The Washington Post piece by Youyou Zhou ranks counties as places to raise children using measures like school quality and crime, but also includes state-level abortion access and LGBTQ policy as factors in those rankings, which raises questions about whether those social policy metrics belong in an evaluation of family-friendliness.
The Washington Post published an opinion by Youyou Zhou that tries to map the best places in America to raise children, and it mixes clear measures such as school performance and crime with culture-war metrics like abortion access and LGBTQ rights. That blending of conventional community indicators with partisan policy choices changes the frame from practical family decisions to political signaling. Readers deserve to know when an analysis shifts from objective community data to values-based scoring.
The Post’s scoring method is described in the piece with a straightforward sentence: “We scored each county based on how well it performed across the four metrics. A better public school district and a lower crime rate moved up the county’s score, while limited personal liberty, fewer state-mandated parental leave days or higher costs of raising children lowered the rate.” That quote sits next to judgments about liberty and parental leave as state policy variables, which are far from neutral community indicators. Including “limited personal liberty” as a measurable strike against a county invites ideological judgment, not empirical clarity.
The column also leans into concerns about the national birth rate and cites generational intentions: “The United States is reaching its lowest birth rate in history, but that alarming outcome isn’t necessarily intentional. Pew Research Center data show that the majority of young Americans today still want to have children: More than 7 out of 10 people in their 20s and 30s have or plan to have at least one child, and the majority of nonparents between ages 18 and 34 say they want to be parents someday.” That statistic is worth noting, but it does not by itself justify ranking states by abortion policy when gauging family-friendliness.
The Post argues that prospective parents must “feel safe to conceive,” and it uses differences in abortion access as evidence of varying safety. The piece even states that “Research shows that in states where abortions are banned mothers are more likely to die from unwanted pregnancy and infant mortality increased due to birth defects.” Those are serious public-health claims and deserve scrutiny through peer-reviewed research and context about causes and confounders, rather than serving as a quick justification for policy scoring.
What the analysis does not fully reckon with is the tradeoff implicit in elevating abortion access as a positive factor for raising children. Expanding legal abortion reduces barriers to family planning for some, but it also correlates with higher abortion incidence and the ending of potential lives that others count as children. A sober evaluation of where to raise a family should be explicit about which outcomes it prioritizes—safety, longevity, social stability, or reproductive autonomy—because those priorities lead to very different policy conclusions.
Likewise, folding LGBTQ policy into county or state scores treats civil-rights questions as direct proxies for childhood outcomes without showing a causal link to parenting success. Parents generally base decisions about schools, safety, cost of living, and community values on tangible local conditions. Conflating rights debates with measures like school quality risks steering families toward places that score well politically while doing nothing to improve classroom performance or reduce crime.
Readers should also note the editorial tilt behind blending these variables. A piece that elevates state-level parental leave, abortion access, and personal-liberty ratings alongside school and crime data reflects a particular worldview about what government should prioritize. If a ranking intends to help parents make practical choices, it should clearly separate empirical community indicators from ideological rankings so readers can weigh each factor on its own.
There is room for thoughtful debate about how social policies affect family formation, and studies on maternal and infant health deserve attention. But ranking counties as the “best place to raise children” needs transparent assumptions and a clear separation between measurable community outcomes and contested political values. Without that, such lists risk guiding families by partisan preferences rather than by the practical realities of parenting.
