheck and the attendant power of independence or maybe even a sense of satisfaction and purpose, fewer women use motherhood as a conduit to respect and adulthood. This makes parenthood better, too: Women lucky enough to have a choice see parenthood as its own distinct path, and intentionally walking down it brings unique life experience, a deep meaning, expanded potential, and a relationship unlike any other — and also trades some opportunities for others.

Of course, these choices are not all free, or always “choices” at all. The United States remains a wildly unequal place, and that affects women’s reproductive choices. Women who want to balance their career, life, and their own future may be less likely to have a baby (or a second or a third) with a man who doesn’t pull his own weight. And many American women are still unable to find easy access to family planning tools, including contraception and abortion.

But there are also fewer constraints on American women today than at any point in U.S. history, and many more options. The United States is also now a place where huge numbers of women of childbearing age live in dynamic communities where those their age are staying single and delaying motherhood longer than ever. Growing numbers of young women have opportunities to travel, live independently, pursue a career and simply spend many more years of their adult lives asking themselves who they are and what they want, instead of being slotted, early, into a narrow set of gendered expectations.

To be sure, for some women choosing to wait to have children, choosing to have fewer, or not have them at all, is linked to a failure of the state. But for many others, it’s a sign of a more flexible and open society, populated by women who feel surer of themselves to pursue the unconventional.

Concerns about the economic impacts of lower birth rates are valid, but also shortsighted — especially given that an ever-expanding global population of wealthier people living longer is simply unsustainable. One short-term solution to an aging population is immigration. Longer-term answers come down to finding more creative ways to fund social welfare programs than dependence on unlimited population growth and placing the burden on women to create a generation of workers.

Maybe the truth is that, given a wider range of options for finding love, respect, and a full life, women will choose many different paths of which motherhood or mothering a large brood are but two. Maybe the choices made by some of the luckiest and best-resourced women in the world shouldn’t scare us but should inform us that when women have more options and opportunities, women’s desires become far more varied.

We should spend less time worrying about birthrates, and more time developing policies to support families of all kinds — because it’s simply the right thing to do. We should couple that with an intentional shift in culture that doesn’t require women to cede so much of themselves (and give up so much of their potential and so many of their other wants) when they have children. That might not result in a baby boom, but it would serve a more worthy goal: healthier families and happier citizens, each a little freer to decide for themselves what makes a good life.