There’s definitely a political wing that would see this as a negative story and read the headline as “free contraception in Finland leads to reduction in reproductive rate”.
A birth that moves from the 20s to the 30s is still a birth, and while a lot of what you’re saying is happening - I know it first hand - it’s incomparable in magnitude to not having four kids between 14 and 18.
Women are often delaying their first child well into their 30s or even 40s
Women who delay into their 40s are highly likely to never have children. Even waiting until the mid-30s dramatically reduces a woman’s chance of ever being able to have children naturally.
Pregnancies after the age of 35 are called “geriatric pregnancies”, because they occur at the very tail end of a woman’s fertile timespan.
Fertility itself starts going down some time between 28 and 32, and really starts plummeting by 40. The medical field considers nearly all women 45 and older to be “functionally sterile”, even though menopause itself may still be years or decades away.
I mean, can a woman get pregnant naturally after the age of 45? As in, without modern medical reproductive assistance in the many tens of thousands of dollars? Sure, but it is vanishingly rare.
I’ve read somewhere that most of the decline in birth rates in developed countries comes from the end of teenage pregnancies.
Wouldn’t surprise me.
There’s definitely a political wing that would see this as a negative story and read the headline as “free contraception in Finland leads to reduction in reproductive rate”.
Forced birthers are weird. They’re bigots who believe in replacement theory and that the solution is to turn women into baby factories.
Much of it, perhaps. Women are often delaying their first child well into their 30s or even 40s, so it’s more than just waiting for adulthood.
A birth that moves from the 20s to the 30s is still a birth, and while a lot of what you’re saying is happening - I know it first hand - it’s incomparable in magnitude to not having four kids between 14 and 18.
Women who delay into their 40s are highly likely to never have children. Even waiting until the mid-30s dramatically reduces a woman’s chance of ever being able to have children naturally.
Pregnancies after the age of 35 are called “geriatric pregnancies”, because they occur at the very tail end of a woman’s fertile timespan.
Fertility itself starts going down some time between 28 and 32, and really starts plummeting by 40. The medical field considers nearly all women 45 and older to be “functionally sterile”, even though menopause itself may still be years or decades away.
I mean, can a woman get pregnant naturally after the age of 45? As in, without modern medical reproductive assistance in the many tens of thousands of dollars? Sure, but it is vanishingly rare.