Don't worry, Republicans will solve this by banning abortion and birth control nationwide!
They are always thinking of the children.
And legalizing marriage to minors. And outlawing comprehensive sexual education.
Conservatives are thinking of the children. How is that unclear?
Fight against SA protection in the workplace and push more children to work to live? Anything is better than the Great Replacement right? /s
But honestly thinking about what terrible combination of policies.
Okay, so on an actual serious note -- Historically, this has actually been the lever that's been pulled by government in order to control population growth.
The problem is that we've grown so much as a society that we now realize that bodily-autonomy is a human right.
Uh, yeah, about that. Republicans need to stop thinking so much about children, mmkay?
There was a theory that roughly 15 years after Roe v Wade crime started decreasing because people who weren't ready for or didn't want children could now have an abortion. Many of those kids that were previously born "unwanted" were in poor households and so the kids getting to about 15 years old in those conditions would start getting into trouble and start committing crimes.
For any fuckwit that says "make better decisions then! Use protection!" I'm the result of a broken condom, that shit absolutely happens. I was a "pleasant surprise." Honestly I wish they'd have just had the abortion.
My sister had her first child because her birth control failed due to another medication making it less effective.
No one warned her about that being a thing that can happen with that particular med. Not her doctor. Not the pharmacist. No one said a thing.. which is super fucked up. She was married at the time, but still. They were not ready for a kid(their words)
This was almost 20 years ago so I don't remember which med it was, and I'm hoping the medical community is better about this now.
I have been called a weirdo many times for always reading the information that comes with medications. I still do, even for stuff i have taken many times like Tylenol.
Of course doctors and pharmacists should inform their patients and have an eye on these things. But the full legally required known documentation is always with the medication. And humans are prone to error, especially in a field as complex as medicine/pharma.
Read the things before starting the medication. Always.
It doesn't get brought up because it's not useful to anyone politically. Already support abortion rights? Well then lower crime rates is just a positive unintended side effect of a policy that grants women their inherent right to bodily autonomy. Already oppose abortion rights? Then you probably don't care about crime rates because you already think that abortion itself is a crime.
Probably not, but I just thought it was interesting to bring up in relation to young age births that may or may not have been intentional.
I fail to see how this crime fighting measure involves more cops, guns and racism so I don't think you'll be able to convince the "tough on crime" "pro life" GOP supreme court on this.
Honestly I wish they'd have just had the abortion.
Asafum, I don't know you, but I am almost certain the world is a better place with you in it.
Hope you encounter a nice autumn breeze (assuming from the instance) or a nice whatever you like this week. Despite, I agree, the world being a bit of a hole in general.
Me, I've been enjoying the sun on the leaves this spring.
Kind regards, This Australian anon
Detailed in Freaknomics where Romania is used as an example.
A debunked theory
The reason why people aren't having kids anymore isn't because of abortion, its because: wages are decreasing (accounting for inflation), the cost of living is skyrocketing (yes even accounting for inflation), the cost of owning a home is now far too much for young people, people are working longer and more stressful hours in worse jobs for worse bosses, public areas have been destroyed leading to less in person interaction, online dating is toxic, the internet has given people heightened expectations, an unresolved mental health crisis, and people are finally becoming responsible enough to understand that you shouldn't have kids you cant afford.
online dating is toxic
I've read some good evidence is that this is because women, especially zoomer and millennial women, are considerably more liberal than the men in their peer group. Historically, women have always been more liberal than men, but the difference between them has gotten extreme in the last 10 years. Being a Trump supporter is a deal-breaker for many single women.
That's completely reasonable, why would a women date a man who thinks that she doesn't own her own body (not all but a significant amount of Trump supporters believe that). In addition women are more liberal because primarily their rights have and are being threatened by Trump, furthermore women are more likely to be sympathetic to other minorities who may loose their rights as well. On top of that young conservative men are very often completely delusional in terms of dating expectations. Many of them demand an extremely young person (18-20), demand they be stay at home, demand many children, while not having a job capable of upholding such a lifestyle because they cannot accept that the world we live in is not the same one our grandparents lived in. In addition young conservatives (especially young Trump supporters) tend to have completely unreasonable demands and expectations due to them being terminally online and a very poor understanding of women.
Great news - the fewer Trumpers who reproduce, the better.
You just listed 6 reasons why people are losing their minds then casually throw out "being responsible enough to not have kids they can't afford"
Which is if? Everyone's losing their goddamn minds of people have their shit together? Which is it damn it!!
/S
I forgot that only one thing can be true at once, its actually none of the reasons listed. The true reason is that the 5g radio waves connect with the vaccine autism to produce gay frog chemicals (that are spread by chemtrails in planes piloted by lizard people) so that everyone becomes trans.
/s /j
Losing my job and seeing there's about 100 times more people applying for IT jobs than there are IT jobs made me go from "maybe" to "nah" in the procreation question. Too many people already procreated too many times before me.
wages are decreasing (accounting for inflation), the cost of living is skyrocketing (yes even accounting for inflation), the cost of owning a home is now far too much for young people
Because the first thing people do when they get horny is immediately check their bank account balance 🙄
I think this is where a lot of modern civilization is falling apart at. If you want population replacement and growth, you actually have to make it advantageous to have children, and at appropriate age for your society and culture. The GOP thinks they can do it by destroying reproductive rights, civil rights, and marriage laws, if they harm women enough they'll HAVE to be baby makers! Dehumanized baby factories! And even conservative voters are fighting against it, because it's insane and it's against our current culture. It has to work for everyone. It would be more intelligent to create free childcare, better pregnancy and birth leave for both parents, and child tax credits. They could use WIC to absorb the cost of having a child and public education sooner with preschool. If people are hopeful their children will have high education access and a stable life they will be a lot more likely to have kids. Being horrified that your children will live in a fascist theocracy and intentionally kept uneducated and poverty stricken, they might actually voluntarily avoid sex to not have kids.
What if we don't want infinite growth? What about stability? Or (gasp) a population reduction so we don't destroy the planet. Have less babies. Feed the ones we have. Educate them.
I personally think reproductive rights are human rights, every adult should have total personal control over their reproductive choices, I don't think people who chose to have kids should be punished for the choice, and I don't think people who do not wish to have children should be likewise punished for not doing so, nor forced in any way or manipulated into having children. I agree that there has to be a lot of improvement for kids who are here right now. That's an important problem you have to solve first if you want to encourage your population to grow, the outcome must be good now.
I mean yes, children should be an affordable option and please take my tax money to make it practically free. But also I think a lot more people don't want children than is generally assumed it expected. Just lots of societal pressure pushing vulnerable people to make a decision that's not necessarily in their best interest.
It's a deeply felt personal choice, I don't think people should be manipulated or pressured into it, only that the cost at the very least be at zero so that people can choose based on what matters, their own personal views, and not in their ability to pay for every aspect of a child's life.
Let's not pretend the GOP are doing it for the good of humanity....
I think this is where a lot of modern civilization is falling apart at. If you want population replacement and growth, you actually have to make it advantageous to have children, and at appropriate age for your society and culture.
For most of history it wasn't advantageous to have children. People just didn't have many options, and we were used to babies dying all the time so if we wanted any help in our old age we had to have enough to survive into adulthood.
Where do you base this information from?
E.g. people who had a farm or crafts/trade business usually had children to help and later take over the business. Having children to help at old age is mentioned by yourself.
Sounds quite advantageous to me. Especially when labor is more physically demanding or you need enough people to maintain security like for traders etc.
I don't see where anyone should give two shits how many babies other people are having for their own benefit/detriment.
Macro economics, you need a growing population to do capitalism at all. You can't have a shrinking consumer base.
Also. If you want to even make it a choice people CAN make, you need to equalize it. We currently punish people for having kids by a upsetting margin, at the very least it should be the same difference, you choose to have a kid, you get appropriate services to make that process at the very least, not a clear negative in all regards.
Thirdishly we are currently getting a very low level of education for our population as a whole, and that's a BIG problem when you chief exports and economy are build on innovation in computer science, physics, and petrochemicals, we need a population with the education to work and move forward or we fall behind and that's it. We actually need a highly educated population of we intent to progress as a society with our without capitalism.
well that is because shareholders are wetting their pants realizing that with low birth rates they are losing both slaves and customers. Well, jokes on them, it is because of the shitty world they spearheaded (and that we followed)
Not to call out OP, but does anyone have this information in anything other than .png format? There's no timestamps, hyperlinks, or citations anywhere here. I'd love to send this to other people, but I'm not about to copy-pasta something that could be old or inaccurate.
Not the exact image posted, but this appears to be the source
Fantastic. Thank you!
Here is the paywalled Economist article and an archive that does a poor job of capturing the image.
That person and the author of the article obviously suck at reading/understanding graphs. Teen pregnancies did not have a high enough percentage (and it’s good that it went down).
Also, how do you miss the drop in the age range 20 - 24 and the rise in the age ranges above 30. It’s even indicated in the title to “40 is the new 20”.
This is indicative of a bad economy. I bet if you add a graph showing the rise in rent, you will see an inverse correlation.
I bet if you add a graph showing the rise in rent, you will see an inverse correlation.
Or about inequality of income.
Not much of a bet, really. More of a fact.
I have a modest proposal.
Let’s all just skip a generation and no one have kids this time. We can easily start having kids again later with a nice clean slate.
Good idea, right?
Good call! Next gen can have children for our pensions!
Of course, if you outlaw kids, only outlaws will have kids.
It's almost like if people are able to mature enough to make an informed choice, they get a choice.
Preganté
Dangerops pregonant sex
Pregananant???
starch masks
Will it hurt baby top of his head?
Preganté
Gurlfraynd ain't had period since she gawt pregat?
My circle is nomal
I like that: it sounds Spanish.
It's a reference to a meme video of someone reading misspelled Yahoo answer users asking pregnancy questions. It's quite entertaining.
YouTube Link to the video in question.
It’s almost Spanish for “I asked” (pregunté).
Although it’s common for English speakers to mix up the word for ‘embarrassed’ (avergonzado) with ‘pregnant’ (embarazada). Which makes trying to tell someone “I’m embarrassed” even more hilarious!
Nobody expects the teen pregnancy
It was never about stopping abortion. It’s about keeping people in poverty and creating a cycle of uneducated voters that either don’t vote or vote Republican because they don’t know better
please stop having babies ffs
I think it's fine to have kids if you want them but the government trying to get people to have more kids for economic reasons is sickening
Agreed, but I don't think it's fine either way. I'm an antinatalist and there is no such thing as an unselfish reason to have a baby.
And what then, the human race just dies out? I get the pessimistic feeling, but we may very well be the only sapient species in this galaxy. It would be such a waste to just give up and perish because of momentary hardships.
We are literally sapient stardust, and I'm certainly not going to give up and throw away the efforts and struggles on millions of ancestors just because of some current corporate greed and fascism is in fashion.
We are in no way at risk of dying out from negative population growth. If we start to go down below a few million, then maybe let's talk.
World population is still increasing, and is set to maybe stabilize in a couple decades. Fingers crossed. If we could (gently, without mass starvation) reduce the population down to a more sustainable level, that is an unmitigatedly good thing.
What might kill us is infertility from pollution or disease, but this won't do it.
We're upright locusts. Stop stroking your ego and look at the state of the world. Humanity doesn't justify itself.
we literally have 8 or 9 billion people dude i think we're good for now
Really? Why not? You think the impressive development of an intelligent and aware species is important enough to make that same species suffer more and more to the inevitable extinction anyways? Let's do it now while it's still partially habitable so that the end isn't quite as horrific. Your logic makes no sense.
I don't share this view. Life is an interesting pattern created by matter, but no need to be spiritual about it. If life ceased to exist, no one would be sad about it. Actually a lot of struggle and pain would be over which is positive in my opinion. In practice, we should value quality of life of conscious beings instead of quantity. Having less is better.
i also think people are probably good yes
Just here to say I feel you and agree with your sentiment.
I think the 20-24 line is hinting at a bad economy.
You just can't hear that hint over the hint of the constant torment of the growing lower class
For real. Middle class was a low but comfortable bar back in 1987 when I was born. My parents went above and beyond having two incomes, one of them being a small business. I do essentially the same thing as my mom small business wise, and my wife makes arguably more than my old man dad, but the thought of doubling our starter home (or even moving out of it) just hasn't crossed my mind.
And we also had kids about three years later on average than my folks did (though compared to my wife's folks, about five years earlier).
The '90s were fucking awesome (except for the acid rain, shit had me spooked in first grade when they played the laser disc about it).
35-39 maybe just barely made the cut before the start of the collapse. But generally i expect all of them to trend down in the long run
Tbf. Norway has a fertility rate of 1,4 I think. And that is in a country with (compared to many other places) quite generous benefits like a year paid maternity/paternity leave. Relative cheap and abundant kindergartens and a less horrible work situation. Think everyone are feeling the zeitgeist
People want stability before they have kids. Generous government benefits matter little if you're living in a cardboard box. No one wants to raise a child in a cardboard box. Look up the cost of housing in the Nordic countries. They aren't the socialist paradise you're making them out to be.
It's more nuanced than that. Wages are comparable high, and there are some tax regulations that makes owning less expensive. Renting is still not the norm in Norway. Second+++ apartments/houses are severely taxed in a recent new regulation (incidentally making renting more expensive as they were sold off)
Outside some "metropolitan" areas like Oslo you can find lex expensive homes. But you are correct that prices have started to be our of reach of many, and stability is key for starting a family.
And Norway is by no means a paradise, but it seems more agreeable than the US.
The world is on fire around us, even in places where it's only smoldering people don't want to consign their children to the flames.
Then Norway is the best place to have children!
Poland has super strict abortion bans in 2021. Wait until 2035 to see that place turn into a shithole
What is the reasoning behind the 14 year wait, is it tied to anything in particular? Or is it just that 13 year olds know how to make fun of the thing you are sensitive about
abortion gets banned. <-----You stopped thinking here
children are born in unloving homes
homes have with limited opportunities to succeed
children grow up as degenerates
commit crimes to get money and feed themselves/support bad habits
create more children that cycle the same behavior
Do you get surprised when six sided dice dosen't show a 0 or a 7?
Or do you eat raw chicken because you don't plan ahead to cook it?
What do you know. If it takes two people to pay the rent them two people have to work to pay the rent...
While true, this is mostly about teen pregnancy. So it's moreso that things like education, easy access to contraception, legalizing abortion, etc. were the primary drivers. Not to worry though, the supreme court and fascists are working hard to reverse all that. We need poor children to feed the machine
Pay people a living wage and their gonna live.
Pay people more than a living wage and their gonna create more life.
Huh, weird, access to sexual education, contraception, and medical termination should the above fail, allows women to wait until they are more financially settled and independent. And as a result, a lot of whoopsie-babies are never born, lowering the overall birth rate.
That's what I get from this diagram, at least. Birthrate among women under college-age is down, birthrate above college-age is up.
This is a good thing. The older moms, not the declining rate. The declining rate is worrying because our society relies on younger generations to prop up and care for the older ones.
Now let's keep doing what we are doing, and then find ways to make people who want to have kids less nervous about the massive financial, career, and time commitments of them. The costs of food, childcare, education, housing. and healthcare (in the US) is absurd.
Each of my kids deliveries alone "cost" more than the used minivan we cart them around in. I put cost in quotes, because that's what the insurance "paid".
But of course, my insurance premiums each year also cost more than that minivan, too. At least they are pre-tax.
I got a kid in second grade and he will probably be in college by the time I'm done paying for my wife's state college loans.
I, fortunately, got into a very well paying career after dropping out a semester into college, and I happen to have a natural aptitude for it. I recognize I lucked my way into my station, I'd be foolish to forget it. But honestly I have no idea how we'd do it if I didn't. We make 4x the median household income for my area and every time we manage to save a little bit, something always comes around to clear out 90% of it. It's incredibly demoralizing.
I know the childfree folks (and most Republicans) hate the idea of their taxes paying for medicaid, or college, or even public school (or even free lunches there!). But the fact is that an educated and healthy generation below us is usually the most important things for society to invest in. Now we also have to worry about keeping the planet habitable for them.
let kids be kids. when you force kids to be parents, you are stealing their childhood. all you have to do is explain "sex" in bits and pieces, when it's appropriate, and eventually they're ready for the anatomy explanations and maybe you can help soften the trauma of puberty.
EVERYBODY is mad!!!!
youd have to be pretty narcissistic to bring a child into the current environment
You're getting downvoted, but I kinda agree with you. I think if someone is ready and has hope for the future, sure, it makes sense for them to have a kid. I think a lot of people are aware the world sucks and the future of that child may be uncertain/bleak, many people have kids cause it's "the next step" in adulting, sometimes always wanted to be a parent. The obvious hope is that the future will figure it out. I would like to think most aren't being overly selfish, just following the flow.
My husband and I want kids, but the thought of bringing someone into our current world, and with our financial restraints, it seems cruel from my perspective... Like, the kindest thing I could do for a future child of my own womb would be to just not have them currently. (Plus, ew pregnancy) We've been looking into adoption from foster care once we feel financially ready because those kiddos are already here and need a supportive home.
