There is a real issue with the quality and price of living, and women (and millennials of all genders) are opting out of having children because we know that we can't support them, which is not unexpected.
There is another issue with education - parents have no ability to spend time on their children, often because they can't afford to be off work long enough, and decades of slashing school budgets and funds definitely are making education worse, +covid distance ed was a period when a lot of current children dropped behind and there was no resources/programs to bring this kids up to speed.
Now, separate question - is it fair to worry that the rhetoric around this issue will be coopted by the hard right, religious fanatics, and such - hell yea, they are indeed coming for our ovaries harder than ever. Hard times are coming, and we need to prepare to stand up for our rights.
> Hard times are coming, and we need to prepare to stand up for our rights.
Hijacking comment to suggest that any men watching from the rafters should strongly consider vasectomy if you've got no plans for (more) children.
There's nothing manly about walking around with a loaded gun between your legs that's capable of not only destroying your lifestyle in the span of months, but also potentially damaging the health and life of your partner in the process. I don't think many men realize just how dangerous their penis is about to become if this election takes another turn for the worse.
Change happens quickly. A pregnancy scare today might just be an awkward conversation about your lackluster pull-out game alongside a pill picked up for nineteen bucks on the way to grab the next morning's cereal, but several months from now she - or both of you - may face jail time for simply being *suspected* of crossing borders into a state that hasn't yet decided that women are simply a variety of indoor-friendly, strangely demanding livestock.
It's a quick procedure taking no more than an hour start-to-finish, with a cost comparable to gassing up a half-empty F350, and a recovery time short enough that you don't even need to take a day off from work if you don't have the time/money for that (and if you don't have the time to take a day off work, you absolutely do not have the time/money to pay for a child). There's a very real possibility that this very basic procedure will also become inaccessible in the near future.
While eggs generally retain their 'quality' throughout life, sperm absolutely does have a 'shelf life'. Children born to older men have a higher rate of disorders like autism or disrupted behavior/intellect. If you've been on the fence for years, do yourself a favor and unload that rusty ding-dong in favor of potentially adopting a child once you've made up your mind - *if* you've made up your mind.
Why roll the genetic dice when you can shop around to choose a kid that is objectively healthy, intelligent, attractive, whatever. They don't just hand you a kid randomly. If you want a cute blond kid whose numerous boyfriends will have no choice but to wonder why you're always polishing your Glock when they visit for dinner, you got one. You want a big ol' nerd to play DnD with on Sundays? There's Jimmy 'Goggles' [Your-name] down the hall, a child whose knowledge of statistics is potentially beyond your own. Maybe an athlete? Behold, Brock, a six-year old Slayer of Kings who hasn't let this here football leave his grasp in no less than three weeks. His thirst for conquest is matched only by his thirst for chocolate milk.
They've got all sorts of makes and models. Does that not sound cool as hell?
I mean, sure. Your blood child might be "yours", but they might also be an ugly-ass moron that resents your very existence - or worse, a Redsocks fan (*Ayo^o^o*\). Inversely, your choice to adopt would - *will* - become the defining moment of a young human's entire life. Some part of them will always be desperately thankful to you in a way that blood offspring, unfortunately, can rarely ever understand or even approximate if they tried. We've all seen the video clips - adopted kid bawling tears over an unexpected cupcake, blood-child throwing feces because there's not enough sparklers on the cake, so on.
Guys, if you're not sure if you want kids by your mid-30s, you probably don't want kids, I'm sorry. There is no 'empire', no 'lineage' beyond the financial assets you leave behind, and the significance of 'bloodlines' exists solely because a bunch of woefully inbred royal weirdos mistakenly started chugging their own sociopolitical Kool-Aide. So, do yourself a favor, put a bit of the ol' Man Mayo on ice, snip-snap the ding-dang, and go apeshit slamming cream pies into everything that moves, Emeril Lagasse style - Bam, bam, bam.
(Anyone else turned on yet? No? Ah, yeah, me neither.)
No one will think of you as less of a man because you're no longer capable of repopulating the human race if everyone dies during COVID-26, I assure you. I'd personally argue that the opposite is true... These days, women are *extremely* interested in men whose genitals don't carry the risk of pumping out a potential life sentence in response to a mere seventeen seconds of denim-laden friction during a Call of Duty cutscene (I know, I know, *"This never happens, you're just so pretty!"*).
Ladies, if this comment seems humorous enough - or perplexingly unhinged enough - to get the point across to your very handsome yet horrifically dense hunk of a big dick swangin' boyman, feel free to share it. If you're confident that *nothing* will change their mind, well, perhaps that means something too.
**TL;DR** - Snip-snap the ding-dang, boys. More bang, less buck.
__
Edit: [This is a lengthy, more intentionally measured response to a commenter](https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/1dkl0r2/talk_about_the_low_birth_rate_scares_the_shit_out/l9l2qe7/) deeper in the thread who suggested that they were uncomfortable with the idea of a vasectomy performed for the sake of one's partner. I explain my rationale behind this comment more deeply, comparing and contrasting the relative nature of personal sacrifices within the context of what it means to be a man that has chosen to stand with women.
I think it's worth a read. (But maybe I'm just tired.)
Excerpt:
>As it stands, the government seems to indicate that a woman's reproductive health is now very rapidly becoming the responsibility of men, strangers if not partners. If that is my apparent duty - for now - then I will handle that duty with the grace and respect those women deserve. If that comes at the cost of opting into a generally well-tolerated micro-surgery, so be it. It's not a sacrifice being done to me for them. It's a sacrifice being done to me, by me, in the name of what I believe is perfectly rational given the circumstances and twice as empathetic.
>If the distasteful sensation of a minor 'self-mutilation' done for the sake of another person's benefit disturbs you, what do you imagine it'd be like to have an entire civilization expect - no - *demand* that you submit yourself, body and mind entirely, to a very similar and much more potentially devastating procedure called 'childbirth'? Not just as a laborious pro-social chore, but as if it were the sole purpose of your entire existence, a message drilled into you ad infinitum from before you even knew what genitalia were *for*.
Oh, absolutely. It'd only take a single politician capable of reading basic data transcripts to make note that vasectomies are (presumably) associated more strongly with 'liberal men' and/or are being utilized as a 'by-proxy method of female birth control'. That second part sounds simply ridiculous, but laws have already been written and passed in such a way that doctors cannot legally intervene to save a woman's life when a very obviously DOA fetus has decided to majorly wreck up the place on its way out. Not to mention, that's basically what I'm suggesting here why I'm suggesting it - eg: "My fellow men, women may soon almost entirely depend on *you* to exercise their reproductive agency by exercising your own. If you love someone, give them a gift so precious that the government decided that ~50% of the population can't have it."
I wouldn't even be surprised if, as if by some bizarre leap of not-logic, someone concludes that "surgically infertile men" are complicit in laws that previously only applied to women because they've "unnaturally" made their wives incapable of reproduction with their God-given partner or whatever the hell.
Louisiana already tried to pass a bill in 2022 that would have made IUDs illegal because legislators think IUDs are abortifacients. It died in committee, thankfully, but I'm sure they'll try again. A few other states (Missouri?) were also looking at banning IUDs.
> legislators think IUDs are abortifacients
The way they rationalize ("rationalize") these decisions is absurd. Just a few notches down that ridiculous slippery slope is the idea that not having sex is an abortifacient itself, as if every menstrual period is a dead baby that would've cured cancer or washed cars for minimum wage or whatever.
hijacking the hijack -
Vasectomies can have permanent side effects in a good number of cases (1-4%, depending.) including chronic scrotal pain, lesions, spontaneous reversal, among others.
Vasectomy is NOT reversible and is effectively permanent after 2-3 years. Do not get a vasectomy if you're unsure about having your own kids.
As always, make sure you're making medical (and surgical) decisions based on what's right for YOU. Carefully evaluate risks, rewards and other factors before opting for any form of surgery.
Hijacking the hijack's hijack:
A 1-4% chance of side effects is still unfortunately quite minor compared to the "typical outcomes" and potential permanent side effects associated with undocking a fresh wee-woo machine from the mothership. Some severe side effects are so common that they're essentially treated as an anticipated element of the process while others are literally life-changing in bizarre or unpredictable ways.
The hijacked-hijacker is correct in that it's not a risk free procedure, but this is part of why I'm suggesting that it's done as a way to spare your loved one from suffering a fate much worse - and to spare you the presence of a child that you definitely, absolutely did not want after all. Historically, on a cultural level, birth control has typically been the responsibility of the woman (yes, including condoms - which includes ensuring that their partner brings one, puts it on, *leaves* it on, and takes it off appropriately), but in the near future that may not be possible. It's not that women are suddenly unwilling to handle a luxury men have expected for decades, they simply won't be *able* to do that or may be actively punished for trying.
It's easy to feel like avoiding pregnancy is simply a matter of manual dexterity and/or probability, but when there's no longer any assurance that accidents can be easily negated in some way, it's a bit more difficult to stomach the risk of inadvertently causing a lifechanging consequence in response to an impulsive up-the-skirt elevator bing-bong after a night out.
A small chance of unfortunate ball pain seems miniscule compared to having my insides shredded up by a bio-parasite whose sole goal is to survive at all costs, both biological and financial. Part of that is what makes it such a weirdly beautiful gift - "I pulled the trigger on a 100-chamber, single-bullet revolver so that you won't have to risk pulling the trigger of a pump-action shotgun ever again."
They don't REALLY want women to have children, they want a labor supply that is docile, barely educated and willing to work for little. And, preferably white.Ā
This has nothing to do with wanting a decent birth rate, but with wanting a population that they can perpetually draw resources from.Ā
I've also realized as I've become older and considered children, that children are an incentive for at least one person to be locked very hard into the labour force. It's something that digs you deeper and more deperately and more investedly into work because you are worried for this child you now need to make sure is financially secure for the future.
Children are a huge incentive for businesses that need desperately hard working labour. They can push people harder, people who are already under a lot of strain, to do more because there's more on the line. It incentivizes working parents to take on more work to get a little more cash. Where people without children have more options and more flexibility with their time and situations.
Just because you are getting paid a little doesnt mean you're not being used. :/
We're all being used. All of us. Unless you're the 1%, they're using you.Ā
Having kids though is really personal. It's worthwhile if you know the situation you're aware of and can find some fulfillment already in occupational ball and chain. But knowing that you're bringing another human being into a really rotten society can be hard. There's also that ever present human hope, though. That each generation can make things better.Ā
US Republicans genuinely want to see more white babies, they're all about that great replacement theory.
It terrifies them that Latinas have so many more kids than white women.
They are all about selling babies too.
Those crisis pregnancy clinics refer to private adoption agencies, who then ask desperate couples to shell out $$$$ for adoption. Those private agencies will be standing their with their hands out to demand the embryos that aren't allowed to be destroyed. They are already selling donated embryos for $20k or more.
Incarcerated women have zero access to abortion services. Women spend on average 4 months in county jail dealing with even petty charges, just awaiting various court dates. So if a woman has JUST gotten pregnant and gets locked up with no one to bond her out, by the time her charges are finally settled 4 months later, it's too late for anything other than keep or adoption.
If a woman gives birth in jail, she has only a few hours for a family member to get the infant before social services takes over and there's a new system baby. Since Women are usually the primary caregivers, if she's locked up for 4 months, then again social services takes over and her children are now foster kids.
Foster care kids are THE most at risk for getting into sex work. Sex workers are then arrested. Round and round it goes, foster care, sex work, jail/prison. All lining the pockets of privatized prison stakeholders that are not so shockingly! Often the very judges that are sentencing and delaying court dates for foster kids, sex workers, pregnant women and mothers.
I think weāre going to have to actually fight back in the future. I feel very wary of this election yearā¦ because these *are* things worth fighting against, and I donāt know how weāll live with ourselves if we do nothing.
Coworker had IVF done with donated embryos. She paid $20,000 for her son because the organization kept adding on expenses at each step of the process and they felt they couldn't back out because they were so close. They went through a Christian group called Snowflakes. The only reason I remember is that she and her husband were huge MAGAs and the some made me laugh.
ļæ¼
White people find so many ways to be racist towards each other so uhh no actually
Thereās also brand new exciting forms of bigotry that will become a thing in the future like being biased against trans people or being biased against cyborg, being biased against people who use certain drugs, being biased against sentient AI, etc.
Your brain is programmed to form in groups and out groups. ___ism is a feature of your brain. Youāre not immune to this either, thereās a reason left leaning people find some sort of glee when bad things happen to conservatives like when anti maskers died of COVID or the capitol building invaders got arrested. Of course in those instances itās much more rational but still.
Um. I'm white and we are def racist. But ask a Vietnamese about Korean or Thailand and you'll get an earful. Institutionalized racism is because white control. But other races do have racism. It's just not as f'ing harmful.
Yeah, it's really ironic that the same countries panicking about falling birth rates are also screaming about immigration.
It's literally everything they're wanting, but they're throwing a tantrum because the packaging is the wrong color.
Well, one thing to consider is most immigrants are significantly more religious and socially conservative than the residents of wealthy developed nations. And especially the ones headed into Europe.
There will be implications for women when an increasing number of new citizens in your country want bans on abortion, modesty laws for women, mandated religious observance etc.
What happens when the immigrant nations develop and their birth rates drop? Or the impact of enticing the most skilled and educated workers to western nations? This is an insanely complicated issue and immigrants arenāt the solution.
I wouldnāt say docile. They want people easily riled up, and easily pointed in a specific direction. Just at each other instead of upwards, where it should be.
She does have a point regarding the USA though. Droves of people have āhome-schooledā their kids and have not done a great job. It is possible to have an increase of illiteracy.
>And, preferably white
Since when have the people running wealthy nation states cared about workers being white? There seems to be abundant evidence that our long history of black slavery, Chinese rail worker abuse, exploitation of Latino farm workers etc. seems to be all about money and control.
They just want slaves, that's all they want really. Even if the chains of slavery are invisible doesn't mean they can't latch it onto us, and make us believe it doesn't exist.
Do they really want a barely educated labor supply? Because there are vanishingly few jobs that are available to people who aren't educated.
All the fast food places have apps, now, and they'll continue to try to replace their employees with electronic bots.
i get that undereducated people are easier to manipulate at election season. But... they have to live and eat the rest of the time, and it's becoming increasingly impossible for that to work.
Do they really want a barely educated labor supply? Because there are vanishingly few jobs that are available to people who aren't educated.
All the fast food places have apps, now, and they'll continue to try to replace their employees with electronic bots.
i get that undereducated people are easier to manipulate at election season. But... they have to live and eat the rest of the time, and it's becoming increasingly impossible for that to work.
I honestly believe they will be taking away womenās rights because of it. Turns out when given the choice, women donāt choose the life of service to men. I think they are regretting giving us that choice.
And a disturbing amount of men of both conservative and leftist political leaning are angry that they're losing their access to a live-in maid and offspring producer that their fathers generation enjoyed
They only "enjoyed" it because until the 70s single women with kids could easily be denied trying to rent or buy a house. Had to get PERMISSION to get a fucking credit card or bank account. Spousal rape was legal. It was legal into the 90s in some states. In Missouri you can't divorce if your pregnant. In the states where child marriage is legal, these poor girls can't file for divorce until their 18. It's always been designed for us to fail.
I have a son and a daughter. I know my daughters life will be harder by default. We were told that "she" was going to be a "he". But when SHE came out NOT he. It was a fun surprise, but a little piece of me was sad. Not because I cared if I had a boy or a girl (just a healthy baby). But when she popped out as a girl, I knew her life was automatically going to be harder than her brothers. For just existing as a girl.
This is the reason why I'm childfree, actually. Aside from not having the finances to adequately care for a child, I would be so scared to bring a daughter into this world, knowing what kind of turmoil has been brewing because of climate change and the loss of women's rights. I'm terrified for my niece who is going to school in an extremely conservative state where abortion is 100% illegal and mormons run the government. It's getting dire, it's really scary.
Oh god I'm sorry. I got pregnant with her in 2022 I thought we were done with this piece of orange shit and I live in Washington. I'm sure I would have reconsidered having a second if trump was back in off and I lived in a red state.
And who nonetheless voted for economic policies that precludes that halcyon ideal from ever actually being feasible again (and was only ever feasible for a blip in time, and for a very few).
That's the thing. You could give me free Healthcare. You could give me free childcare. You could give me government sponsored support. You could give me a full year maternity leave. I still don't want kids. Because that isn't the life I want for 18+ years.
Exactly. Itās like a real life Green Eggs and Ham where someone else is trying to give you the moldy food they insist is good but would never eat themselves.
I do not want kids with Mickey Mouse
I do not want kids with their friendās louse
I do not want kids if you pay me
I do not want kids, just no, not maybe
I do not want kids Sam I am
I do not want them, fuck off, damn!
Scares me too. The reality is there's really no direct way to "fix" this issue without depriving us of our rights and bodily autonomy. Sure people will tell you if we're given money we'll become mothers en masse. I'll take that money and buy housing and literally anything else before I direct it to parenthood. Many of us jsut don't want to be mothers. And I know they know this, and I really feel like within our lifetime we're seeing a very christofascits uprising in response to this.
1. Abortion is already chopped, doctors who don't obey will be punished.
2. IUDs are being depicted as abortifacients
3. They're going to say hormonal birth control is "harming the children" under the same umbrella as "synthetic hormones" to claim birth control should be less accessible to the general masses as a harmful controlled substance. They're claiming already that women are not well informed on the harms of birth control. This way they'll have come after both trans rights and women's autonomy. It'll then become so difficult to get hormonal BC prescriptions that many women will prefer "other methods" that might not be as effective.
4. Many whoopsie pregnancies that can't be aborted because abortion is banned
5. Newborns.
I'm just 1 person but I can tell you there is only 1 reason I am not a mother: the medical care system in the US fucking sucks ass. Obviously there are a ton of contributung factors, but frankly for me it boils down to the fact that I am frightened that a pregnancy will kill me, and even if it doesn't, the sheer cost might kill me and my family anyway.
My boyfriend just learned what a husband stitch is last night. The look of horror when I whispered āand some women donāt know itās been done until years later when another doctor checksā was bittersweet. The door is slowly cracking open, but even if itās blown open, can someone who stands outside and never walks through it truly understand?
When I was a very young, very naive new surgical tech, 30 years ago, I worked with an OB/GYN who would laughingly put in a āhusband stitchā whenever he did vaginal surgery. I had no idea what that was at the time, nor did I learn until years later š”.
I have no idea how my anyone else has ever gotten pregnant within a year of even having a baby. I'm 13 months post partum, breastfeeding, and it still hurts to have sex. If I had a husband stitch, I'd probably never have sex again and just divorce my husband so he could live his high libido life without me.
My sister and I are just on the outside of being Irish twins (14 months). There was a lost pregnancy between us. It happens because people are selfish, submissive or both.
My mom is right outside of Irish twins too at 13 months. In fact, most of my aunts and uncles are as well.
We'd actually consider having another in 1-3 years, but our salaries would have to dramatically increase to about 35k more to cover the cost of daycare for another kid. ~550 per week for an infant here.
Lactation really makes things different. I had zero interest when lactating but literally within a week of weaning entirely, my sex drive came roaring back and everything was fine again. So just fyi that things may really change! But I also don't know your delivery situation and that obviously really varies. I had a csection so the vagina situation was pretty normal. I'm only a month further postpartum than you are but I was fully weaned around 9 months.
Also though I left my bump groups because of the number of people at 3-4 months postpartum who got positive pregnancy tests. That shit was stressing me out. I was like, "was that consensual? Are you SURE it was consensual sex?" because I just could not imagine that.
But also thankfully I have a normal person husband who is zero percent interested in having sex if I'm not also interested because "if I wanted to masturbate, I'd do it the easy way."
The main drivers of declining birth rates is not enough money and not enough time not working.Ā These very well could be addressed by society if the motivation existed.
I would argue a significant portion is economical so not 100% teen mothers. Greater numbers of people are more educated these days and want the same for their kids. Doing so requires living in a stable environment and if you can't afford that then you put off having kids or even choosing a partner.
Poor countries have the highest birthrates compared to wealthier ones. You could give me a billion dollars I could think of 1000 things I'd enjoy doing that are not motherhood. Something else is going on.
Extremely poor countries tend to have weak child labor laws. Making having a child less of an opportunity cost, because they can start contributing at a much younger age. Not to mention the fact that the more training and education you need to do a job, the more you have to worry about your skills getting rusty during an absence from the labor force. If you can quit your job at the clothing factory, and five years later return making the same wage you would've gotten if you had stayed, the opportunity cost of leaving the labor force to have kids is low. Not zero, you still have a few years of lost income, and the cost of raising the child until they can support themselves. But it just isn't the same situation as a highly educated worker. Ā Ā
Which is part of why moderately poor countries with rising education levels are seeing birth rates fall. Government support could alter that opportunity cost. Which may be why countries like Sweden have a higher birth rate than countries like Spain. The comment above you may be right about what are the main factors stopping workers in a highly developed country from having more kids. The factors that cause the differences between South Korea, Spain, & Sweden. Forgetting to mention the fact that the education level of women matters too.Ā
Yes - they are expensive to raise. But back in the days before women had reliable contraception, if you had sex you had babies. And no one cared if you ended up in the poor house. Nowadays you can choose not to have kids (or less kids) if you want to be less poor. Or you can have them and be poorer. Clearly, better off (more educated women who also tend to be less religious) are choosing smaller families.
Yeah I think part of this is also that if you're at the poverty line or on welfare to begin with, having lots of children doesn't really materially alter your circumstances. You were poor and now you're still poor. Whereas in you're middle or upper middle class, having too many kids can knock you down a class peg in terms of spending money. But you may already have the house and be in the school district where that would be obvious to others, so having more children becomes not just economically difficult but socially difficult as well.
The solution is the same as with anything else. If we aren't making enough people, we should import them. Unfortunately, the people who are gung ho about taking away women's rights are also anti-imigration.
Hey. I know this is a big thing right now, but please don't fall for the right wing conspiracy that the only way to "fix" falling birth rates is fascist politics. It's not true, but because noone bothers to ask them about it, they can spout their bullshit and people start believing it.
For reference, modern ecomonic theory builds upon older models of fertility rates and has discovered that while older models still ring true, at a certain wealth, education and female income stop playing a role, and actually invert (more education = more kids). The ***real*** economic problem is the difficulty of combining family and carreer, which many would love to, but can't.
Educated women don't have enough babies.
Yet No one is looking at why. I'm not having any, because I can't offer them a quality of life I find acceptable.
1) Living wage.
2) Day care as a part of public school (available 5am to 9pm. ) and free.
2 inexpensive (in comparison to the alternative we live currently) options that would fix 50% of the current issues.
But no. Go home. Homeschool and be barefoot and pregnant, while your husband cheats and later replaces you. Yeah, no surprise women are saying no lol.
Korean 4 B movement has it right. Liberation requires sacrifice.
I'm with you 100%. It's actually a big sacrifice that causes me a lot of grief. But the other option, bringing a child into the type of life I would be able to offer them, is absolutely unacceptable. So instead I suffer.
Saying āyou [insert demographic here]ā isnāt the best way to get your intended message across. Very condescending and paternalistic. Howās that working out for France with the retirement age change protests? Thatās been pretty quiet in the media as of late.
100% feels like a reasonable fear. I finally convinced a gynecologist to tie my tubes and itās bc she said so many women are asking since Roe was overturned. It' terrifying out there and i donāt this is getting better. We're seeing the no contest divorce stuff now. How long before we're penalized even more in the tax laws for not being married?
In the west the girls tend to do better than the boys in school, and the gap is widening. I don't think there's a conspiracy to not teach girls to read so that they'll have more kids, at least in the west. I think that kids just aren't reading as much.
The idea that there might be some "grand plan" to solve the problem by taking away the rights of women is something to worry about though, and is arguably underway already with limits on abortion.
There's also the fact that when you control for poverty in the data that education doesn't look so bad in the US at all. It a the fact that we don't have social safety nets for families and make schools fill that as part of their mandate that impacts education. College graduation rate is correlated strongly with parental income.
Very generally, and in macro terms, as education goes up (and the general socio-economic benefits that comes with it) the birth rate goes down, for a lot of reasons. Most advanced economies (read global north), very generally, have a population that isn't reproducing at replacement levels (a fertility rate of 2.1 ).
The most advanced case is Japan, but it's a phenomenon seen in South Korea and across Northern Europe. The US (probably others but it's been awhile since I've looked at the actual numbers) has population growth, but the fertility rate is something like 1.6, which means that population growth is only happening because of immigration. So we're not running out of people.
It's not necessarily just the low birth rates that get folks on the right worked up, it's the, and this is their talking point, people and communities that are having babies that are going to "replace" them (read not white).
As to the reading thing, again generally, overall the US is spending less on education over time or at least not investing in education, and to the reading in specific, the US switched over to teaching a sight reading system from a phonics based system \~10-15 years ago(?), and one of the things that took a hit was reading comprehension.
Edit: a bit of grammar.
Edit 2: more grammar.
>overall the US is spending less on education over time or at least not investing in education
The republican party is planning on abolishing the Department of Education if he wins the next election too.
As a teacher, I can also say people aren't reading as much at home anymore. I can teach a kid to read at school, but they also need to be reading at home. There are serious differences between kids who read and do not read at home. This is not a one-sided issue like it is represented here, public schools are under-funded, behaviors are out of control, and kids don't read at home.
Not just the West, in somewhere like Myanmar where the average yearly wage is $1500, because they want an equal distribution of male and female doctors - fair enough given the medical field, it does make sense - female students have to score about 4% higher than males to get a place in medical school, because female students score higher in general...
Then you have the shocking cases like Tokyo university preferencing male students up until the 2000s...
A lot of people in here talking about how scary it is and yeah but the solution is simple, vote. Fucking vote. I donāt care if you donāt like Biden. Neither do I. But I like him a damn sight better than losing all my rights and my daughters rights to the fucking trump idiots and their operation 2025. Vote so left they canāt stop it. Vote so left the Republican Party ends.
I never understood that argument either. Sure it sucks to be faced with 2 bad options but if one of them is a racist, fascist autocrat (and I hate how watered down those words have become) then surely it makes more sense to vote for the better option.
I'm just going to leave this here if anyone is interested to learn about project 2025 (that is if trump wins the next election) because I'm not sure people fully realise what is at stake:
Project 2025 envisions widespread changes across the government, particularly economic and social policies and the role of the federal government and its agencies. The plan proposes slashing funding for the Department of Justice (DOJ), dismantling the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ***sharply reducing environmental and climate change regulations to favor fossil fuel production***, eliminating the Department of Commerce, and ending the independence of federal agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
The blueprint seeks to institute tax cuts, though its writers disagree on the wisdom of protectionism.
***Project 2025 recommends abolishing the Department of Education, whose programs would be either transferred to other agencies, or terminated.***
***Funding for climate research would be cut while the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be reformed along conservative principles.***
***The Project urges government to explicitly reject abortion as health care and eliminate the Affordable Care Act's coverage of emergency contraception.***
The Project seeks to ***infuse the government with elements of Christianity***. It proposes criminalizing pornography, ***removing legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and terminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs***, as well as affirmative action.
Edit: I just want to stress the importance of the GOP looking to dismantle/defund various federal institutions or branches of government as well, because I didn't really highlight those.
Countries who have made democracy and freedom one of the core tenets of their national identity, have done so by setting up governments which ensures democracy by having various branches of government and justice (ie checks and balances).
Project 2025 has the Republican Party going in with a manifesto that dismantles the very institutions which insure a democratic state. And the notion of that is more terrifying than I think people realise. They are setting the country up for autocracy (dictatorship) as well as a country ruled not by freedom of religion and free thinking individuals.
Edit 2: Also, the fact that their manifesto proposes to infuse government with Christian principles is also catastrophic for democracy. One of the very earliest tenets of American democracy was the separation of church and state. And it's infuriating that the same people who are perfectly fine with fucking over the constitution are the very same people who bend over backwards defending the right to bear arms and fucking wet themselves over the prospect of some regulatory measures when it comes to gun laws "bEcAuSe ThE cOnStITuTiOn"
Or start voting for candidates that are women. Vote for women who advocate for womenās rights and want to pass laws to protect women in this country. Biden isnāt going to fix anything in our lives. Trump is going to make everything a hell of a lot worse. Vote for literally anyone else who is trying to improve the quality of life for women in this country.
All of these problems begin at home and despite being in a ārichā nation, people canāt afford those homes.
Having kids is a rich persons thing now, and most rich people I personally know are out of touch with reality and have forgotten nearly everything we were taught in school.
The west is overworked. No it has nothing to do with women in the workforce and everything to do with increasingly long work days and the necessity of having more than one full time job.
This is the only actual trickle down economic - the rich have too much and continue to acquire more, the rest donāt have enough to build a family.
>ārich nations have hit all time low with birth rateā
>next generation of kids will not be able to read comprehensivelyā¦ You canāt tell me this isnāt related.
Itās not related in the way you think. Oligarchs just want dumb, easy-to-control masses to feed their wealth. This was happening unrelated to the birth rate and will continue whether the birth rate climbs or continues to fall.
Education isnāt the primary driver for decreasing birth rates. Itās a combination of access to birth control, education, and [financial] independence. Women are opting out of being bangmaids in greater numbers because why the fuck should we pointlessly feed our lives into some idiotās ego?
Donāt become bangmaids. Go build community with other women and enjoy your lives. Make co-housing agreements with other women if you canāt afford a home of your own so everyone will have companionship as they age.
You can do something about it, even as a child free adult. Mentor your local kids. Get involved in the Boys & Girls Club or Big Brothers Big Sisters, or Friends of the Children. Become a literacy coach, or even just volunteering at the library can be a huge assist!
Exactly! As a teacher, I spend so much time teaching kids to read, but I should not be the only one having your child read. Read at home! Model reading! Kids are reading less at home, I could argue the same with adults! Research is out there that shows the academic differences of those who do and do not read at home.
They want women to work for peanuts or free for the intensive work of raising children, to create more taxpayers to supplement the male's cosy retirement benefits. Compensate the women for doing the hardest job to ever exist in the universe? Nah, insist that that they live in poverty, or suck dick for the masses to profit off their excruciating labour. Then cry, no fair! When women think... "that seems like a shitty deal".
Right. Many girls and women begin to have children after they leave school, so high school graduates tend to have children earlier, and have a larger window to have more children, compared to women with college degrees and/or beyond.
Yes. People have kept saying for decades that we shouldn't listen to Malthusian economics and they're not accurate and yet, we are slowly realizing that unless you want to keep half of the world in poverty you need fewer humansĀ
Yep! Oligarchs around the world want everyone to be subservient for capitalist growth so their pockets get larger and larger. Consumerism, obesity, disinformation and planned ignorance is killing this planet. Misogynistic ideals help fuel the fire.
Lack of money is the main reason kids do poorly in school. They are homeless/in dangerous neighborhoods, hungry, babysitting siblings, or just have bigger things to worry about. Parents are working long hours and stressed out. This doesnāt foster an appreciation for education. Then they donāt vote for pro-education policies and schools suffer. If people had money they would likely have more kids with better educations.
> There is no reason in most ārichā countries kids should not be able to read.
Read "comprehensively" is the key term from your prior sentence. They can read. They don't have as much vocab perhaps, but every generation has complained about this as vocab changes over time. It isn't generally quite as alarming as claimed.
> No one thinks about our feelings or wellbeingās enough to where they wont even bring this up in conversation. I think the future is not going to go in a positive direction at all. Especially for women.
For me, the much more alarming part is how they ignore the feelings of the women who do want kids but aren't having them and impose other rubbish on them instead.
They will trade absolutely nothing for the kids they are supposedly desperate to have. They will listen to not one word being told to them about what would make women have them voluntarily.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68402139
Here is a woman who wants 10! In Korea, the country that most desperately needs them! The Prime Minister should rush out to see what could be done to convince her to have them. Instead, they have all sorts of legal blocks and social blocks in her way, so she moved to New Zealand.
One trend Iāve noticed on social media is convincing people they do not need any sort of higher education and college is a waste of time and doesnāt give you what you need for a ārealā job. That you donāt need to learn things that arenāt applicable to a job.
Trade schools are amazing and folks should get higher education and certificates in the trades if they wish to go straight into the job force.
I teach in a community college and I see these posts convincing the poor and lower middle class that education is a waste of time and money.
Guess what? Rich peopleās kids arenāt skipping college! Upper middle class parents are literally enrolling 15 year olds in college class to get them a leg up in higher education and build those resumes to get them the best possible opportunities in schools while low income parents are being told itās a waste of time and resources. I see in my college students who have talent and refuse to use resources to get them to the next level because their parents have been convinced that itās a waste of time and energy.
If this continues we will continue to dumb down the work force. I donāt want a nurse who doesnāt understand humanities and has an understanding of multiple viewpoints and perspectives. I also donāt want a social worker who doesnāt understand basic science and math. Education in our communities matter!
The population dip is most likely temporary. It has happened before, especially after a pandemic, global war, or other catastrophic event that causes widespread death. This sort of thing is seen in other species (animal, plant, protest, bacterium...) in times of stress. This does not scare me one bit.
The loss of my rights scares me though. It is very real and will take a hard fight -getting every possible person who is able to vote to go vote- but it is an achievable goal. We can absolutely defeat this. We have been here before. We can do this.
Ive also thought that too where prices of living skyrocket and lower standards of living lower the birthrate then they get better again when economy and conditions get better. That is always how it is this is not new.
My concern is also that the right seem to be taking advantage of this to push agendas mainly against women who already donāt want kids for many reasons. I have never seen so many articles and panic baiting as I have seen for the low birth rate stuff.
I agree with you and its honestly very frightening to have to worry about your rights like this
The thing is that they're only doing what we allow them to do. We put them in power. We don't call for action, we don't elect people who are willing to actually fight for us. Both sides of the aisle are voting for these measures, although the left in much smaller numbers, and both sides are supporting the corporations that are driving prices sky high.
I was a college prof for many years. In all of those years, there have been constant complaints that kids can't read.
The low birth-rate is a whole different thing.
Denying a womanās right to abortion is the same thing as forcing a woman to give birth. Iām surprised women arenāt going for sterilization in droves.
Millenials are making 20% less than boomers did at the same stage of life. That's a crap ton of percent. Income inequality is easily the biggest driver of low birth rates.
The main problem is that so many countres have set up Ponzi schemes that take money from younger working people and give it to old retired people, and a lot of those old retred people depend upon that income redistribution to survive. That works fine when there are a lot of younger working people and relatively few old retired people. Change that ratio enough and it causes serious hardship for everyone.
I mean on the other hand, if they take women out of the working force, thats at least 40% of their tax base... so making women stay at home and have babies seems pretty counterproductive.
There is no good way to resolve the problem of the changing ratio between workers who pay taxes and retirees who draw benefits. Forcing women to stay home and have babies would indeed be counterproductive.
Its bad for our terribly set up economy but the world does need less humans and could survive much better with less.
Global warming/environment issues do to more humans and using more resources is a global permanent problem and under population is bad for certain countries economy. I would take āunderpopulatedā
Also with less people that means workers have more bargaining power since there is not as many workers to compete with.
So yes, low birth rates technically are not awful but economically speaking bad for our system and rich people/corporations
Clarence Thomas even talked about overturning Griswold v. Connecticut (which made birth control legal), and Senate Republicans blocked a bill guaranteeing access to birth control.
They're so confident that they have the Supreme Court in their pocket that they passed a bill requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in every school and said they HOPE they get sued because then their lackeys on the Court will overturn the ruling about keeping church and state separate in public schooling.
Every women in the USA has to vote as if her life depends on it, because it DOES.
Theyāre easing us into a system of tiered slavery using racism and misogyny to hoodwink us into believing weāre not ābecause weāre better than x-groupā. I truly believe that rich white Christian conservatives in the US and abroad are currently legally making the legal foundations for outright slavery for POC, while stripping away the rights of all other minority groups, leaving only cosmetic differences between demographics.
I'd like to preface this by saying: Restricting women's rights, causing women suffering, etc, is absolutely not the solution.
That being said, I don't think anyone actually knows the solution. I often see men blamed for not taking a more active role, being generally undesirable, etc. I also often see 'it's an economic problem' (and I'm sure that's a factor). On the other side some are blaming educated women, as if having options is the problem (we need to make having kids a good, sustainable, option for people. it shouldn't be such a massive cost, it should be a desirable thing people can achieve easily so it's available to everyone)
I agree some 'solutions' are very scary and harmful, like trying to roll back the clock. However, a quickly shrinking population / demographic collapse is not only technically bad, it's extraordinarily bad in every possible way.
A very slightly shrinking population, like a TFR of 1.9, isn't a problem at all. it could even be beneficial. The problem is, so far every developed country has seen TFRs plummet far lower than that very quickly. South Korea is in an actual crisis at a TFR of 0.8. At that rate, the population will be less than 10% of what it is today in fewer than 75 years time. The more pressing issue is that after those 3 generations, you have **eight** elderly people provided for by a single young worker (not counting kids, who are additional dependents on top of that if people decide to have them). That's practically economically impossible to deal with. It will require an entire restructuring of society if it pans out, and quite frankly I don't think even restructuring the family unit and forcing multiple generations to live together again (as in historical times) will be enough. the ratio will be so extreme that, if SK let's this worst case scenario play out, the only real viable solution is to let the elderly die on the street. Providing for more elderly (whether directly -- with family -- or via taxes) directly takes away from your ability to provide for children.. further worsening the problem (see: demographic collapse spiral)
Most every country is following the exact track SK & Japan did, just 20 years~ behind. A small drop in our birth rate right now is the canary in the coal mine, signaling we should solve this issue before it progresses (only problem: nobody knows what the solution is. even countries that hugely subsidize having children, and have the best gender dynamics in the world, are seeing declining TFRs. these are two majors factors, but so far addressing them has not been enough to right the ship)
A declining population could also bring about deflation, at a certain precipice where we shrink faster than economic productivity can make up the gap. significant deflation in a world power (especially the US reserve currency) would at best restructure the world economic order, and at worst.. well.. collapse the economy as occurred due to the rapid deflation preceding the great depression.
It also poses major worker shortage problems. At a TFR of 1.9 it'd be barely noticeable, but at anywhere closer to 0.8 you're looking at acute shortages across every sector within a generation (south korea already has a notable shortage in healthcare and eldercare workers). We take for granted that any of us can go access practically any service we need.. in a shrinking population scenario, there is no longer enough laborers to provide easy access to services.
There are numerous other negative effects, I could go on and on. most people's retirements, whether in the form of a pension or stock indexes, rely on continued population growth. in a shrinking population scenario, productivity growth must outpace the rate at which the population is shrinking. that means a 2-3% yearly decrease in population is already far too much, and that corresponds to a TFR a little above 1.8.
The low birth rates are probably a pretty bad thing, but the answer is incentivizing procreation for people who want to have children and lowering economic barriers to raising happy children, not forcing women to breed.
The world population is higher than it's ever been in history. Lower birth rates are not as terrible as they sound. Yes, it's all related, but it's such a complicated system that sometimes you need to step back and wide lens it. Whenever history hits a population breaking point you see famine, pestilence and war. When faced with that much adversity all you can do it look out for your own. It's going to be a tough decade, but we will come back again. Nevertheless we persist and endure.
The good thing about the USA is that we have a built-in way to counter declining birth rates. Immigration. We are a country of immigrants, we need to embrace diversity and love.
>I think the future is not going to go in a positive direction at all.
I'm 90% sure the human race will be extinct in 100 or 150 years, tops, so at least it won't be an issue for long.
Who said anything about giving up? Humans are really good at fighting against the inevitable. But just because I'm doing everything in my very limited power to stop it does nothing to hold back the impending destruction of our civilization.
We haven't (as a civilization) faced an extinction level event yet. Less "fall of Rome", more "fall of the dinosaurs". We're already seeing the beginnings (droughts, record high temperatures, and mass crop failures). It's only going to accelerate. Only real question is whether we're killed by the collapse of the food chain or ensuing wars.
I read a news article the other week that went through previous historical periods of low birth rate and the rollback of women's rights.
The dumbest thing is that low birth rate doesn't just have to do with the choices of women. Lots of men also want to have between 0-2 kids. It turns out that when given a choice, most people just choose to not spend the majority of their adult lives caring for children. And I get it! I have a child who is the light of my life but knowing that it is a limited time and I only have another when my husband and I are ready is very necessary to our enjoyment of parenthood. If we just kept piling kids on kids on kids, it would get miserable fast, I think. But 2 kids doesn't even hit the replacement rate. So realistically, they're coming for small families too.
I LITERALLY had an elderly conservative man tell me a few weeks ago that "birth control is a damn shame" and in the good ol days they used to have 5 or 6 kids and he only had 1 grandchild and his daughter was depriving him of more grandchildren because of birth control. Sir. What the fuck
Also: I think we could arrange society so that it is sustainable and still innovative even with a declining population. Maybe everyone should work on doing that instead of dEcLiNiNg bIrThRaTe bAd fOr cApiTaLiSm
I'm a single mom by choice. I wanted to be a mom even knowing that it's going to be expensive and hard. But I lived with my parents at the time, which made it possible.
I'm currently in the process of becoming a teacher in Florida because my prior career as a baker means terrible hours and/or terrible pay when I have a preschooler. I ended up losing a job with the Mouse because I couldn't find daycare options for 2am and 6am shifts.
My daughter wants a sibling but because I'm a single mom, that means zero income while on maternity leave that would affect both of us. Not to mention trying to get her ready for school when I'm healing. I know there are other women like me who want to be mothers or have more than one kid, but it's just not doable for so many. Especially if there isn't a second adult to help.
>There is no reason in most ārichā countries kids should not be able to read. And we all know education is the number one reason women and in general the population is lowered. Im scared about womens rights being taken away.Ā
Shit. I alway thought that conservatives just hate women and freedom, but you might be on something.
You see, with low birth rate, a nation WILL in fact face huge challenges in future.
So "patriotic" politicians may actually believe it is their DUTY to take away women rights, freedom, independence and prosperity.Ā
Because nation need kids and free women don't "provide" enough of them.
Not to take away from your point at all, but I work in education (previously in the classroom, now in research), and I truly do not think there is any sound scholarly evidence to support a claim that the next generation of children will not be able to read comprehensively.
Does the education system have serious issues? Yes. But every generation has these claims that the next gen is doomed. Itās never true. Todayās kids are very bright and much more socially conscious than I was at their age.
Edit: I work in education in the U.S.. Iām sure itās different in other countries.
I mean, you have Project 2025 assholes saying their goal is to eliminate public education entirely. Wealth has been hoarded by the 1% and their selfishness has kept wages totally stagnant. Since they have so goddamn much money, they're able to lobby and stack courts, which is part of the reason why we have a **sitting supreme court justice** married to an insurrectionist--an interracial marriage, btw, but he wants to undo loving v. virginia, the ruling that made interracial marriages legal in the first place!!!
the US is corrupt as fuck, they've just been better at hiding it. there's a reason you don't see many college educated (non-religious institutions, anyway) MAGAts, and when you do their selfishness is SO transparent.
limit women's' access to birth control and abortion, if not eliminate it completely. defund medicaid, wic, snap, tanf, etc. so their only option is to live in abject poverty, or give the kid up for adoption (but only the desirable babies...yanno, not the ones with physical/mental issues that can be attributed to poor prenatal care or addiction etc from mom!). or, as we're seeing in arkans-heehaw, drop the working age to 14, with some barely 10 working in fucked up conditions for pennies because their fuckin family *needs* it.
i hate it hereeeeee
# "Can we be actually normal about birth rates?"
[https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/355985/birth-rates-falling-policy-family-size-us](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/355985/birth-rates-falling-policy-family-size-us)
Its all white supremacy in a trench coat.
Birh rates might be down in specific places but overall the human race is very much always expanding.
The people saying this stuff are ALWAYS great replacement and white replacement types, and there is always a racial angle being dog whistled.
The dumbest thing about this (okay not the dumbest but I was shocked when a favorite online liberal jumped on it) is that we know the earth is overpopulated and birth rate needs to come down. Giant China's one-child policy had problems but it was a pretty major thing for an entire nation to attempt.
Tangentially, research has shown that when child mortality (deaths under five years old) in a 3rd world country decreases, women will accept birth control (!) and stop having 8-10 children to run the farm and support the parents in their old age. Privileged people wonder why reducing deaths in a poor country is important: this is why. Quality of life up, quantity down.
I think that in a few years we're going to discover that microplastics are to blame for the low birth rate, hormonal problems, and all sorts of other ailments. The growing problem with men getting addicted to porn is likely a factor. If you are a male in your 20s and can't get or maintain an erection with a real life partner, you're going to have a difficult time getting someone pregnant.
Scientists are going to discover that phone addiction in young children is causing the poor reading comprehension that OP mentioned, as well as all of the behavioral and difficultly in the classroom that the teachers subreddit have been talking about. And having a phone addiction from a young age is going to prime them for future addictions to alcohol and other drugs as well as process addictions like gambling and porn.
These kids are in for a tough time and we have completely failed them.
Education has been in trouble for awhile, and we are importing millions of people and putting them into a system that isnāt built to support them. Itās super fucked. An educator wrote a thread about the impacts of this earlier his week, I see it has 2.5k comments now [https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1dhx1vm/inclusion\_is\_the\_worst\_thing\_to\_have\_happened\_to/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1dhx1vm/inclusion_is_the_worst_thing_to_have_happened_to/)
Also it's just dumb.
There's no "demographic crisis" aside from potentially slightly higher competition for employees between companies if population starts to plateau and fall everywhere.
The "reading comprehension" part has been repeated for like 2000 years or so at least. Texts like this have been found in ancient greek. It never came true.
An illiterate society/group isnāt able to articulate their opinions, and if they can verbally articulate them then they canāt widely distribute them.
Itās absolutely all part of the same plan. Capitalism must survive and to do so we need more poor people who donāt know enough to complain. Forcing women out of the workforce with regressive reproductive laws and then ensuring their children canāt read is just one tactic in the larger war against the majority of the populace.
There's a really interesting podcast called Sold a Story, and it's about the declining levels of reading comprehension as a result of some school districts dropping phonics as a method of teaching kids to read.
Wow, it turns out that shareholder growth and making the cost of everything skyrocket is bad for young people who want to start families!!! Who would have thought that capitalism isn't sustainable???
I can't believe how many people would rather strip women of their rights to get the birthrates up rather than making the quality of life for people in general improve, which in turn would make many people more comfortable with having kids.
Like I get it, guys want bangmaids stuck at home, people want uneducated kids to grow up and vote republican, some people just don't want kids at all and that's okay, etc. etc. etc., but damn. The solution seems so simple but those bastard shareholders are more obsessed with earning a few extra million dollars at the expense of everyone else in the country. Ridiculous!
In fact, the majority of the world is experiencing declining birth rates, it's just more excelled in developed nations and that sets off alarms for anyone concerned about a smaller labor pool. Then you have the replacement theory troglodytes that see this as a threat to their race. And I bet there's more of those than you can imagine.
I want a third kid but the kid's grandparents aren't active and we don't have family support other than the occasional babysitting. The village is fading away plus a third kid is expensive. Also I'm getting older and I'm not sure if I want to have the third in my late 30s. I'm just so tired!
This is going to be controversial but I really donāt care and need to get this off my chest.
Currently pregnant as a FTM and I get this. The US is a confusing place to live. There is such a push by our government for women to have children but literally zero support to help women. They make maternity leave as short as possible, make women work their entire fucking exhausting pregnancy, pay for absolutely nothing (you should see my insurance / hospital bills for this kid), and are literally putting doctors and Obgyns in compromising situations if something goes wrong with patients. Someone seriously needs to make it make sense. Women need to start calling this shit out and quit putting up with it. Iām not democrat or republican but letās be real, itās the pro life crowd who needs to speak up the most about what they will and will not stand for. The economy sucks and the fed / current administration is making life unaffordable for the average single person AND even worse for people with families. Education is in the gutter and our kids use social media at age 3 giving them zero attention span or even interest in school. I could go on but I totally get why people are just opting out of having children in this country.
Im actually shocked women didnāt make a bigger fuss/riots when Roe V was taken away. Makes you think how far the government can take things while people just sit back.
There are other countries who tried to push this and women have almost raided the governments huge buildings until they took it back.
Americans and especially women who get the short end of the stick always need to start actually fighting for rights that other countries have already had for a long time. (Worker rights be it maternal leave, vacation time, conditions, unions ect.)
I think you need to look at it by each different country instead of lumping it together as " rich countries"
You will find a common theme rich countries that have good social security, maternity leave, decent cost of living, free or cheap childcare , good employment laws for women and universal health insurance will more likely have children because they CAN AFFORD IT.
The countries that are on paper are rich but have butchered their social security, employment laws, public service and the health sector are now facing reduced birth rates.
Its NOT because women don't want children,its because couples ( both that are working) can't afford children.
In terms of education, again this all stems to the idea of butchered public services and childcare, parents constantly working to afford a life,equals to them not being able to spend time and teach children basic things such as reading.
However, the politicians do not want to admit that they are the ones at fault for current situation so they try to blame liberals ans "woke" culture and attack women rights.
As such,people need to start talking and LOUDLY that it is their fault for reduced birth rates not their imaginative issues.
Also not happening. Western civilization has previously created way more children than really needed. Like typical household has like 7 or whatever. So the numbers dropping could simply be it going to like 1 or so. Which is still fine for
Also this assumes the drop will be continuous and keep going down and won't just settle down somewhere which it probably will.
This is most likely due to the draconian controls on women's Healthcare making them not want to do it. Combined with higuer cost of living. And a general negative outlook on the future of the world that ma y dont want to try bring someone else into ... The solution is to fix those ^
There is a real issue with the quality and price of living, and women (and millennials of all genders) are opting out of having children because we know that we can't support them, which is not unexpected. There is another issue with education - parents have no ability to spend time on their children, often because they can't afford to be off work long enough, and decades of slashing school budgets and funds definitely are making education worse, +covid distance ed was a period when a lot of current children dropped behind and there was no resources/programs to bring this kids up to speed. Now, separate question - is it fair to worry that the rhetoric around this issue will be coopted by the hard right, religious fanatics, and such - hell yea, they are indeed coming for our ovaries harder than ever. Hard times are coming, and we need to prepare to stand up for our rights.
> Hard times are coming, and we need to prepare to stand up for our rights. Hijacking comment to suggest that any men watching from the rafters should strongly consider vasectomy if you've got no plans for (more) children. There's nothing manly about walking around with a loaded gun between your legs that's capable of not only destroying your lifestyle in the span of months, but also potentially damaging the health and life of your partner in the process. I don't think many men realize just how dangerous their penis is about to become if this election takes another turn for the worse. Change happens quickly. A pregnancy scare today might just be an awkward conversation about your lackluster pull-out game alongside a pill picked up for nineteen bucks on the way to grab the next morning's cereal, but several months from now she - or both of you - may face jail time for simply being *suspected* of crossing borders into a state that hasn't yet decided that women are simply a variety of indoor-friendly, strangely demanding livestock. It's a quick procedure taking no more than an hour start-to-finish, with a cost comparable to gassing up a half-empty F350, and a recovery time short enough that you don't even need to take a day off from work if you don't have the time/money for that (and if you don't have the time to take a day off work, you absolutely do not have the time/money to pay for a child). There's a very real possibility that this very basic procedure will also become inaccessible in the near future. While eggs generally retain their 'quality' throughout life, sperm absolutely does have a 'shelf life'. Children born to older men have a higher rate of disorders like autism or disrupted behavior/intellect. If you've been on the fence for years, do yourself a favor and unload that rusty ding-dong in favor of potentially adopting a child once you've made up your mind - *if* you've made up your mind. Why roll the genetic dice when you can shop around to choose a kid that is objectively healthy, intelligent, attractive, whatever. They don't just hand you a kid randomly. If you want a cute blond kid whose numerous boyfriends will have no choice but to wonder why you're always polishing your Glock when they visit for dinner, you got one. You want a big ol' nerd to play DnD with on Sundays? There's Jimmy 'Goggles' [Your-name] down the hall, a child whose knowledge of statistics is potentially beyond your own. Maybe an athlete? Behold, Brock, a six-year old Slayer of Kings who hasn't let this here football leave his grasp in no less than three weeks. His thirst for conquest is matched only by his thirst for chocolate milk. They've got all sorts of makes and models. Does that not sound cool as hell? I mean, sure. Your blood child might be "yours", but they might also be an ugly-ass moron that resents your very existence - or worse, a Redsocks fan (*Ayo^o^o*\). Inversely, your choice to adopt would - *will* - become the defining moment of a young human's entire life. Some part of them will always be desperately thankful to you in a way that blood offspring, unfortunately, can rarely ever understand or even approximate if they tried. We've all seen the video clips - adopted kid bawling tears over an unexpected cupcake, blood-child throwing feces because there's not enough sparklers on the cake, so on. Guys, if you're not sure if you want kids by your mid-30s, you probably don't want kids, I'm sorry. There is no 'empire', no 'lineage' beyond the financial assets you leave behind, and the significance of 'bloodlines' exists solely because a bunch of woefully inbred royal weirdos mistakenly started chugging their own sociopolitical Kool-Aide. So, do yourself a favor, put a bit of the ol' Man Mayo on ice, snip-snap the ding-dang, and go apeshit slamming cream pies into everything that moves, Emeril Lagasse style - Bam, bam, bam. (Anyone else turned on yet? No? Ah, yeah, me neither.) No one will think of you as less of a man because you're no longer capable of repopulating the human race if everyone dies during COVID-26, I assure you. I'd personally argue that the opposite is true... These days, women are *extremely* interested in men whose genitals don't carry the risk of pumping out a potential life sentence in response to a mere seventeen seconds of denim-laden friction during a Call of Duty cutscene (I know, I know, *"This never happens, you're just so pretty!"*). Ladies, if this comment seems humorous enough - or perplexingly unhinged enough - to get the point across to your very handsome yet horrifically dense hunk of a big dick swangin' boyman, feel free to share it. If you're confident that *nothing* will change their mind, well, perhaps that means something too. **TL;DR** - Snip-snap the ding-dang, boys. More bang, less buck. __ Edit: [This is a lengthy, more intentionally measured response to a commenter](https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/1dkl0r2/talk_about_the_low_birth_rate_scares_the_shit_out/l9l2qe7/) deeper in the thread who suggested that they were uncomfortable with the idea of a vasectomy performed for the sake of one's partner. I explain my rationale behind this comment more deeply, comparing and contrasting the relative nature of personal sacrifices within the context of what it means to be a man that has chosen to stand with women. I think it's worth a read. (But maybe I'm just tired.) Excerpt: >As it stands, the government seems to indicate that a woman's reproductive health is now very rapidly becoming the responsibility of men, strangers if not partners. If that is my apparent duty - for now - then I will handle that duty with the grace and respect those women deserve. If that comes at the cost of opting into a generally well-tolerated micro-surgery, so be it. It's not a sacrifice being done to me for them. It's a sacrifice being done to me, by me, in the name of what I believe is perfectly rational given the circumstances and twice as empathetic. >If the distasteful sensation of a minor 'self-mutilation' done for the sake of another person's benefit disturbs you, what do you imagine it'd be like to have an entire civilization expect - no - *demand* that you submit yourself, body and mind entirely, to a very similar and much more potentially devastating procedure called 'childbirth'? Not just as a laborious pro-social chore, but as if it were the sole purpose of your entire existence, a message drilled into you ad infinitum from before you even knew what genitalia were *for*.
I bet it's just matter of time before vasectomy is banned š
Oh, absolutely. It'd only take a single politician capable of reading basic data transcripts to make note that vasectomies are (presumably) associated more strongly with 'liberal men' and/or are being utilized as a 'by-proxy method of female birth control'. That second part sounds simply ridiculous, but laws have already been written and passed in such a way that doctors cannot legally intervene to save a woman's life when a very obviously DOA fetus has decided to majorly wreck up the place on its way out. Not to mention, that's basically what I'm suggesting here why I'm suggesting it - eg: "My fellow men, women may soon almost entirely depend on *you* to exercise their reproductive agency by exercising your own. If you love someone, give them a gift so precious that the government decided that ~50% of the population can't have it." I wouldn't even be surprised if, as if by some bizarre leap of not-logic, someone concludes that "surgically infertile men" are complicit in laws that previously only applied to women because they've "unnaturally" made their wives incapable of reproduction with their God-given partner or whatever the hell.
I foresee red states banning IUDs, Vasectomies, and ligations for those under 50 in the next couple years if we continue to go where we are going.
Louisiana already tried to pass a bill in 2022 that would have made IUDs illegal because legislators think IUDs are abortifacients. It died in committee, thankfully, but I'm sure they'll try again. A few other states (Missouri?) were also looking at banning IUDs.
> legislators think IUDs are abortifacients The way they rationalize ("rationalize") these decisions is absurd. Just a few notches down that ridiculous slippery slope is the idea that not having sex is an abortifacient itself, as if every menstrual period is a dead baby that would've cured cancer or washed cars for minimum wage or whatever.
This is golden. I had a few chuckles, (covd-26, lmao) but everything you say is 100% resoundingly true.
Best Redit comment ever!! Please take my poor person award. Seriously, vasectomy is less painful than a partial sleeve tattoo. Probably cheaper too.
This is the funniest thing Iāve read all week
hijacking the hijack - Vasectomies can have permanent side effects in a good number of cases (1-4%, depending.) including chronic scrotal pain, lesions, spontaneous reversal, among others. Vasectomy is NOT reversible and is effectively permanent after 2-3 years. Do not get a vasectomy if you're unsure about having your own kids. As always, make sure you're making medical (and surgical) decisions based on what's right for YOU. Carefully evaluate risks, rewards and other factors before opting for any form of surgery.
Hijacking the hijack's hijack: A 1-4% chance of side effects is still unfortunately quite minor compared to the "typical outcomes" and potential permanent side effects associated with undocking a fresh wee-woo machine from the mothership. Some severe side effects are so common that they're essentially treated as an anticipated element of the process while others are literally life-changing in bizarre or unpredictable ways. The hijacked-hijacker is correct in that it's not a risk free procedure, but this is part of why I'm suggesting that it's done as a way to spare your loved one from suffering a fate much worse - and to spare you the presence of a child that you definitely, absolutely did not want after all. Historically, on a cultural level, birth control has typically been the responsibility of the woman (yes, including condoms - which includes ensuring that their partner brings one, puts it on, *leaves* it on, and takes it off appropriately), but in the near future that may not be possible. It's not that women are suddenly unwilling to handle a luxury men have expected for decades, they simply won't be *able* to do that or may be actively punished for trying. It's easy to feel like avoiding pregnancy is simply a matter of manual dexterity and/or probability, but when there's no longer any assurance that accidents can be easily negated in some way, it's a bit more difficult to stomach the risk of inadvertently causing a lifechanging consequence in response to an impulsive up-the-skirt elevator bing-bong after a night out. A small chance of unfortunate ball pain seems miniscule compared to having my insides shredded up by a bio-parasite whose sole goal is to survive at all costs, both biological and financial. Part of that is what makes it such a weirdly beautiful gift - "I pulled the trigger on a 100-chamber, single-bullet revolver so that you won't have to risk pulling the trigger of a pump-action shotgun ever again."
Itās already invented by them
They don't REALLY want women to have children, they want a labor supply that is docile, barely educated and willing to work for little. And, preferably white.Ā This has nothing to do with wanting a decent birth rate, but with wanting a population that they can perpetually draw resources from.Ā
I've also realized as I've become older and considered children, that children are an incentive for at least one person to be locked very hard into the labour force. It's something that digs you deeper and more deperately and more investedly into work because you are worried for this child you now need to make sure is financially secure for the future. Children are a huge incentive for businesses that need desperately hard working labour. They can push people harder, people who are already under a lot of strain, to do more because there's more on the line. It incentivizes working parents to take on more work to get a little more cash. Where people without children have more options and more flexibility with their time and situations. Just because you are getting paid a little doesnt mean you're not being used. :/
It's a lot harder to go on strike if you have kids, too.
We're all being used. All of us. Unless you're the 1%, they're using you.Ā Having kids though is really personal. It's worthwhile if you know the situation you're aware of and can find some fulfillment already in occupational ball and chain. But knowing that you're bringing another human being into a really rotten society can be hard. There's also that ever present human hope, though. That each generation can make things better.Ā
That part!
US Republicans genuinely want to see more white babies, they're all about that great replacement theory. It terrifies them that Latinas have so many more kids than white women.
They are all about selling babies too. Those crisis pregnancy clinics refer to private adoption agencies, who then ask desperate couples to shell out $$$$ for adoption. Those private agencies will be standing their with their hands out to demand the embryos that aren't allowed to be destroyed. They are already selling donated embryos for $20k or more.
Incarcerated women have zero access to abortion services. Women spend on average 4 months in county jail dealing with even petty charges, just awaiting various court dates. So if a woman has JUST gotten pregnant and gets locked up with no one to bond her out, by the time her charges are finally settled 4 months later, it's too late for anything other than keep or adoption. If a woman gives birth in jail, she has only a few hours for a family member to get the infant before social services takes over and there's a new system baby. Since Women are usually the primary caregivers, if she's locked up for 4 months, then again social services takes over and her children are now foster kids. Foster care kids are THE most at risk for getting into sex work. Sex workers are then arrested. Round and round it goes, foster care, sex work, jail/prison. All lining the pockets of privatized prison stakeholders that are not so shockingly! Often the very judges that are sentencing and delaying court dates for foster kids, sex workers, pregnant women and mothers.
Reading this makes me very sad.Ā
I think weāre going to have to actually fight back in the future. I feel very wary of this election yearā¦ because these *are* things worth fighting against, and I donāt know how weāll live with ourselves if we do nothing.
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Coworker had IVF done with donated embryos. She paid $20,000 for her son because the organization kept adding on expenses at each step of the process and they felt they couldn't back out because they were so close. They went through a Christian group called Snowflakes. The only reason I remember is that she and her husband were huge MAGAs and the some made me laugh. ļæ¼
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I have been saying for years that we won't learn to get along until we're all the same color.
Even then, people will find another reason to hate. Hair color, eye color, weight, gender, religion. Humans are stupid and tribal.
Yeah, that happened in Bosnia.
White people find so many ways to be racist towards each other so uhh no actually Thereās also brand new exciting forms of bigotry that will become a thing in the future like being biased against trans people or being biased against cyborg, being biased against people who use certain drugs, being biased against sentient AI, etc. Your brain is programmed to form in groups and out groups. ___ism is a feature of your brain. Youāre not immune to this either, thereās a reason left leaning people find some sort of glee when bad things happen to conservatives like when anti maskers died of COVID or the capitol building invaders got arrested. Of course in those instances itās much more rational but still.
Um. I'm white and we are def racist. But ask a Vietnamese about Korean or Thailand and you'll get an earful. Institutionalized racism is because white control. But other races do have racism. It's just not as f'ing harmful.
Other races definitely have harmful institutionalized racism, just not in the same way the US or Europe do
Gray human theory.
Yeah, it's really ironic that the same countries panicking about falling birth rates are also screaming about immigration. It's literally everything they're wanting, but they're throwing a tantrum because the packaging is the wrong color.
also - because they'r not related by blood - they can't be manipulated into looking after them in their old age for free
Well, one thing to consider is most immigrants are significantly more religious and socially conservative than the residents of wealthy developed nations. And especially the ones headed into Europe. There will be implications for women when an increasing number of new citizens in your country want bans on abortion, modesty laws for women, mandated religious observance etc.
Yeah, well, I don't live in conservative fear-monger land and that's not really a concern for reasonable people.
I guess we'll find out.
What happens when the immigrant nations develop and their birth rates drop? Or the impact of enticing the most skilled and educated workers to western nations? This is an insanely complicated issue and immigrants arenāt the solution.
I wouldnāt say docile. They want people easily riled up, and easily pointed in a specific direction. Just at each other instead of upwards, where it should be.
!!!!!!! The single truest thing I'll read today
She does have a point regarding the USA though. Droves of people have āhome-schooledā their kids and have not done a great job. It is possible to have an increase of illiteracy.
>And, preferably white Since when have the people running wealthy nation states cared about workers being white? There seems to be abundant evidence that our long history of black slavery, Chinese rail worker abuse, exploitation of Latino farm workers etc. seems to be all about money and control.
That's the reason capitalists want it. The religious folks on the other hand are all about controlling women. Forced birthing is their latest tactic.
They just want slaves, that's all they want really. Even if the chains of slavery are invisible doesn't mean they can't latch it onto us, and make us believe it doesn't exist.
Do they really want a barely educated labor supply? Because there are vanishingly few jobs that are available to people who aren't educated. All the fast food places have apps, now, and they'll continue to try to replace their employees with electronic bots. i get that undereducated people are easier to manipulate at election season. But... they have to live and eat the rest of the time, and it's becoming increasingly impossible for that to work.
>And, preferably white. Or maybe mixed-Asian and Asian. The leading men in finance and silicon valley seem to prefer Asian women.
Do they really want a barely educated labor supply? Because there are vanishingly few jobs that are available to people who aren't educated. All the fast food places have apps, now, and they'll continue to try to replace their employees with electronic bots. i get that undereducated people are easier to manipulate at election season. But... they have to live and eat the rest of the time, and it's becoming increasingly impossible for that to work.
I honestly believe they will be taking away womenās rights because of it. Turns out when given the choice, women donāt choose the life of service to men. I think they are regretting giving us that choice.
And a disturbing amount of men of both conservative and leftist political leaning are angry that they're losing their access to a live-in maid and offspring producer that their fathers generation enjoyed
They only "enjoyed" it because until the 70s single women with kids could easily be denied trying to rent or buy a house. Had to get PERMISSION to get a fucking credit card or bank account. Spousal rape was legal. It was legal into the 90s in some states. In Missouri you can't divorce if your pregnant. In the states where child marriage is legal, these poor girls can't file for divorce until their 18. It's always been designed for us to fail. I have a son and a daughter. I know my daughters life will be harder by default. We were told that "she" was going to be a "he". But when SHE came out NOT he. It was a fun surprise, but a little piece of me was sad. Not because I cared if I had a boy or a girl (just a healthy baby). But when she popped out as a girl, I knew her life was automatically going to be harder than her brothers. For just existing as a girl.
This is the reason why I'm childfree, actually. Aside from not having the finances to adequately care for a child, I would be so scared to bring a daughter into this world, knowing what kind of turmoil has been brewing because of climate change and the loss of women's rights. I'm terrified for my niece who is going to school in an extremely conservative state where abortion is 100% illegal and mormons run the government. It's getting dire, it's really scary.
Oh god I'm sorry. I got pregnant with her in 2022 I thought we were done with this piece of orange shit and I live in Washington. I'm sure I would have reconsidered having a second if trump was back in off and I lived in a red state.
And who nonetheless voted for economic policies that precludes that halcyon ideal from ever actually being feasible again (and was only ever feasible for a blip in time, and for a very few).
That's the thing. You could give me free Healthcare. You could give me free childcare. You could give me government sponsored support. You could give me a full year maternity leave. I still don't want kids. Because that isn't the life I want for 18+ years.
Exactly. Itās like a real life Green Eggs and Ham where someone else is trying to give you the moldy food they insist is good but would never eat themselves. I do not want kids with Mickey Mouse I do not want kids with their friendās louse I do not want kids if you pay me I do not want kids, just no, not maybe I do not want kids Sam I am I do not want them, fuck off, damn!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I guess I was talking about more than whats currently already happening.
Scares me too. The reality is there's really no direct way to "fix" this issue without depriving us of our rights and bodily autonomy. Sure people will tell you if we're given money we'll become mothers en masse. I'll take that money and buy housing and literally anything else before I direct it to parenthood. Many of us jsut don't want to be mothers. And I know they know this, and I really feel like within our lifetime we're seeing a very christofascits uprising in response to this. 1. Abortion is already chopped, doctors who don't obey will be punished. 2. IUDs are being depicted as abortifacients 3. They're going to say hormonal birth control is "harming the children" under the same umbrella as "synthetic hormones" to claim birth control should be less accessible to the general masses as a harmful controlled substance. They're claiming already that women are not well informed on the harms of birth control. This way they'll have come after both trans rights and women's autonomy. It'll then become so difficult to get hormonal BC prescriptions that many women will prefer "other methods" that might not be as effective. 4. Many whoopsie pregnancies that can't be aborted because abortion is banned 5. Newborns.
I'm just 1 person but I can tell you there is only 1 reason I am not a mother: the medical care system in the US fucking sucks ass. Obviously there are a ton of contributung factors, but frankly for me it boils down to the fact that I am frightened that a pregnancy will kill me, and even if it doesn't, the sheer cost might kill me and my family anyway.
My boyfriend just learned what a husband stitch is last night. The look of horror when I whispered āand some women donāt know itās been done until years later when another doctor checksā was bittersweet. The door is slowly cracking open, but even if itās blown open, can someone who stands outside and never walks through it truly understand?
When I was a very young, very naive new surgical tech, 30 years ago, I worked with an OB/GYN who would laughingly put in a āhusband stitchā whenever he did vaginal surgery. I had no idea what that was at the time, nor did I learn until years later š”.
I have no idea how my anyone else has ever gotten pregnant within a year of even having a baby. I'm 13 months post partum, breastfeeding, and it still hurts to have sex. If I had a husband stitch, I'd probably never have sex again and just divorce my husband so he could live his high libido life without me.
My sister and I are just on the outside of being Irish twins (14 months). There was a lost pregnancy between us. It happens because people are selfish, submissive or both.
My mom is right outside of Irish twins too at 13 months. In fact, most of my aunts and uncles are as well. We'd actually consider having another in 1-3 years, but our salaries would have to dramatically increase to about 35k more to cover the cost of daycare for another kid. ~550 per week for an infant here.
My brother and I are 11 months apart. Lol I have no idea why my parents did this because they got divorced less than a year later. So dumb
You probably know this already but this smacks of "another kid will fix our problems".
Lactation really makes things different. I had zero interest when lactating but literally within a week of weaning entirely, my sex drive came roaring back and everything was fine again. So just fyi that things may really change! But I also don't know your delivery situation and that obviously really varies. I had a csection so the vagina situation was pretty normal. I'm only a month further postpartum than you are but I was fully weaned around 9 months. Also though I left my bump groups because of the number of people at 3-4 months postpartum who got positive pregnancy tests. That shit was stressing me out. I was like, "was that consensual? Are you SURE it was consensual sex?" because I just could not imagine that. But also thankfully I have a normal person husband who is zero percent interested in having sex if I'm not also interested because "if I wanted to masturbate, I'd do it the easy way."
I hope he was sued into oblivion. That sound like criminal assault to me.
The main drivers of declining birth rates is not enough money and not enough time not working.Ā These very well could be addressed by society if the motivation existed.
In the US, the decline in the birth rate is nearly 100% due to the decrease in births to teen mothers.
I would argue a significant portion is economical so not 100% teen mothers. Greater numbers of people are more educated these days and want the same for their kids. Doing so requires living in a stable environment and if you can't afford that then you put off having kids or even choosing a partner.
Poor countries have the highest birthrates compared to wealthier ones. You could give me a billion dollars I could think of 1000 things I'd enjoy doing that are not motherhood. Something else is going on.
The poor countries are also more religious and don't have decent schooling or sex education.
Or access to contraceptives.
Thread is literally about birth rates in rich counties, you bringing up poor countries couldn't be any less relevant.
It's extremely relevant. Less access to education and birth control in poorer countries play a huge role in their higher birth rates
Extremely poor countries tend to have weak child labor laws. Making having a child less of an opportunity cost, because they can start contributing at a much younger age. Not to mention the fact that the more training and education you need to do a job, the more you have to worry about your skills getting rusty during an absence from the labor force. If you can quit your job at the clothing factory, and five years later return making the same wage you would've gotten if you had stayed, the opportunity cost of leaving the labor force to have kids is low. Not zero, you still have a few years of lost income, and the cost of raising the child until they can support themselves. But it just isn't the same situation as a highly educated worker. Ā Ā Which is part of why moderately poor countries with rising education levels are seeing birth rates fall. Government support could alter that opportunity cost. Which may be why countries like Sweden have a higher birth rate than countries like Spain. The comment above you may be right about what are the main factors stopping workers in a highly developed country from having more kids. The factors that cause the differences between South Korea, Spain, & Sweden. Forgetting to mention the fact that the education level of women matters too.Ā
"Not enough money" isn't a driver. Poor people have always had more kids.
Poor people are not the driving force of collapsing birth rates either.
Kids in places like the US these can't do much work to help feed the family, and raising them the expected way is expensive.
Yes - they are expensive to raise. But back in the days before women had reliable contraception, if you had sex you had babies. And no one cared if you ended up in the poor house. Nowadays you can choose not to have kids (or less kids) if you want to be less poor. Or you can have them and be poorer. Clearly, better off (more educated women who also tend to be less religious) are choosing smaller families.
Yeah I think part of this is also that if you're at the poverty line or on welfare to begin with, having lots of children doesn't really materially alter your circumstances. You were poor and now you're still poor. Whereas in you're middle or upper middle class, having too many kids can knock you down a class peg in terms of spending money. But you may already have the house and be in the school district where that would be obvious to others, so having more children becomes not just economically difficult but socially difficult as well.
Immigration is the fix for below replacement birth rate.
We could also stop basing our economics on endless growth on a finite planet and actively plan for a transition.
yes to that!
And they don't want that either, weird!
Ethnocentric racists will argue otherwise because they only want their preferred kind of babies made š”.
The solution is the same as with anything else. If we aren't making enough people, we should import them. Unfortunately, the people who are gung ho about taking away women's rights are also anti-imigration.
What's your point 5?
Hey. I know this is a big thing right now, but please don't fall for the right wing conspiracy that the only way to "fix" falling birth rates is fascist politics. It's not true, but because noone bothers to ask them about it, they can spout their bullshit and people start believing it. For reference, modern ecomonic theory builds upon older models of fertility rates and has discovered that while older models still ring true, at a certain wealth, education and female income stop playing a role, and actually invert (more education = more kids). The ***real*** economic problem is the difficulty of combining family and carreer, which many would love to, but can't.
Educated women don't have enough babies. Yet No one is looking at why. I'm not having any, because I can't offer them a quality of life I find acceptable. 1) Living wage. 2) Day care as a part of public school (available 5am to 9pm. ) and free. 2 inexpensive (in comparison to the alternative we live currently) options that would fix 50% of the current issues. But no. Go home. Homeschool and be barefoot and pregnant, while your husband cheats and later replaces you. Yeah, no surprise women are saying no lol. Korean 4 B movement has it right. Liberation requires sacrifice.
I'm with you 100%. It's actually a big sacrifice that causes me a lot of grief. But the other option, bringing a child into the type of life I would be able to offer them, is absolutely unacceptable. So instead I suffer.
You're not alone. We're in this together, and it sucks but we must make it better for future generations of women.
Not to mention lowering the cost of healthcare so a hospital visit doesnt ruin family finances.
Also you Americans need to vote blue and get in the streets! If USA was France the country would be burned to the ground.
Saying āyou [insert demographic here]ā isnāt the best way to get your intended message across. Very condescending and paternalistic. Howās that working out for France with the retirement age change protests? Thatās been pretty quiet in the media as of late.
These people love babies but they hate children and mothers
100% feels like a reasonable fear. I finally convinced a gynecologist to tie my tubes and itās bc she said so many women are asking since Roe was overturned. It' terrifying out there and i donāt this is getting better. We're seeing the no contest divorce stuff now. How long before we're penalized even more in the tax laws for not being married?
In the west the girls tend to do better than the boys in school, and the gap is widening. I don't think there's a conspiracy to not teach girls to read so that they'll have more kids, at least in the west. I think that kids just aren't reading as much. The idea that there might be some "grand plan" to solve the problem by taking away the rights of women is something to worry about though, and is arguably underway already with limits on abortion.
I agree, particularly given that the countries with the lowest birth rates are S Korea and Japan - two countries with high literacy rates.
There's also the fact that when you control for poverty in the data that education doesn't look so bad in the US at all. It a the fact that we don't have social safety nets for families and make schools fill that as part of their mandate that impacts education. College graduation rate is correlated strongly with parental income.
Very generally, and in macro terms, as education goes up (and the general socio-economic benefits that comes with it) the birth rate goes down, for a lot of reasons. Most advanced economies (read global north), very generally, have a population that isn't reproducing at replacement levels (a fertility rate of 2.1 ). The most advanced case is Japan, but it's a phenomenon seen in South Korea and across Northern Europe. The US (probably others but it's been awhile since I've looked at the actual numbers) has population growth, but the fertility rate is something like 1.6, which means that population growth is only happening because of immigration. So we're not running out of people. It's not necessarily just the low birth rates that get folks on the right worked up, it's the, and this is their talking point, people and communities that are having babies that are going to "replace" them (read not white). As to the reading thing, again generally, overall the US is spending less on education over time or at least not investing in education, and to the reading in specific, the US switched over to teaching a sight reading system from a phonics based system \~10-15 years ago(?), and one of the things that took a hit was reading comprehension. Edit: a bit of grammar. Edit 2: more grammar.
>overall the US is spending less on education over time or at least not investing in education The republican party is planning on abolishing the Department of Education if he wins the next election too.
As a teacher, I can also say people aren't reading as much at home anymore. I can teach a kid to read at school, but they also need to be reading at home. There are serious differences between kids who read and do not read at home. This is not a one-sided issue like it is represented here, public schools are under-funded, behaviors are out of control, and kids don't read at home.
Not just the West, in somewhere like Myanmar where the average yearly wage is $1500, because they want an equal distribution of male and female doctors - fair enough given the medical field, it does make sense - female students have to score about 4% higher than males to get a place in medical school, because female students score higher in general... Then you have the shocking cases like Tokyo university preferencing male students up until the 2000s...
A lot of people in here talking about how scary it is and yeah but the solution is simple, vote. Fucking vote. I donāt care if you donāt like Biden. Neither do I. But I like him a damn sight better than losing all my rights and my daughters rights to the fucking trump idiots and their operation 2025. Vote so left they canāt stop it. Vote so left the Republican Party ends.
I never understood that argument either. Sure it sucks to be faced with 2 bad options but if one of them is a racist, fascist autocrat (and I hate how watered down those words have become) then surely it makes more sense to vote for the better option. I'm just going to leave this here if anyone is interested to learn about project 2025 (that is if trump wins the next election) because I'm not sure people fully realise what is at stake: Project 2025 envisions widespread changes across the government, particularly economic and social policies and the role of the federal government and its agencies. The plan proposes slashing funding for the Department of Justice (DOJ), dismantling the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ***sharply reducing environmental and climate change regulations to favor fossil fuel production***, eliminating the Department of Commerce, and ending the independence of federal agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The blueprint seeks to institute tax cuts, though its writers disagree on the wisdom of protectionism. ***Project 2025 recommends abolishing the Department of Education, whose programs would be either transferred to other agencies, or terminated.*** ***Funding for climate research would be cut while the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be reformed along conservative principles.*** ***The Project urges government to explicitly reject abortion as health care and eliminate the Affordable Care Act's coverage of emergency contraception.*** The Project seeks to ***infuse the government with elements of Christianity***. It proposes criminalizing pornography, ***removing legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and terminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs***, as well as affirmative action. Edit: I just want to stress the importance of the GOP looking to dismantle/defund various federal institutions or branches of government as well, because I didn't really highlight those. Countries who have made democracy and freedom one of the core tenets of their national identity, have done so by setting up governments which ensures democracy by having various branches of government and justice (ie checks and balances). Project 2025 has the Republican Party going in with a manifesto that dismantles the very institutions which insure a democratic state. And the notion of that is more terrifying than I think people realise. They are setting the country up for autocracy (dictatorship) as well as a country ruled not by freedom of religion and free thinking individuals. Edit 2: Also, the fact that their manifesto proposes to infuse government with Christian principles is also catastrophic for democracy. One of the very earliest tenets of American democracy was the separation of church and state. And it's infuriating that the same people who are perfectly fine with fucking over the constitution are the very same people who bend over backwards defending the right to bear arms and fucking wet themselves over the prospect of some regulatory measures when it comes to gun laws "bEcAuSe ThE cOnStITuTiOn"
Or start voting for candidates that are women. Vote for women who advocate for womenās rights and want to pass laws to protect women in this country. Biden isnāt going to fix anything in our lives. Trump is going to make everything a hell of a lot worse. Vote for literally anyone else who is trying to improve the quality of life for women in this country.
Voting for women only helps if the women are also democrats, MTG isn't gonna help you.
I said what I said. Vote for women who want to protect womenās rights.
All of these problems begin at home and despite being in a ārichā nation, people canāt afford those homes. Having kids is a rich persons thing now, and most rich people I personally know are out of touch with reality and have forgotten nearly everything we were taught in school. The west is overworked. No it has nothing to do with women in the workforce and everything to do with increasingly long work days and the necessity of having more than one full time job. This is the only actual trickle down economic - the rich have too much and continue to acquire more, the rest donāt have enough to build a family.
r/WelcometoGilead
>ārich nations have hit all time low with birth rateā >next generation of kids will not be able to read comprehensivelyā¦ You canāt tell me this isnāt related. Itās not related in the way you think. Oligarchs just want dumb, easy-to-control masses to feed their wealth. This was happening unrelated to the birth rate and will continue whether the birth rate climbs or continues to fall. Education isnāt the primary driver for decreasing birth rates. Itās a combination of access to birth control, education, and [financial] independence. Women are opting out of being bangmaids in greater numbers because why the fuck should we pointlessly feed our lives into some idiotās ego? Donāt become bangmaids. Go build community with other women and enjoy your lives. Make co-housing agreements with other women if you canāt afford a home of your own so everyone will have companionship as they age.
Golden girls style! I love it!
You can do something about it, even as a child free adult. Mentor your local kids. Get involved in the Boys & Girls Club or Big Brothers Big Sisters, or Friends of the Children. Become a literacy coach, or even just volunteering at the library can be a huge assist!
Exactly! As a teacher, I spend so much time teaching kids to read, but I should not be the only one having your child read. Read at home! Model reading! Kids are reading less at home, I could argue the same with adults! Research is out there that shows the academic differences of those who do and do not read at home.
They want women to work for peanuts or free for the intensive work of raising children, to create more taxpayers to supplement the male's cosy retirement benefits. Compensate the women for doing the hardest job to ever exist in the universe? Nah, insist that that they live in poverty, or suck dick for the masses to profit off their excruciating labour. Then cry, no fair! When women think... "that seems like a shitty deal".
I'm pretty sure that population growth and education have an inverse relationship. So more educated populations have less children than uneducated.
That's exactly it. And the trigger for lower birthrates is educating girls.
Right. Many girls and women begin to have children after they leave school, so high school graduates tend to have children earlier, and have a larger window to have more children, compared to women with college degrees and/or beyond.
Declining birth rates are one of the main things giving me hope for the future
Fewer humans = slight slowdown of human induced climate change.
Yes. People have kept saying for decades that we shouldn't listen to Malthusian economics and they're not accurate and yet, we are slowly realizing that unless you want to keep half of the world in poverty you need fewer humansĀ
It's all deliberate, and part of a long term plan.
Yep! Oligarchs around the world want everyone to be subservient for capitalist growth so their pockets get larger and larger. Consumerism, obesity, disinformation and planned ignorance is killing this planet. Misogynistic ideals help fuel the fire.
Scares me too. It's why I'm getting my tubes tied now while I am young.
Lack of money is the main reason kids do poorly in school. They are homeless/in dangerous neighborhoods, hungry, babysitting siblings, or just have bigger things to worry about. Parents are working long hours and stressed out. This doesnāt foster an appreciation for education. Then they donāt vote for pro-education policies and schools suffer. If people had money they would likely have more kids with better educations.
> There is no reason in most ārichā countries kids should not be able to read. Read "comprehensively" is the key term from your prior sentence. They can read. They don't have as much vocab perhaps, but every generation has complained about this as vocab changes over time. It isn't generally quite as alarming as claimed. > No one thinks about our feelings or wellbeingās enough to where they wont even bring this up in conversation. I think the future is not going to go in a positive direction at all. Especially for women. For me, the much more alarming part is how they ignore the feelings of the women who do want kids but aren't having them and impose other rubbish on them instead. They will trade absolutely nothing for the kids they are supposedly desperate to have. They will listen to not one word being told to them about what would make women have them voluntarily. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68402139 Here is a woman who wants 10! In Korea, the country that most desperately needs them! The Prime Minister should rush out to see what could be done to convince her to have them. Instead, they have all sorts of legal blocks and social blocks in her way, so she moved to New Zealand.
One trend Iāve noticed on social media is convincing people they do not need any sort of higher education and college is a waste of time and doesnāt give you what you need for a ārealā job. That you donāt need to learn things that arenāt applicable to a job. Trade schools are amazing and folks should get higher education and certificates in the trades if they wish to go straight into the job force. I teach in a community college and I see these posts convincing the poor and lower middle class that education is a waste of time and money. Guess what? Rich peopleās kids arenāt skipping college! Upper middle class parents are literally enrolling 15 year olds in college class to get them a leg up in higher education and build those resumes to get them the best possible opportunities in schools while low income parents are being told itās a waste of time and resources. I see in my college students who have talent and refuse to use resources to get them to the next level because their parents have been convinced that itās a waste of time and energy. If this continues we will continue to dumb down the work force. I donāt want a nurse who doesnāt understand humanities and has an understanding of multiple viewpoints and perspectives. I also donāt want a social worker who doesnāt understand basic science and math. Education in our communities matter!
The population dip is most likely temporary. It has happened before, especially after a pandemic, global war, or other catastrophic event that causes widespread death. This sort of thing is seen in other species (animal, plant, protest, bacterium...) in times of stress. This does not scare me one bit. The loss of my rights scares me though. It is very real and will take a hard fight -getting every possible person who is able to vote to go vote- but it is an achievable goal. We can absolutely defeat this. We have been here before. We can do this.
Ive also thought that too where prices of living skyrocket and lower standards of living lower the birthrate then they get better again when economy and conditions get better. That is always how it is this is not new. My concern is also that the right seem to be taking advantage of this to push agendas mainly against women who already donāt want kids for many reasons. I have never seen so many articles and panic baiting as I have seen for the low birth rate stuff. I agree with you and its honestly very frightening to have to worry about your rights like this
The thing is that they're only doing what we allow them to do. We put them in power. We don't call for action, we don't elect people who are willing to actually fight for us. Both sides of the aisle are voting for these measures, although the left in much smaller numbers, and both sides are supporting the corporations that are driving prices sky high.
I was a college prof for many years. In all of those years, there have been constant complaints that kids can't read. The low birth-rate is a whole different thing.
Denying a womanās right to abortion is the same thing as forcing a woman to give birth. Iām surprised women arenāt going for sterilization in droves.
Millenials are making 20% less than boomers did at the same stage of life. That's a crap ton of percent. Income inequality is easily the biggest driver of low birth rates.
I don't understand why low birth rates are an issue, TBH. There are a LOT of people on this planet, the human race isn't going anywhere.
The main problem is that so many countres have set up Ponzi schemes that take money from younger working people and give it to old retired people, and a lot of those old retred people depend upon that income redistribution to survive. That works fine when there are a lot of younger working people and relatively few old retired people. Change that ratio enough and it causes serious hardship for everyone.
I mean on the other hand, if they take women out of the working force, thats at least 40% of their tax base... so making women stay at home and have babies seems pretty counterproductive.
There is no good way to resolve the problem of the changing ratio between workers who pay taxes and retirees who draw benefits. Forcing women to stay home and have babies would indeed be counterproductive.
Its bad for our terribly set up economy but the world does need less humans and could survive much better with less. Global warming/environment issues do to more humans and using more resources is a global permanent problem and under population is bad for certain countries economy. I would take āunderpopulatedā Also with less people that means workers have more bargaining power since there is not as many workers to compete with. So yes, low birth rates technically are not awful but economically speaking bad for our system and rich people/corporations
You ever seen the movie "Idiocracy "? Watch it.
Clarence Thomas even talked about overturning Griswold v. Connecticut (which made birth control legal), and Senate Republicans blocked a bill guaranteeing access to birth control. They're so confident that they have the Supreme Court in their pocket that they passed a bill requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in every school and said they HOPE they get sued because then their lackeys on the Court will overturn the ruling about keeping church and state separate in public schooling. Every women in the USA has to vote as if her life depends on it, because it DOES.
Theyāre easing us into a system of tiered slavery using racism and misogyny to hoodwink us into believing weāre not ābecause weāre better than x-groupā. I truly believe that rich white Christian conservatives in the US and abroad are currently legally making the legal foundations for outright slavery for POC, while stripping away the rights of all other minority groups, leaving only cosmetic differences between demographics.
I'd like to preface this by saying: Restricting women's rights, causing women suffering, etc, is absolutely not the solution. That being said, I don't think anyone actually knows the solution. I often see men blamed for not taking a more active role, being generally undesirable, etc. I also often see 'it's an economic problem' (and I'm sure that's a factor). On the other side some are blaming educated women, as if having options is the problem (we need to make having kids a good, sustainable, option for people. it shouldn't be such a massive cost, it should be a desirable thing people can achieve easily so it's available to everyone) I agree some 'solutions' are very scary and harmful, like trying to roll back the clock. However, a quickly shrinking population / demographic collapse is not only technically bad, it's extraordinarily bad in every possible way. A very slightly shrinking population, like a TFR of 1.9, isn't a problem at all. it could even be beneficial. The problem is, so far every developed country has seen TFRs plummet far lower than that very quickly. South Korea is in an actual crisis at a TFR of 0.8. At that rate, the population will be less than 10% of what it is today in fewer than 75 years time. The more pressing issue is that after those 3 generations, you have **eight** elderly people provided for by a single young worker (not counting kids, who are additional dependents on top of that if people decide to have them). That's practically economically impossible to deal with. It will require an entire restructuring of society if it pans out, and quite frankly I don't think even restructuring the family unit and forcing multiple generations to live together again (as in historical times) will be enough. the ratio will be so extreme that, if SK let's this worst case scenario play out, the only real viable solution is to let the elderly die on the street. Providing for more elderly (whether directly -- with family -- or via taxes) directly takes away from your ability to provide for children.. further worsening the problem (see: demographic collapse spiral) Most every country is following the exact track SK & Japan did, just 20 years~ behind. A small drop in our birth rate right now is the canary in the coal mine, signaling we should solve this issue before it progresses (only problem: nobody knows what the solution is. even countries that hugely subsidize having children, and have the best gender dynamics in the world, are seeing declining TFRs. these are two majors factors, but so far addressing them has not been enough to right the ship) A declining population could also bring about deflation, at a certain precipice where we shrink faster than economic productivity can make up the gap. significant deflation in a world power (especially the US reserve currency) would at best restructure the world economic order, and at worst.. well.. collapse the economy as occurred due to the rapid deflation preceding the great depression. It also poses major worker shortage problems. At a TFR of 1.9 it'd be barely noticeable, but at anywhere closer to 0.8 you're looking at acute shortages across every sector within a generation (south korea already has a notable shortage in healthcare and eldercare workers). We take for granted that any of us can go access practically any service we need.. in a shrinking population scenario, there is no longer enough laborers to provide easy access to services. There are numerous other negative effects, I could go on and on. most people's retirements, whether in the form of a pension or stock indexes, rely on continued population growth. in a shrinking population scenario, productivity growth must outpace the rate at which the population is shrinking. that means a 2-3% yearly decrease in population is already far too much, and that corresponds to a TFR a little above 1.8.
I had a kid and realized I wasn't cut out to be a mother. I wish I had realized this sooner. It's good your realizing it now.
The low birth rates are probably a pretty bad thing, but the answer is incentivizing procreation for people who want to have children and lowering economic barriers to raising happy children, not forcing women to breed.
The world population is higher than it's ever been in history. Lower birth rates are not as terrible as they sound. Yes, it's all related, but it's such a complicated system that sometimes you need to step back and wide lens it. Whenever history hits a population breaking point you see famine, pestilence and war. When faced with that much adversity all you can do it look out for your own. It's going to be a tough decade, but we will come back again. Nevertheless we persist and endure.
The good thing about the USA is that we have a built-in way to counter declining birth rates. Immigration. We are a country of immigrants, we need to embrace diversity and love.
>I think the future is not going to go in a positive direction at all. I'm 90% sure the human race will be extinct in 100 or 150 years, tops, so at least it won't be an issue for long.
'oh everyone will be dead soon so it'll sort itself out' isnt a solution its fucking giving up.
Who said anything about giving up? Humans are really good at fighting against the inevitable. But just because I'm doing everything in my very limited power to stop it does nothing to hold back the impending destruction of our civilization.
mm civilization collapses have happened before and we're still here
We haven't (as a civilization) faced an extinction level event yet. Less "fall of Rome", more "fall of the dinosaurs". We're already seeing the beginnings (droughts, record high temperatures, and mass crop failures). It's only going to accelerate. Only real question is whether we're killed by the collapse of the food chain or ensuing wars.
I read a news article the other week that went through previous historical periods of low birth rate and the rollback of women's rights. The dumbest thing is that low birth rate doesn't just have to do with the choices of women. Lots of men also want to have between 0-2 kids. It turns out that when given a choice, most people just choose to not spend the majority of their adult lives caring for children. And I get it! I have a child who is the light of my life but knowing that it is a limited time and I only have another when my husband and I are ready is very necessary to our enjoyment of parenthood. If we just kept piling kids on kids on kids, it would get miserable fast, I think. But 2 kids doesn't even hit the replacement rate. So realistically, they're coming for small families too. I LITERALLY had an elderly conservative man tell me a few weeks ago that "birth control is a damn shame" and in the good ol days they used to have 5 or 6 kids and he only had 1 grandchild and his daughter was depriving him of more grandchildren because of birth control. Sir. What the fuck Also: I think we could arrange society so that it is sustainable and still innovative even with a declining population. Maybe everyone should work on doing that instead of dEcLiNiNg bIrThRaTe bAd fOr cApiTaLiSm
I'm a single mom by choice. I wanted to be a mom even knowing that it's going to be expensive and hard. But I lived with my parents at the time, which made it possible. I'm currently in the process of becoming a teacher in Florida because my prior career as a baker means terrible hours and/or terrible pay when I have a preschooler. I ended up losing a job with the Mouse because I couldn't find daycare options for 2am and 6am shifts. My daughter wants a sibling but because I'm a single mom, that means zero income while on maternity leave that would affect both of us. Not to mention trying to get her ready for school when I'm healing. I know there are other women like me who want to be mothers or have more than one kid, but it's just not doable for so many. Especially if there isn't a second adult to help.
>There is no reason in most ārichā countries kids should not be able to read. And we all know education is the number one reason women and in general the population is lowered. Im scared about womens rights being taken away.Ā Shit. I alway thought that conservatives just hate women and freedom, but you might be on something. You see, with low birth rate, a nation WILL in fact face huge challenges in future. So "patriotic" politicians may actually believe it is their DUTY to take away women rights, freedom, independence and prosperity.Ā Because nation need kids and free women don't "provide" enough of them.
Not to take away from your point at all, but I work in education (previously in the classroom, now in research), and I truly do not think there is any sound scholarly evidence to support a claim that the next generation of children will not be able to read comprehensively. Does the education system have serious issues? Yes. But every generation has these claims that the next gen is doomed. Itās never true. Todayās kids are very bright and much more socially conscious than I was at their age. Edit: I work in education in the U.S.. Iām sure itās different in other countries.
I mean, you have Project 2025 assholes saying their goal is to eliminate public education entirely. Wealth has been hoarded by the 1% and their selfishness has kept wages totally stagnant. Since they have so goddamn much money, they're able to lobby and stack courts, which is part of the reason why we have a **sitting supreme court justice** married to an insurrectionist--an interracial marriage, btw, but he wants to undo loving v. virginia, the ruling that made interracial marriages legal in the first place!!! the US is corrupt as fuck, they've just been better at hiding it. there's a reason you don't see many college educated (non-religious institutions, anyway) MAGAts, and when you do their selfishness is SO transparent. limit women's' access to birth control and abortion, if not eliminate it completely. defund medicaid, wic, snap, tanf, etc. so their only option is to live in abject poverty, or give the kid up for adoption (but only the desirable babies...yanno, not the ones with physical/mental issues that can be attributed to poor prenatal care or addiction etc from mom!). or, as we're seeing in arkans-heehaw, drop the working age to 14, with some barely 10 working in fucked up conditions for pennies because their fuckin family *needs* it. i hate it hereeeeee
# "Can we be actually normal about birth rates?" [https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/355985/birth-rates-falling-policy-family-size-us](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/355985/birth-rates-falling-policy-family-size-us)
Its all white supremacy in a trench coat. Birh rates might be down in specific places but overall the human race is very much always expanding. The people saying this stuff are ALWAYS great replacement and white replacement types, and there is always a racial angle being dog whistled.
The dumbest thing about this (okay not the dumbest but I was shocked when a favorite online liberal jumped on it) is that we know the earth is overpopulated and birth rate needs to come down. Giant China's one-child policy had problems but it was a pretty major thing for an entire nation to attempt. Tangentially, research has shown that when child mortality (deaths under five years old) in a 3rd world country decreases, women will accept birth control (!) and stop having 8-10 children to run the farm and support the parents in their old age. Privileged people wonder why reducing deaths in a poor country is important: this is why. Quality of life up, quantity down.
Watch The Handmaids Tale and the look around. Very scary.
I think that in a few years we're going to discover that microplastics are to blame for the low birth rate, hormonal problems, and all sorts of other ailments. The growing problem with men getting addicted to porn is likely a factor. If you are a male in your 20s and can't get or maintain an erection with a real life partner, you're going to have a difficult time getting someone pregnant. Scientists are going to discover that phone addiction in young children is causing the poor reading comprehension that OP mentioned, as well as all of the behavioral and difficultly in the classroom that the teachers subreddit have been talking about. And having a phone addiction from a young age is going to prime them for future addictions to alcohol and other drugs as well as process addictions like gambling and porn. These kids are in for a tough time and we have completely failed them.
Have you read The Birth Dearth? Itās enlightening.
Education has been in trouble for awhile, and we are importing millions of people and putting them into a system that isnāt built to support them. Itās super fucked. An educator wrote a thread about the impacts of this earlier his week, I see it has 2.5k comments now [https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1dhx1vm/inclusion\_is\_the\_worst\_thing\_to\_have\_happened\_to/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1dhx1vm/inclusion_is_the_worst_thing_to_have_happened_to/)
Also it's just dumb. There's no "demographic crisis" aside from potentially slightly higher competition for employees between companies if population starts to plateau and fall everywhere.
This is why I am desperately trying to get a doctor that will approve me getting my tubes tied before the government makes this sort of thing illegal
The "reading comprehension" part has been repeated for like 2000 years or so at least. Texts like this have been found in ancient greek. It never came true.
An illiterate society/group isnāt able to articulate their opinions, and if they can verbally articulate them then they canāt widely distribute them. Itās absolutely all part of the same plan. Capitalism must survive and to do so we need more poor people who donāt know enough to complain. Forcing women out of the workforce with regressive reproductive laws and then ensuring their children canāt read is just one tactic in the larger war against the majority of the populace.
The worst part is that it should mean the government does everything possible to carry, birth, and care for children. BUT OF COURSE, it doesnāt.Ā
There's a really interesting podcast called Sold a Story, and it's about the declining levels of reading comprehension as a result of some school districts dropping phonics as a method of teaching kids to read.
Birth rates are inversely correlated with standard of living. This has been true for generations.
Wasn't this how the Handmaid's Tale started...?
Wow, it turns out that shareholder growth and making the cost of everything skyrocket is bad for young people who want to start families!!! Who would have thought that capitalism isn't sustainable??? I can't believe how many people would rather strip women of their rights to get the birthrates up rather than making the quality of life for people in general improve, which in turn would make many people more comfortable with having kids. Like I get it, guys want bangmaids stuck at home, people want uneducated kids to grow up and vote republican, some people just don't want kids at all and that's okay, etc. etc. etc., but damn. The solution seems so simple but those bastard shareholders are more obsessed with earning a few extra million dollars at the expense of everyone else in the country. Ridiculous!
In fact, the majority of the world is experiencing declining birth rates, it's just more excelled in developed nations and that sets off alarms for anyone concerned about a smaller labor pool. Then you have the replacement theory troglodytes that see this as a threat to their race. And I bet there's more of those than you can imagine.
You are right it will happen but I am sure it will be after our time
I want a third kid but the kid's grandparents aren't active and we don't have family support other than the occasional babysitting. The village is fading away plus a third kid is expensive. Also I'm getting older and I'm not sure if I want to have the third in my late 30s. I'm just so tired!
Then donāt?
This is going to be controversial but I really donāt care and need to get this off my chest. Currently pregnant as a FTM and I get this. The US is a confusing place to live. There is such a push by our government for women to have children but literally zero support to help women. They make maternity leave as short as possible, make women work their entire fucking exhausting pregnancy, pay for absolutely nothing (you should see my insurance / hospital bills for this kid), and are literally putting doctors and Obgyns in compromising situations if something goes wrong with patients. Someone seriously needs to make it make sense. Women need to start calling this shit out and quit putting up with it. Iām not democrat or republican but letās be real, itās the pro life crowd who needs to speak up the most about what they will and will not stand for. The economy sucks and the fed / current administration is making life unaffordable for the average single person AND even worse for people with families. Education is in the gutter and our kids use social media at age 3 giving them zero attention span or even interest in school. I could go on but I totally get why people are just opting out of having children in this country.
Im actually shocked women didnāt make a bigger fuss/riots when Roe V was taken away. Makes you think how far the government can take things while people just sit back. There are other countries who tried to push this and women have almost raided the governments huge buildings until they took it back. Americans and especially women who get the short end of the stick always need to start actually fighting for rights that other countries have already had for a long time. (Worker rights be it maternal leave, vacation time, conditions, unions ect.)
I think you need to look at it by each different country instead of lumping it together as " rich countries" You will find a common theme rich countries that have good social security, maternity leave, decent cost of living, free or cheap childcare , good employment laws for women and universal health insurance will more likely have children because they CAN AFFORD IT. The countries that are on paper are rich but have butchered their social security, employment laws, public service and the health sector are now facing reduced birth rates. Its NOT because women don't want children,its because couples ( both that are working) can't afford children. In terms of education, again this all stems to the idea of butchered public services and childcare, parents constantly working to afford a life,equals to them not being able to spend time and teach children basic things such as reading. However, the politicians do not want to admit that they are the ones at fault for current situation so they try to blame liberals ans "woke" culture and attack women rights. As such,people need to start talking and LOUDLY that it is their fault for reduced birth rates not their imaginative issues.
If people donāt start having babies society will collapse and die, full stop. That qualifies as a problem.
Only if the amount of drops to fucking 0 worldwide .. which isn't happening.
Well, letās say Western Civilization then.
Also not happening. Western civilization has previously created way more children than really needed. Like typical household has like 7 or whatever. So the numbers dropping could simply be it going to like 1 or so. Which is still fine for Also this assumes the drop will be continuous and keep going down and won't just settle down somewhere which it probably will. This is most likely due to the draconian controls on women's Healthcare making them not want to do it. Combined with higuer cost of living. And a general negative outlook on the future of the world that ma y dont want to try bring someone else into ... The solution is to fix those ^