These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
…
If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.
In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.
Woman of childbearing age here. Lots of my friends took another child off the table when Roe fell. Being potentially forced to die and leave your existing children orphaned is a big deterrent, turns out
Plus it just fucking sucks to be a mother these days. Things are a lot more egalitarian than they used to be, but society still expects the uterus-having to take on more of the child caring tasks, and the emotional labor especially tends to still fall disproportionately on women. Our careers suffer, our bodies suffer if we bore (and possibly nursed) the baby/ies, our mental health suffers from the unrelenting societal pressure and neglect, plus all of the other shit that every other parent deals with as well. The women and mothers I know are fed up and so, so tired. (I’m not bitter… not at all… :D)
I love my children to pieces, but if I had seen an older sister go through this I might have opted out of having kids entirely. Two of my sisters have.
Yeah can’t blame the ladies for that one, if I were a woman I’d be mighty tempted to seal up my womb too.
Interestingly this is actually how a lot of men feel about their own procreation. You’re one broken condom away from being beholden to an unwanted child and a selfish mother. It can ruin your life before you’ve even had a chance to start. Hell teenage boys raped by older women have had to pay child support.
I’d love to see this lead into a useful conversation about the rights of both sexes but it has been pretty one-sided so far.