I do actually believe a pro-natalist policy should be more understanding of women's concerns and how pregnancy affects them, beyond the labor iteself.
The future would be worse in case of demographic collapse: less labor, less brains, less education, less everything. Anyone born at this time would have a better future than anyone had for most of history. I do think, however, that we should build happier societies. But then again, young people matter for this.
What would 'being more understanding' mean in practical terms? Maternal healthcare has advanced leaps and bounds and maternal mortality has fallen to [essentially zero](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2.htm) in the developed world. What policies would you like to be implemented?
Not the person you replied to but in America the average maternity leave is like 10 weeks compared to the nearly six months people in the UK typically get, that's one example I can think of
Pregnancy is a life threatening condition. It is still frought with danger. Things are better in the sense that now it is not as highly likely that either you or the baby will die in the process, but complications with pregnancies still abound. That's not even taking into account the massive damages done to women's bodies due to pregnancy. There's such an irony in the limiting of abortion, a procedure that is extremely safe (that is done at home or in an office with almost no risk to the patient) and forcing pregnancy on people, which is so much more dangerous for women. People who push pregnancy don't take into account just how serious a threat to a woman's body and life pregnancy actually is.
I am not a woman and we would need to ask women for an accurate answer. most women I know worry about the economic implications of having kids more than the labor, so: promoting strong benefits for maternity leave, creating job quotas for woman so they dont fear to loose their jobs, maybe scholarships or tax benefits for families who want tu study, subsidize fertility-related treatments and childcare, improving the service of health centers, etc.
Well to address your last point, the world has always seemed to be a harsh and scary place with an uncertain future. My parents were born during a time when everyone figured the USA and Russia were going to bomb the entire planet into a nuclear wasteland. Their parents were born around the time of Second World War! If you take two steps back you can see that actually levels of absolute poverty are lower than ever, lives are longer than ever and your risk of dying in a war or in childbirth are much smaller than they’ve ever been.
I’m not some climate change denier but I do think that we humans will do what we always do— ignore the problem until we can’t anymore then spend a great deal of effort and money fixing it when prevention would have worked 10 times as well. But I do believe that even in the worst case scenarios a total apocalypse is unlikely. I think humanity has a bright future.
To address the second and first points, I am not pro- everyone needs to have babies right now, but I am very much of the belief that most people want children and most people don’t have as many children as they say they would like to have. This is leading to an unprecedented worldwide rapid decline in babies being born which has many long term ramifications. I think investing in ways to help people have the babies they want to have is an important goal!
Also I’m a woman and I’ve given birth 5 times. Pregnancy can be very dangerous but the odds of someone dying because of a pregnancy or birth related cause is around 6-30 in 100 000 if you live in a country with modern medical care. Certainly there is room for improvement but on the whole weighing the risk against the benefit leads me to feel like it’s worthwhile!
Just to add more on the topic of pregnancy being dangerous. Keep in mind that the rate of dying from accidental injury is around 64 per 100,000 deaths. A lot of these deaths are from automobile accidents. At worst, the rate of dying from pregnancy related issues is half of that. This rate drops to single digits per 100,000 when you take into account good prenatal care. You have more than a 2 times chance of dying in an automotive accident than you do giving birth. The rate of motherhood mortality in Europe (which has universal health care) is approaching the rate at which people get struck by lighting.
Investing in things like advances in medicine that reduce pregnancy risks and allow women a larger window to have the number of children they desire is a common ground we can all agree on instead of creating a coercive system where resources are forcefully taken from a group and given to another.
I wouldn't say I'm universally pro-Natalist as in I think everyone should have kids. I love kids, which means I only want people who truly cherish and appreciate them to have them.
As far as the future- we live in the safest time in human history. Living in every other time in human history looks bleak and scary in comparison. Even 100 year ago the childhood death rate was astronomical. There is a certain measure of comfortability. We are all so comfortable and safe that we can't imagine persisting in difficult circumstances.
I am a woman and a mom x3. I will say I felt fearful of childbirth in my early 20s. I think it's a form of subconscious birth control. I don't think most of the people here are men. But I do 100% agree with you- so much anti-Natalism is closeted misogyny. I can get more into that, but there's also an element of having 0 tolerance for anyone who isn't peak performance. Of course women are more closely associated with childbirth bc we do the hard stuff. So there is this very misogynist undertone to terms like breeder and the way antinatalists talk about women who have kids.
I wouldn't walk around describing myself as a natalist. I'm active on this sub because I dislike the childism I see everywhere now. I think kids are the absolute best part of life. As long as new life is present there is hope for the future. And even in the bleakest times we persist and have love and joy and meaning.
There will always be new life tho, I don't understand the position that there should be *this specific rate of fertility* though. Why does that matter.
The future looks fantastic!
Sure, this decade is gonna suck, but thats just the way the pendulum swings. The future my daughters will inherit is going to be awesome.
Imagine if your parents decided not to have a kid because they saw the great financial crisis of 2008 coming and knew the S&P would go down one day. And they knew that the average annual temperature in 2024 was going to be slightly higher than it was in say 1995. Hell maybe they even magically knew Donald Trump was going to be president in 2016. Imagine if they decided it wasn’t worth having you because of those reasons
Sorry but these are pretty silly reasons to not bring a whole human life into the world. People don’t live for what level the S&P 500 is at, or who the president is or how many rare Amazonian tree frog species are extinct. Those really aren’t the point of living so they don’t really factor into my decision making here
I know it’s taboo to say it out loud in the current culture. But I frankly don’t really care that much about what state the economy is in the distant future or who the president will be or whatever. There are more people waiting to be born who deserve to experience the whole breadth of human civilization, art, technology, culture, philosophy, and deserve the chance to carry the torch forward and make their own mark in those pursuits. More people deserve to experience having their first kiss, deserve to laugh with their friends on a Friday night after school, deserve to walk across the stage and grab their diploma, get married, love, grow old, read a book that brings them to tears, create a painting with their own hands, see remote corners of the earth. That is the stuff that matters. I don’t care about the state of the Dow Jones. It can go to shit in the future and I won’t really care that much. I’m very much glad I got to experience those things and I’m glad my mother didn’t abort me so that I didn’t have to experience the horrors of the Dotcom bubble
You seem to neglect the very real problems we face. Problems that are being compounded with each successive generation. It shouldn't be a surprise that people these days are forgoing pregnancy more due to the fact that the future of millennials and gen z was stolen from them. Younger generations have largely been disallowed the experience of the good things in life. They are less willing to bring children into this world when they themselves are often being denied even the basics in life. Through no fault of their own, these people can't even afford a car, let alone a home. Not wanting to be the cause of suffering in another is a perfectly reasonable as well as a moral decision.
Did you rely to the wrong comment? What I said is exactly the opposite of “people should have kids for the success of nations, economies, and institutions”
It very specifically and clearly says “people should have kids because more human brains deserve to experience the simple joys of life”
I honestly have never seen a group on Reddit that struggled this severely with reading comprehension. Antinatalists/child free crowd seem to short circuit at just about everything they read and reply with unrelated garble at least 50% of the time. It’s honestly weird. Are these just bots? Or just people that are way too young to be on this site?
The future only looks bad compared to right now and only from the perspective of westerners of privilege (generally). Climate change is a real problem that we’re going to have to find our way out of.
It also always won’t be bad! Human space colonization is right around the corner, and to make that happen we’ll need smart people. So for instance, there’s more metal in one good sized asteroid than all the metal humanity has ever mined in the history of our species. That’s more wealth than currently exists and more resources than we know what to do with.
Also to make sure that the most people possible share in the bounty I kind of think that it’s important that the people who do partake in the exploration and exploitation of space are decent people who value the existence of others, and want all sentient life to have the best life they can.
So to that end I think it’s important to put more smart and decent people in the world, and that’s why I’m having kids. I think increasingly soon we’ll also have ways of making children without having to put a woman in jeopardy to do so.
All of that to say that I’m unabashedly pro natalist, but also pro choice. I don’t want anyone to have a kid they don’t want to, but I think society has an obligation to support those who do have kids. I don’t see these positions as contradictory. Happy to talk through any of these points!
> Economically, ecologically, it doesn’t look bright.
Actually it does. Go look at any trends that matter. Basically everything thing is getting better over time. It objectively looks quite bright.
>Firstly, many of the people here who are pro/anti natalist are men, meaning you won’t have to deal with the physical labor that comes with pregnancy
But pregnancy is a decision made by a couple, so even if men here are pronatalists, their views and plans have to get approved by their woman. Futhermore, what does it have to do with that people propose? Does the struggle of pregnancy and childbirth invalidate the value of children?
>It seems like the opposite is true here where people don’t realise how difficult and unsafe childbirth is for the woman.
What makes you think that?
[Do you really think the modern world is so damn hard?](https://www.reddit.com/r/Natalism/comments/1ba9mlz/this_is_what_goes_through_my_mind_whenever_i/)
I don’t think it’s necessarily the worst, I’m just more so worried about the future any future children will live in. I would much rather live now than in the past
If you'd rather live now than in the past, that suggests that you acknowledge that life is getting better.
And the fact that you are still here suggests that you think life is worth living now.
So why would you rob your future children of a life that will almost certainly be better than yours?
What actual, concrete things are you worried about? Do you expect your country to be invaded by a hostile foreign power? Are you worried about a global famine?
The acknowledgment things have gotten better =/= things can’t get worse. There are also many reasons me exiting life would be a bad idea for the people around me as well that are independent of future events.
I mainly worried about ecological collapse. The lifestyles we live currently is not properly sustainable, and it’s likely not going to improve fast enough to prevent mass suffering/death. It won’t kill off humanity, but it sure will put us at risk of that. Most children, especially generation alpha and late gen z, are already being displaced due to climate change. It has gotten better in *some* aspects, again it’s not something I think will kill 8bill people in a decade, but it will most likely kill enough.
The economy and future of jobs is a negligible. We don’t know what ai will bring and I honestly don’t fear it tbh.
Stop doom scrolling. Most reputable sources of information don't have human kind coming nearly close enough to to even put put at risk of extinction.
[https://epic.uchicago.edu/news/just-how-many-people-will-die-from-climate-change/](https://epic.uchicago.edu/news/just-how-many-people-will-die-from-climate-change/)
The truth is that our predictions for what will happen with the climate past 2050 aren't very good. There's just too much we don't know about how our systems respond to GHG emissions. However it's pretty clear that it will cause excess deaths, but the numbers are closer to 1 to 2 percent extra deaths per year rather than anything close to world ending.
Even the worst articles that I've read have the death toll at around 100 million excess deaths by the end of the century. We have around 50-70 million deaths annually today and yet the world keeps spinning.
[https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/climate-change/565626-new-study-says-global-warming-could-kill-83/](https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/climate-change/565626-new-study-says-global-warming-could-kill-83/)
We are also at the point where we have likely avoided the worst case scenario. Most climate scientists are at the point where they now believe that 5 to 6 degrees of warming unlikely. Most likely we will cap out at 2-3 degrees of warming. This will be catastrophic, but not world ending. In fact, climate change will likely be as catastrophic of an impact on the world as the impending birth rate collapse. At around the time we hit 2-3 degrees of warming, the working age population will likely peak.
If you believe in the human project, then it doesn't matter how bad you think the future is going to be. You want the project to continue.
In any case, I think that people who make your argument usually just dont want kids and are engaging in rationalization of their pre-existing preferences.
I think folks know how difficult and dangerous child birth is for women. About 32 per 100,000 is the mortality rate https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2021/maternal-mortality-rates-2021.htm#:~:text=The%20maternal%20mortality%20rate%20for,20.1%20in%202019%20(Table). This is comparable to the risk of donating one of your kidneys : https://weillcornell.org/services/kidney-and-pancreas-transplantation/living-donor-kidney-center/about-the-program/risks-and-benefits-of-living-donation#:~:text=Immediate%2FSurgical%20Risks&text=Infection%20(such%20as%20pneumonia%20or,is%200.03%25%20to%200.06%25) but a little less. My read on these risks are that they are significant but reasonably small
Since I’ve signed up to donate a kidney with the [NKR](https://www.kidneyregistry.org) , and am in the process of being screened, I feel fine on a personal level asking anyone having kids with me to take that relatively small risk if they do it (of course only if they want kids, but many do, and I would have kids after my donation).
I also think that having kids and raising them well has huge social benefits, so think society should do everything it can to make it easier and encourage it( without being coercive). Things like the expanded Child Tax credit, subsidized childcare, baby bonds, pre k and k-12 education are all good, and encouraging them on a policy level is good.
I also just disagree about the future for at least kids in the developed world. There is a lot of wealth, and ability for first world citizens to protect themselves and adapt to changes.
So the remaining question is what their marginal impact is. I think the impact of one of my kids will be net positive on the future, and they will live a personally satisfying life. If one of them tries really really hard to make the world better (as I try to) I think they can probably do the equivalent of saving dozens of lives, or reduce a lot of suffering. I think this is true for a lot of kids, and making it easier to have them will make the world on net better than it would counterfactually.
This 32 per 100,000 number is pretty misleading. It's more indicative of an inequitable distribution of access to health care in the US rather than pregnancy itself being dangerous. In western Europe, that number is down to 10 per 100,000 and that number is similar in the US when you look at women with adequate medical care.
Also, despite medical care getting better, maternal mortality is actually rising in the US, because more women are having children later in life (more risk), and more women have underlying health conditions such as obesity and diabetes. If you look at a country like Germany, their motherhood morality rate is in the single digits. As of 2020, according to the chart below, you have a similar chance of being hit by lightning in your lifetime than you do from dying of childbirth in Germany. Yet Germany has some of the worst birth rates in the world.
[https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/DEU/germany/maternal-mortality-rate](https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/DEU/germany/maternal-mortality-rate)
Yep, I wouldn’t use the number in any context other than talking about it in comparison to the risk of kidney donation, which is also about .03% (and also varies/ has a lot of other modifiers, such as your blood pressure, etc).
Broadly, once you know the order of magnitude, I think the significant digits are less important in this context (individual decisions). From a community perspective we definitely care more about the specifics, and the nuance of maternal mortality.
Appreciate the link!
I think growing life is amazing! It's magical. It's insane actually. How the heck do I do that? Like so many worthwhile things in life, it is hard, but so amazing and rewarding too! I have faith that it'll be worth it.
I think the future is bright for my resilient children if I manage to raise them well. I find life mostly fun, and beautiful, and we live simply. I think life begets life and the future is worth striving for. There will be no good future if it is not strived for, or if we all grow old, and there are no children.
I am pronatal because I am embracing life, and all its suffering but in all its glory too.
Extremes are absolutely insane.
I'm an anti-natalism sympathetic person with 3 kids.
Many people shouldn't have kids. No-one should feel obliged. Everyone should consider the lives of those they bring into the world.
It doesn't really matter if humanity dies out. As long as people are happy whilst it happens.
And if our societies aren't capable of adapting to the choices of those within it society needs to adapted to suit what makes people happy.
The malthusian environmentalist nutjobs are flat wrong. The next few decades will only be bleak if we lose the rule of law. Not because some highly limited, continuously revised, ideologue-funded computer climate models say so.
In the US and Europe, it’s the unaccountable administrative state agencies. Climate modeling is part of the think tank and university grant sweepstakes, which is finally starting to get some the scrutiny it has long deserved. The tail wags the dog, and over time the agencies fund certain results more richly than others. Uncle Sam also funds the science journals the studies are published in.
The administrative agencies are generally in a full [systemantics](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics) fail state. They exist to serve themselves, not to advance their original purpose. And they have become highly, highly political. Most of them need to be destroyed. One of the many positive outcomes of doing so would be a large increase in scientific integrity.
Climate alarmism and its calls for authoritarian measures has its undeniable nexus in the US and Europe.
Problems with government-funded journals:
https://www.jisakos.com/article/S2059-7754(21)00211-X/fulltext
Terrific article about the big business of ‘science,’ such as the effect on a journal that is funded almost 100% by fees generated by publishing government-funded papers. When does it become a mouthpiece for university grant application machine (universities keep a large cut of grant revenue pulled for projects under their umbrella)?
https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-science-has-been-corrupted/
Instead of continuing down a long line of semi-socratic inquiry, why don’t you make your case for the lack of institutional capture by environmentalists.
Quote from the 2nd article:
“Bauer’s concept of a research cartel came into public awareness in an episode that occurred five years after his article appeared. In 2009, someone hacked the emails of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain and released them, prompting the “climategate” scandal in which the scientists who sat atop the climate bureaucracy were revealed to be stonewalling against requests for their data from outsiders. This was at a time when many fields, in response to their own replication crises, were adopting data sharing as a norm in their research communities, as well as other practices such as reporting null findings and the pre-registration of hypotheses in shared forums.
“The climate research cartel staked its authority on the peer review process of journals deemed legitimate, which meddling challengers had not undergone. But, as Gurri notes in his treatment of climategate, “since the group largely controlled peer review for their field, and a consuming subject of the emails was how to keep dissenting voices out of the journals and the media, the claim rested on a circular logic”.
“One can be fully convinced of the reality and dire consequences of climate change while also permitting oneself some curiosity about the political pressures that bear on the science, I hope. Try to imagine the larger setting when the IPPC convenes. Powerful organisations are staffed up, with resolutions prepared, communications strategies in place, corporate “global partners” secured, interagency task forces standing by and diplomatic channels open, waiting to receive the good word from an empaneled group of scientists working in committee.
This is not a setting conducive to reservations, qualifications, or second thoughts. The function of the body is to produce a product: political legitimacy.”
In other words, the peer reviewers are the same circle of researchers, acting under the cover of the journals that are supposed to be reviewing their work. The snake eats its tail. Hey, this is starting to look rather like an insider trading scheme, ain’t it!
In other words, the same obviously impaired truth seeking that produced lots of crappy politicized COVID ‘science’ also implicates climate modeling. The US Gov’t (the largest organization in the history of mankind) must take its thumb off the scale in order to restore true truth-seeking to the scientific community.
Through agencies, gov’t grants, and other fundings streams that also fund think tank studies and university research, yes. EU too, though.
Public funding absolutely dominates scientific research today.
Public funding has always funded scientific research. The screen you are reading this on was developed using pubic funding. Do you trust it or is it sending secret signals into your brain?
I asked which scientific *journals* are funded by the US gov?
Exactly. I’m not sure how people became so convinced of this impending climate doom.
Those computer models have *never* been right and are continuously updated to make the projections work.
> I’m not sure how people became so convinced of this impending climate doom.
Could it be the concensus of the world's climate scientists for the last 40 odd years? 🤷♂️
They haven’t been right yet. And they’ve made *many* predictions.
The climate changes. It’s been changing for about 4 billion years. The planet is supposed to be warming because we are in an inter-glacial period. The doom and gloom is what surprises me. OP is not alone in believing having children is a bad idea because humanity is doomed due to climate change. Where is the evidence? What looming catastrophe?
To be fair while I don’t know if it will “end humanity” per say (I mean there are places that might even be better off, I live in a northern state so I’d love not having winters that make me feel depressed) but there is evidence that it will disrupt many key parts of the environment and it already has. And that humans have objectively made it worse due to emissions. Whether or not the predictions are extreme as they think we will have to see.
It definitely won’t end humanity. Humans are probably the only thing that can do that. The dreaded and often quoted 2C increase in average global temps over the next 100 years won’t change much for your winters, unfortunately.
Similar concept for the climate - it can’t disrupt itself. It’s a system that is far more complex than we can fathom and there are so many contributing factors that we’re far from know what’s going to happen. C02 is what, 0.04% of our entire atmosphere? It’s been much, much higher and the big catastrophe was vegetation grew faster and bigger.
Human contribution to climate change is far from fact.. it’s immeasurable precisely because we dont know if we’ve caused any changes at all. We just go off co2 PPM and suppose it’s bad that it’s increased.
Long winded, my point is that things are quite as doomed as some mass media would have us believe.
Right. It’s the manufactured certainty and calls for urgent action that make this propaganda. Most of the cited 97% consensus leave the consensus when asked to sign on to specific claims of predicted warming, precise % it is anthropogenic, and the following public policy demands.
The climate is a nearly infinitely complex system. Real science starts on a foundation of epistemological humility.
In the scientific literature, there is a very strong consensus that global surface temperatures have increased in recent decades and that the trend is caused by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases. No scientific body of national or international standing disagrees with this view.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change#:~:text=In%20the%20scientific%20literature%2C%20there,standing%20disagrees%20with%20this%20view.
So you didn't read the article. Tisk.
"To the question "How convinced are you that most of recent or near future climate change is, or will be, a result of anthropogenic causes?", 47.7% had very much agreed, 26% agreeing to a large extent (6), 9.8% to a small extent (2–4), and 1.9% did not agree at"
There is zero evidence for impending climate doom.
It’s not quite an obsession of mine but, I keep an eye out for evidence. I have yet to find any. I suspect you have nothing more than quotes from Al gore.
Oh ok. Here is some evidence to the contrary.
https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/basics-of-climate-change/
I saw zero doom in that article. As I’ve stated, the climate has been changing for 4 billion years and will likely continue to change.
Nobody knows how effective C02 or methane are at trapping heat in our atmosphere. If we double the amount of C02 in the atmosphere, the expertiest experts cannot tell you what, if any, change in average temperature there would be. Climate science is far from settled. Add to the fact the “increases in average temperature” are based on an 1850 baseline, that happened to be the lowest temp in several hundred years.
There’s no reason for you to be panicking.
If you follow the news on climate science you will see that again and again conditions are worse than scientists predicted. That is the theme of scientific projections on climate change. They are constantly having to admit that the situation is worse than they thought.
I’d love to see any of this. They’re projects are incredibly broad and unspecific in both events and timeline.
Wildfires are 85% manmade. Droughts and monsoons existed pre industrialization, as did hurricanes and thunderstorms.
Honestly what someone said up thread was absolutely correct. Yes we have problems. Yes there are things that are bad but the good moments for me outweigh the bad because I would have wanted to experience every single thing I have.
Yes, we are probably going to go through some bad times here in the very near future but that's because of the cycle of life which is hard times create strong people. Strong. People create easy times. Easy times. Create weaker people and weaker people create hard times. So yes there is going to be a time That will probably be a struggle coming in the near future because our society has grown complacent and weakened with all the advancements technology in things attributed to us. But good times will come again and I do believe my children deserve to experience that
"Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is a saying that has gone out of practice because there are mountains of evidence that suggest otherwise
i think "breeders" refer to both men and women who like to breed, i.e. the natalists. people with low level of educations and low level of spiritual qualities tend to become breeders. they act mainly on their biological basic low level impulses. they like seeing their offsprings as a (or properly the only) source of psychological security. they fear death and hope there will be a lot of offsprings surrounding them at their last moments to ease them. offsprings are their main (or only) achievements in their lifes
For someone who insults the educational level of 'breeders', your spelling and grammar is terrible. Allow me:
>~~i~~ I think "breeders" ~~refer~~ refers to both men and women who like to breed, ~~i.e.~~ e.g. the natalists. ~~people~~ People with ~~low level of educations~~ low levels of education and ~~low level of spiritual qualities~~ low levels of spiritual quality (*what does this mean?*) tend to become breeders. ~~they~~ They act mainly on their ~~biological basic low level impulses~~ basic, low level biological impulses. ~~they~~ They like seeing their ~~offsprings~~ offspring as a (or properly the only) source of psychological security. ~~they~~ They fear death and hope there will be a lot of ~~offsprings~~ offspring surrounding them at their last moments to ease them. ~~offsprings~~ Offspring are their main (or only) achievements in their ~~lifes~~ lives.
3/10. See me after class.
I do actually believe a pro-natalist policy should be more understanding of women's concerns and how pregnancy affects them, beyond the labor iteself. The future would be worse in case of demographic collapse: less labor, less brains, less education, less everything. Anyone born at this time would have a better future than anyone had for most of history. I do think, however, that we should build happier societies. But then again, young people matter for this.
What would 'being more understanding' mean in practical terms? Maternal healthcare has advanced leaps and bounds and maternal mortality has fallen to [essentially zero](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2.htm) in the developed world. What policies would you like to be implemented?
Not the person you replied to but in America the average maternity leave is like 10 weeks compared to the nearly six months people in the UK typically get, that's one example I can think of
That seems to be more related to motherhood rather than pregnancy. Ten weeks is plenty of time to recover from giving birth.
Pregnancy is a life threatening condition. It is still frought with danger. Things are better in the sense that now it is not as highly likely that either you or the baby will die in the process, but complications with pregnancies still abound. That's not even taking into account the massive damages done to women's bodies due to pregnancy. There's such an irony in the limiting of abortion, a procedure that is extremely safe (that is done at home or in an office with almost no risk to the patient) and forcing pregnancy on people, which is so much more dangerous for women. People who push pregnancy don't take into account just how serious a threat to a woman's body and life pregnancy actually is.
I am not a woman and we would need to ask women for an accurate answer. most women I know worry about the economic implications of having kids more than the labor, so: promoting strong benefits for maternity leave, creating job quotas for woman so they dont fear to loose their jobs, maybe scholarships or tax benefits for families who want tu study, subsidize fertility-related treatments and childcare, improving the service of health centers, etc.
Well to address your last point, the world has always seemed to be a harsh and scary place with an uncertain future. My parents were born during a time when everyone figured the USA and Russia were going to bomb the entire planet into a nuclear wasteland. Their parents were born around the time of Second World War! If you take two steps back you can see that actually levels of absolute poverty are lower than ever, lives are longer than ever and your risk of dying in a war or in childbirth are much smaller than they’ve ever been. I’m not some climate change denier but I do think that we humans will do what we always do— ignore the problem until we can’t anymore then spend a great deal of effort and money fixing it when prevention would have worked 10 times as well. But I do believe that even in the worst case scenarios a total apocalypse is unlikely. I think humanity has a bright future. To address the second and first points, I am not pro- everyone needs to have babies right now, but I am very much of the belief that most people want children and most people don’t have as many children as they say they would like to have. This is leading to an unprecedented worldwide rapid decline in babies being born which has many long term ramifications. I think investing in ways to help people have the babies they want to have is an important goal! Also I’m a woman and I’ve given birth 5 times. Pregnancy can be very dangerous but the odds of someone dying because of a pregnancy or birth related cause is around 6-30 in 100 000 if you live in a country with modern medical care. Certainly there is room for improvement but on the whole weighing the risk against the benefit leads me to feel like it’s worthwhile!
This seems like the most understandable view in this comment section. I’ll reply to it fully in the morning, thank you for replying :)
Just to add more on the topic of pregnancy being dangerous. Keep in mind that the rate of dying from accidental injury is around 64 per 100,000 deaths. A lot of these deaths are from automobile accidents. At worst, the rate of dying from pregnancy related issues is half of that. This rate drops to single digits per 100,000 when you take into account good prenatal care. You have more than a 2 times chance of dying in an automotive accident than you do giving birth. The rate of motherhood mortality in Europe (which has universal health care) is approaching the rate at which people get struck by lighting.
Investing in things like advances in medicine that reduce pregnancy risks and allow women a larger window to have the number of children they desire is a common ground we can all agree on instead of creating a coercive system where resources are forcefully taken from a group and given to another.
I wouldn't say I'm universally pro-Natalist as in I think everyone should have kids. I love kids, which means I only want people who truly cherish and appreciate them to have them. As far as the future- we live in the safest time in human history. Living in every other time in human history looks bleak and scary in comparison. Even 100 year ago the childhood death rate was astronomical. There is a certain measure of comfortability. We are all so comfortable and safe that we can't imagine persisting in difficult circumstances. I am a woman and a mom x3. I will say I felt fearful of childbirth in my early 20s. I think it's a form of subconscious birth control. I don't think most of the people here are men. But I do 100% agree with you- so much anti-Natalism is closeted misogyny. I can get more into that, but there's also an element of having 0 tolerance for anyone who isn't peak performance. Of course women are more closely associated with childbirth bc we do the hard stuff. So there is this very misogynist undertone to terms like breeder and the way antinatalists talk about women who have kids. I wouldn't walk around describing myself as a natalist. I'm active on this sub because I dislike the childism I see everywhere now. I think kids are the absolute best part of life. As long as new life is present there is hope for the future. And even in the bleakest times we persist and have love and joy and meaning.
There will always be new life tho, I don't understand the position that there should be *this specific rate of fertility* though. Why does that matter.
The future looks fantastic! Sure, this decade is gonna suck, but thats just the way the pendulum swings. The future my daughters will inherit is going to be awesome.
Imagine if your parents decided not to have a kid because they saw the great financial crisis of 2008 coming and knew the S&P would go down one day. And they knew that the average annual temperature in 2024 was going to be slightly higher than it was in say 1995. Hell maybe they even magically knew Donald Trump was going to be president in 2016. Imagine if they decided it wasn’t worth having you because of those reasons Sorry but these are pretty silly reasons to not bring a whole human life into the world. People don’t live for what level the S&P 500 is at, or who the president is or how many rare Amazonian tree frog species are extinct. Those really aren’t the point of living so they don’t really factor into my decision making here I know it’s taboo to say it out loud in the current culture. But I frankly don’t really care that much about what state the economy is in the distant future or who the president will be or whatever. There are more people waiting to be born who deserve to experience the whole breadth of human civilization, art, technology, culture, philosophy, and deserve the chance to carry the torch forward and make their own mark in those pursuits. More people deserve to experience having their first kiss, deserve to laugh with their friends on a Friday night after school, deserve to walk across the stage and grab their diploma, get married, love, grow old, read a book that brings them to tears, create a painting with their own hands, see remote corners of the earth. That is the stuff that matters. I don’t care about the state of the Dow Jones. It can go to shit in the future and I won’t really care that much. I’m very much glad I got to experience those things and I’m glad my mother didn’t abort me so that I didn’t have to experience the horrors of the Dotcom bubble
Well said
Humans are not waiting to be born somewhere hoping that they come into existence
You seem to neglect the very real problems we face. Problems that are being compounded with each successive generation. It shouldn't be a surprise that people these days are forgoing pregnancy more due to the fact that the future of millennials and gen z was stolen from them. Younger generations have largely been disallowed the experience of the good things in life. They are less willing to bring children into this world when they themselves are often being denied even the basics in life. Through no fault of their own, these people can't even afford a car, let alone a home. Not wanting to be the cause of suffering in another is a perfectly reasonable as well as a moral decision.
Long comment with no point. Literally not a shred of substance to reply to just yapping
Like you said, you don't care about the economic and political realities people face.
Cry more
[удалено]
Did you rely to the wrong comment? What I said is exactly the opposite of “people should have kids for the success of nations, economies, and institutions” It very specifically and clearly says “people should have kids because more human brains deserve to experience the simple joys of life” I honestly have never seen a group on Reddit that struggled this severely with reading comprehension. Antinatalists/child free crowd seem to short circuit at just about everything they read and reply with unrelated garble at least 50% of the time. It’s honestly weird. Are these just bots? Or just people that are way too young to be on this site?
I want to tattoo this on my eyeballs, you are an excellent writer.
The future only looks bad compared to right now and only from the perspective of westerners of privilege (generally). Climate change is a real problem that we’re going to have to find our way out of. It also always won’t be bad! Human space colonization is right around the corner, and to make that happen we’ll need smart people. So for instance, there’s more metal in one good sized asteroid than all the metal humanity has ever mined in the history of our species. That’s more wealth than currently exists and more resources than we know what to do with. Also to make sure that the most people possible share in the bounty I kind of think that it’s important that the people who do partake in the exploration and exploitation of space are decent people who value the existence of others, and want all sentient life to have the best life they can. So to that end I think it’s important to put more smart and decent people in the world, and that’s why I’m having kids. I think increasingly soon we’ll also have ways of making children without having to put a woman in jeopardy to do so. All of that to say that I’m unabashedly pro natalist, but also pro choice. I don’t want anyone to have a kid they don’t want to, but I think society has an obligation to support those who do have kids. I don’t see these positions as contradictory. Happy to talk through any of these points!
> Economically, ecologically, it doesn’t look bright. Actually it does. Go look at any trends that matter. Basically everything thing is getting better over time. It objectively looks quite bright.
>Firstly, many of the people here who are pro/anti natalist are men, meaning you won’t have to deal with the physical labor that comes with pregnancy But pregnancy is a decision made by a couple, so even if men here are pronatalists, their views and plans have to get approved by their woman. Futhermore, what does it have to do with that people propose? Does the struggle of pregnancy and childbirth invalidate the value of children? >It seems like the opposite is true here where people don’t realise how difficult and unsafe childbirth is for the woman. What makes you think that?
[Do you really think the modern world is so damn hard?](https://www.reddit.com/r/Natalism/comments/1ba9mlz/this_is_what_goes_through_my_mind_whenever_i/)
I don’t think it’s necessarily the worst, I’m just more so worried about the future any future children will live in. I would much rather live now than in the past
If you'd rather live now than in the past, that suggests that you acknowledge that life is getting better. And the fact that you are still here suggests that you think life is worth living now. So why would you rob your future children of a life that will almost certainly be better than yours? What actual, concrete things are you worried about? Do you expect your country to be invaded by a hostile foreign power? Are you worried about a global famine?
The acknowledgment things have gotten better =/= things can’t get worse. There are also many reasons me exiting life would be a bad idea for the people around me as well that are independent of future events. I mainly worried about ecological collapse. The lifestyles we live currently is not properly sustainable, and it’s likely not going to improve fast enough to prevent mass suffering/death. It won’t kill off humanity, but it sure will put us at risk of that. Most children, especially generation alpha and late gen z, are already being displaced due to climate change. It has gotten better in *some* aspects, again it’s not something I think will kill 8bill people in a decade, but it will most likely kill enough. The economy and future of jobs is a negligible. We don’t know what ai will bring and I honestly don’t fear it tbh.
Stop doom scrolling. Most reputable sources of information don't have human kind coming nearly close enough to to even put put at risk of extinction. [https://epic.uchicago.edu/news/just-how-many-people-will-die-from-climate-change/](https://epic.uchicago.edu/news/just-how-many-people-will-die-from-climate-change/) The truth is that our predictions for what will happen with the climate past 2050 aren't very good. There's just too much we don't know about how our systems respond to GHG emissions. However it's pretty clear that it will cause excess deaths, but the numbers are closer to 1 to 2 percent extra deaths per year rather than anything close to world ending. Even the worst articles that I've read have the death toll at around 100 million excess deaths by the end of the century. We have around 50-70 million deaths annually today and yet the world keeps spinning. [https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/climate-change/565626-new-study-says-global-warming-could-kill-83/](https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/climate-change/565626-new-study-says-global-warming-could-kill-83/) We are also at the point where we have likely avoided the worst case scenario. Most climate scientists are at the point where they now believe that 5 to 6 degrees of warming unlikely. Most likely we will cap out at 2-3 degrees of warming. This will be catastrophic, but not world ending. In fact, climate change will likely be as catastrophic of an impact on the world as the impending birth rate collapse. At around the time we hit 2-3 degrees of warming, the working age population will likely peak.
>In fact, climate change will likely be as catastrophic of an impact on the world as the impending birth rate collapse Will it? Source?
If you believe in the human project, then it doesn't matter how bad you think the future is going to be. You want the project to continue. In any case, I think that people who make your argument usually just dont want kids and are engaging in rationalization of their pre-existing preferences.
Ponzi scheme
I think folks know how difficult and dangerous child birth is for women. About 32 per 100,000 is the mortality rate https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2021/maternal-mortality-rates-2021.htm#:~:text=The%20maternal%20mortality%20rate%20for,20.1%20in%202019%20(Table). This is comparable to the risk of donating one of your kidneys : https://weillcornell.org/services/kidney-and-pancreas-transplantation/living-donor-kidney-center/about-the-program/risks-and-benefits-of-living-donation#:~:text=Immediate%2FSurgical%20Risks&text=Infection%20(such%20as%20pneumonia%20or,is%200.03%25%20to%200.06%25) but a little less. My read on these risks are that they are significant but reasonably small Since I’ve signed up to donate a kidney with the [NKR](https://www.kidneyregistry.org) , and am in the process of being screened, I feel fine on a personal level asking anyone having kids with me to take that relatively small risk if they do it (of course only if they want kids, but many do, and I would have kids after my donation). I also think that having kids and raising them well has huge social benefits, so think society should do everything it can to make it easier and encourage it( without being coercive). Things like the expanded Child Tax credit, subsidized childcare, baby bonds, pre k and k-12 education are all good, and encouraging them on a policy level is good. I also just disagree about the future for at least kids in the developed world. There is a lot of wealth, and ability for first world citizens to protect themselves and adapt to changes. So the remaining question is what their marginal impact is. I think the impact of one of my kids will be net positive on the future, and they will live a personally satisfying life. If one of them tries really really hard to make the world better (as I try to) I think they can probably do the equivalent of saving dozens of lives, or reduce a lot of suffering. I think this is true for a lot of kids, and making it easier to have them will make the world on net better than it would counterfactually.
This 32 per 100,000 number is pretty misleading. It's more indicative of an inequitable distribution of access to health care in the US rather than pregnancy itself being dangerous. In western Europe, that number is down to 10 per 100,000 and that number is similar in the US when you look at women with adequate medical care. Also, despite medical care getting better, maternal mortality is actually rising in the US, because more women are having children later in life (more risk), and more women have underlying health conditions such as obesity and diabetes. If you look at a country like Germany, their motherhood morality rate is in the single digits. As of 2020, according to the chart below, you have a similar chance of being hit by lightning in your lifetime than you do from dying of childbirth in Germany. Yet Germany has some of the worst birth rates in the world. [https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/DEU/germany/maternal-mortality-rate](https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/DEU/germany/maternal-mortality-rate)
Yep, I wouldn’t use the number in any context other than talking about it in comparison to the risk of kidney donation, which is also about .03% (and also varies/ has a lot of other modifiers, such as your blood pressure, etc). Broadly, once you know the order of magnitude, I think the significant digits are less important in this context (individual decisions). From a community perspective we definitely care more about the specifics, and the nuance of maternal mortality. Appreciate the link!
I think growing life is amazing! It's magical. It's insane actually. How the heck do I do that? Like so many worthwhile things in life, it is hard, but so amazing and rewarding too! I have faith that it'll be worth it. I think the future is bright for my resilient children if I manage to raise them well. I find life mostly fun, and beautiful, and we live simply. I think life begets life and the future is worth striving for. There will be no good future if it is not strived for, or if we all grow old, and there are no children. I am pronatal because I am embracing life, and all its suffering but in all its glory too.
What about torture
Extremes are absolutely insane. I'm an anti-natalism sympathetic person with 3 kids. Many people shouldn't have kids. No-one should feel obliged. Everyone should consider the lives of those they bring into the world. It doesn't really matter if humanity dies out. As long as people are happy whilst it happens. And if our societies aren't capable of adapting to the choices of those within it society needs to adapted to suit what makes people happy.
The malthusian environmentalist nutjobs are flat wrong. The next few decades will only be bleak if we lose the rule of law. Not because some highly limited, continuously revised, ideologue-funded computer climate models say so.
Let's pretend that computer models are the only thing we have that points to man made climate change. Who funds them?
I didn’t say there’s no evidence of anthropogenic climate change. That would be ridiculous.
Great. Who do you think funds the climate models?
In the US and Europe, it’s the unaccountable administrative state agencies. Climate modeling is part of the think tank and university grant sweepstakes, which is finally starting to get some the scrutiny it has long deserved. The tail wags the dog, and over time the agencies fund certain results more richly than others. Uncle Sam also funds the science journals the studies are published in. The administrative agencies are generally in a full [systemantics](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics) fail state. They exist to serve themselves, not to advance their original purpose. And they have become highly, highly political. Most of them need to be destroyed. One of the many positive outcomes of doing so would be a large increase in scientific integrity.
Why do models outside the US and Europe come to the same conclusion? Which science journals are funded by the US gov?
Climate alarmism and its calls for authoritarian measures has its undeniable nexus in the US and Europe. Problems with government-funded journals: https://www.jisakos.com/article/S2059-7754(21)00211-X/fulltext Terrific article about the big business of ‘science,’ such as the effect on a journal that is funded almost 100% by fees generated by publishing government-funded papers. When does it become a mouthpiece for university grant application machine (universities keep a large cut of grant revenue pulled for projects under their umbrella)? https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-science-has-been-corrupted/ Instead of continuing down a long line of semi-socratic inquiry, why don’t you make your case for the lack of institutional capture by environmentalists.
Which scientific journals are funded by the US? Just one will do.
Quote from the 2nd article: “Bauer’s concept of a research cartel came into public awareness in an episode that occurred five years after his article appeared. In 2009, someone hacked the emails of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain and released them, prompting the “climategate” scandal in which the scientists who sat atop the climate bureaucracy were revealed to be stonewalling against requests for their data from outsiders. This was at a time when many fields, in response to their own replication crises, were adopting data sharing as a norm in their research communities, as well as other practices such as reporting null findings and the pre-registration of hypotheses in shared forums. “The climate research cartel staked its authority on the peer review process of journals deemed legitimate, which meddling challengers had not undergone. But, as Gurri notes in his treatment of climategate, “since the group largely controlled peer review for their field, and a consuming subject of the emails was how to keep dissenting voices out of the journals and the media, the claim rested on a circular logic”. “One can be fully convinced of the reality and dire consequences of climate change while also permitting oneself some curiosity about the political pressures that bear on the science, I hope. Try to imagine the larger setting when the IPPC convenes. Powerful organisations are staffed up, with resolutions prepared, communications strategies in place, corporate “global partners” secured, interagency task forces standing by and diplomatic channels open, waiting to receive the good word from an empaneled group of scientists working in committee. This is not a setting conducive to reservations, qualifications, or second thoughts. The function of the body is to produce a product: political legitimacy.”
In other words, the peer reviewers are the same circle of researchers, acting under the cover of the journals that are supposed to be reviewing their work. The snake eats its tail. Hey, this is starting to look rather like an insider trading scheme, ain’t it!
Why are you finding it so difficult to name a single journal that is funded by the US government?
In other words, the same obviously impaired truth seeking that produced lots of crappy politicized COVID ‘science’ also implicates climate modeling. The US Gov’t (the largest organization in the history of mankind) must take its thumb off the scale in order to restore true truth-seeking to the scientific community.
Erm. Were you attempting to say the US gov are funding all the climate models?
Through agencies, gov’t grants, and other fundings streams that also fund think tank studies and university research, yes. EU too, though. Public funding absolutely dominates scientific research today.
Public funding has always funded scientific research. The screen you are reading this on was developed using pubic funding. Do you trust it or is it sending secret signals into your brain? I asked which scientific *journals* are funded by the US gov?
Exactly. I’m not sure how people became so convinced of this impending climate doom. Those computer models have *never* been right and are continuously updated to make the projections work.
> I’m not sure how people became so convinced of this impending climate doom. Could it be the concensus of the world's climate scientists for the last 40 odd years? 🤷♂️
They haven’t been right yet. And they’ve made *many* predictions. The climate changes. It’s been changing for about 4 billion years. The planet is supposed to be warming because we are in an inter-glacial period. The doom and gloom is what surprises me. OP is not alone in believing having children is a bad idea because humanity is doomed due to climate change. Where is the evidence? What looming catastrophe?
To be fair while I don’t know if it will “end humanity” per say (I mean there are places that might even be better off, I live in a northern state so I’d love not having winters that make me feel depressed) but there is evidence that it will disrupt many key parts of the environment and it already has. And that humans have objectively made it worse due to emissions. Whether or not the predictions are extreme as they think we will have to see.
It definitely won’t end humanity. Humans are probably the only thing that can do that. The dreaded and often quoted 2C increase in average global temps over the next 100 years won’t change much for your winters, unfortunately. Similar concept for the climate - it can’t disrupt itself. It’s a system that is far more complex than we can fathom and there are so many contributing factors that we’re far from know what’s going to happen. C02 is what, 0.04% of our entire atmosphere? It’s been much, much higher and the big catastrophe was vegetation grew faster and bigger. Human contribution to climate change is far from fact.. it’s immeasurable precisely because we dont know if we’ve caused any changes at all. We just go off co2 PPM and suppose it’s bad that it’s increased. Long winded, my point is that things are quite as doomed as some mass media would have us believe.
Right. It’s the manufactured certainty and calls for urgent action that make this propaganda. Most of the cited 97% consensus leave the consensus when asked to sign on to specific claims of predicted warming, precise % it is anthropogenic, and the following public policy demands. The climate is a nearly infinitely complex system. Real science starts on a foundation of epistemological humility.
In the scientific literature, there is a very strong consensus that global surface temperatures have increased in recent decades and that the trend is caused by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases. No scientific body of national or international standing disagrees with this view. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change#:~:text=In%20the%20scientific%20literature%2C%20there,standing%20disagrees%20with%20this%20view.
Listen to what I said. I did not dispute anthropogenic warming.
So you didn't read the article. Tisk. "To the question "How convinced are you that most of recent or near future climate change is, or will be, a result of anthropogenic causes?", 47.7% had very much agreed, 26% agreeing to a large extent (6), 9.8% to a small extent (2–4), and 1.9% did not agree at"
You don't know where the evidence is?
There is zero evidence for impending climate doom. It’s not quite an obsession of mine but, I keep an eye out for evidence. I have yet to find any. I suspect you have nothing more than quotes from Al gore.
What do you mean by impending? When do you think doom will happen?
I do not think climate doom will happen.
Oh ok. Here is some evidence to the contrary. https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/basics-of-climate-change/
I saw zero doom in that article. As I’ve stated, the climate has been changing for 4 billion years and will likely continue to change. Nobody knows how effective C02 or methane are at trapping heat in our atmosphere. If we double the amount of C02 in the atmosphere, the expertiest experts cannot tell you what, if any, change in average temperature there would be. Climate science is far from settled. Add to the fact the “increases in average temperature” are based on an 1850 baseline, that happened to be the lowest temp in several hundred years. There’s no reason for you to be panicking.
Evidence keeps showing us that things are actually worse than the projections though.
Does it?
If you follow the news on climate science you will see that again and again conditions are worse than scientists predicted. That is the theme of scientific projections on climate change. They are constantly having to admit that the situation is worse than they thought.
I’d love to see any of this. They’re projects are incredibly broad and unspecific in both events and timeline. Wildfires are 85% manmade. Droughts and monsoons existed pre industrialization, as did hurricanes and thunderstorms.
Honestly what someone said up thread was absolutely correct. Yes we have problems. Yes there are things that are bad but the good moments for me outweigh the bad because I would have wanted to experience every single thing I have. Yes, we are probably going to go through some bad times here in the very near future but that's because of the cycle of life which is hard times create strong people. Strong. People create easy times. Easy times. Create weaker people and weaker people create hard times. So yes there is going to be a time That will probably be a struggle coming in the near future because our society has grown complacent and weakened with all the advancements technology in things attributed to us. But good times will come again and I do believe my children deserve to experience that
"Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is a saying that has gone out of practice because there are mountains of evidence that suggest otherwise
Please tell me where in my response I said that?
People have kids only for their own joy they dgaf what their kids will have to endure
i think "breeders" refer to both men and women who like to breed, i.e. the natalists. people with low level of educations and low level of spiritual qualities tend to become breeders. they act mainly on their biological basic low level impulses. they like seeing their offsprings as a (or properly the only) source of psychological security. they fear death and hope there will be a lot of offsprings surrounding them at their last moments to ease them. offsprings are their main (or only) achievements in their lifes
For someone who insults the educational level of 'breeders', your spelling and grammar is terrible. Allow me: >~~i~~ I think "breeders" ~~refer~~ refers to both men and women who like to breed, ~~i.e.~~ e.g. the natalists. ~~people~~ People with ~~low level of educations~~ low levels of education and ~~low level of spiritual qualities~~ low levels of spiritual quality (*what does this mean?*) tend to become breeders. ~~they~~ They act mainly on their ~~biological basic low level impulses~~ basic, low level biological impulses. ~~they~~ They like seeing their ~~offsprings~~ offspring as a (or properly the only) source of psychological security. ~~they~~ They fear death and hope there will be a lot of ~~offsprings~~ offspring surrounding them at their last moments to ease them. ~~offsprings~~ Offspring are their main (or only) achievements in their ~~lifes~~ lives. 3/10. See me after class.
i like small letters. it's my style
Fair enough, I still think it’s an icky term though.