Where are the babies? Social conservatives keep asking what’s happened as the U.S. fertility rate crashes to its lowest level ever. But the answer should be another question:

Where are the fathers? And by fathers, we do not mean men who merely spread their seed and then take off, but men who hang around and provide moral and financial support to their children.

The common but wrong answer is that it has simply become too expensive to raise children: If you just bring down the prices of things then family life will become more attractive to young couples. This is the affordability copout.

Sure, lowering the cost of living would make children seem more “affordable.” But parents with a modest income need a partner to maintain a modest middle-class existence.

About 40 percent of births in the U.S. are to unmarried women. Some of the fathers do pay child support, but 33 percent of this group send nothing. Meanwhile, 29 percent of divorced parents received no such payments.

“Earning More but in Worse Shape: Hardship Overwhelms Many American Families,” reads the headline of a recent Wall Street Journal article. It centers on Lisa Meazler, a mother of three girls outside Binghamton, New York. Lisa laments that she hasn’t been able to take the girls on a “real vacation” for years. And we learn that her credit cards are maxed out and her mortgage payments late. We know that she works at a low-wage job.

What we don’t know is the name of the father or fathers of the children. We don’t know where they are. We don’t know whether they’ve been sending checks — though the assumption is they haven’t.

This is the approach to stories of impoverished families kept afloat by desperate single women.

The New York Times reports on Wanda Lavender of Milwaukee. She’s raising six children and one grandchild while working long hours at a Popeyes. Where are the fathers? No one asks.

Social conservatives may largely agree with me on the above points. They blame the culture. But I ask why they give leaders who virtually mock their values a pass. It wasn’t always thus.

In 1964, Sen. Prescott Bush (R-Conn.) condemned Nelson Rockefeller over his divorce and quick remarriage. “Have we come to the point in our life as a nation,” he asks, “where the governor of a great state — one who perhaps aspires to the nomination for president of the United States — can desert a good wife, mother of his grown children, divorce her, then persuade a young mother of four youngsters to abandon her husband and their four children and marry the governor?”

Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative activist best known for helping block the Equal Rights Amendment, said back then, “I’ve been taking a private poll of Republican women I meet all over the state (Illinois), and their reaction nearly unanimous was they’re disgusted with Rockefeller.”

Now look at today. President Donald Trump recently crowned himself the “fertilization president.” He dumped two wives, mothers of four of his children, then went on to marry wife No. 3 and cheat on her. Trump has the money to keep his five kids dressed and fed, but so did Rockefeller.

Trump gets away with playing the libertine while Rockefeller did not. Even now he stocks his administration with “hot” young women, stamped out of the same thin, surgery-enhanced mold.

Young women looking at the lives of Lisa Meazler and Wanda Lavender and the sad sisterhood of impoverished single mothers might understandably choose to forgo having children without fathers onboard.

In earlier days, men in leadership were expected to model basic propriety — especially where children were concerned. Fathers belong back in the story today.

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Follow Froma Harrop on X @FromaHarrop.

She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com.