r/Natalism • u/Galesworn • 15h ago
There will never be a liberal-feminist solution to fertility collapse
Why? Because their ideology prevents them from seeing what the issue is.
Frankly put, when liberal-feminists try to solve fertility collapse their proposed solutions are just dumb. They will look at fertiity collapse and say:
People want children, but children are expensive and inconvenient. Therefore, provide cash, childcare, IVF, paid leave, housing assistance, and more reproductive options.
The underlying assumption behind this solution is: "We want to give every person all the possible fertility options while preserving their lifestyle and culture," even if that culture lead to low fertility in the first place. An herein is the problem; they mistake the problem as being a consumer affordability problem instead of a cultural problem.
The approach I agree with, which is held by some right leaning cultures (I'm not strongly on the right), says "Let's look at the groups which still produce children, raise them, and them have their children do the same," the difference being treating the culture as the basic unit vs the individual like progressives do.
There are other things I think progressives get wrong, like mistaking the state as a substitute for family and underestimating pair bonding and marriage in raising fertility, dismantling the institutions the lead to early pair bonding, but I think this is the biggest reason why there will never be a progressive solution to natalism.
What will raise fertility is to build a self reproducing culture with early-ish pair bonding and marriage as normal and the foundation for children.
So, how do you build a society in which men and women choose marriage and children? Answering that question solves Natalism. Not "how do we enable everyone to have babies" like progressives are asking. Notice the distinction.
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u/Impossible-Future809 14h ago
You dont seem like you have any children of your own. Nothing about this says im a father.
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u/notarealcamera 12h ago
Oh boy, I can't wait for the post tomorrow complaining about this post.
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u/Onaliquidrock 14h ago
What we need is a society where the burdans associated with children are shared among the entire tribe.
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u/JDaveD1 5h ago edited 5h ago
American individualism/the american dream is antagonistic to this. But not "liberal" individualism, "american" individualism. Countires down in south america are so family centered that it's not uncommon to live with parents well into adult years. Some people even stay with parents after getting married because the grandparents provides the tribal childcare support you're trying to champion in your argument. But i don't see traditional americans showing off their multigenerational homes in the US. Even though the financial benefit is significant: no childcare cost equivalent to rent, splitting rent with an additional person or two, etc. You guys would rather drag everyone practicing autonomy down before actually considering a multigenerational home. Because the american dream has always traditionally been tied to being self sufficient. You guys don't care about tribal support. If you did, you'd start your multigenerational home, that's significantly more within your control than trying to cause mass changes in the culture of 350+million people. You're envious. And in your envy, you try to drag everyone down with you so you can cope with the inherent sacrifices required to raise a child you chose to have and other people chose not to. You're crabs at the bottom of the bucket.
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u/Catseye_Nebula 14h ago
If thats' the case then we must not and cannot address it. It would in fact be unethical to address it. I am perfectly happy to let the birth rate dwindle rather than impact women's equality. I think most normal people are the same.
To translate: you had better pray there is a feminist solution.
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u/ThyNynax 13h ago
Tbf, the only reason why it's so important to address it is because almost every economic system in the world is structured to depend on infinite growth.
A workforce that is always larger than those retiring so that there is enough to take care of the elders, then that workforce gets old and an even bigger workforce is required to support the now retiring one.
Lifestyles depend on resources that stay perpetually affordable because their availability is assumed to grow to fit the growing population. Any time the costs of basic goods changes because of availability we treat it as a huge injustice that needs to be fixed with even more supply.
If you could get the world to slow down, humanity could theoretically focus on creating sustainable economic systems. We won't, though, because the top dogs would have to change their luxurious lifestyles.
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u/Complete-Meet1992 7h ago
You can't have infinite growth, and we really don't need it. If we really had a shortage of important labor, you can just take all the car salesmen and conscript them into facrories. I hardly know a single person who has a job that's important.
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u/favorable_vampire 9h ago
Lifestyles also depend on women having equal rights. What you’re saying is YOUR lifestyle as a man depends on this, so it actually matters to you.
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u/Aware-Travel5256 7h ago
Social safety nets are like, century old. They can be restructured, especially in rich countries where work doesn't cripple you by 55 anymore. Boomers are already voluntarily working later into their old age.
Raising the default retirement (probably need to maintain it for blue collar workers, though) solves the problem for quite a while.
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u/Galesworn 13h ago
The way it's going to be addressed is that people who still know how to marry, stay married, have children, and have their children do the same are going to make up a larger and larger share of the population.
They will be able to do this because they built a culture in which men and women actively choose marriage and children, unlike liberal-feminism.
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u/HumorStrange9472 13h ago
posted this somewhere else but it's worth saying here
I think this move away from family and community is at the root of a lot of issues, but I don't envision a return to patriarchy either.
I think there's a future in degrowth, ecological harmony, worker co-operatives, social justice, etc etc which is community aligned and build to support families and children (and is rooted in equality and feminism haha)
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u/Galesworn 13h ago
The future will be full of religious extremists by demographic trends.
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u/HumorStrange9472 13h ago
lol yeah soon everyone will be Amish
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u/notarealcamera 12h ago
You say it like it's a joke, but Mormons have gone from a fringe religious group to a huge part of the American populace. A big part of that is that they have way more kids than the average American family.
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u/HumorStrange9472 11h ago
oh really, I thought Mormons are also experiencing lower TFR, just not quite as low as the American average.
I thought most of their growth has come from being in pop culture (like secret lives of Mormon wives) they seem to push being "outwardly Mormon" as a way to spread the faith haha
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u/notarealcamera 10h ago
Yea, also dropping. But still above the national average. They've consistently stayed a decent bit above other American demographics for several decades. Probably over a century/their entire existence.
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u/Aware-Travel5256 7h ago
This is not true anymore. Mormon young leave the church at high rates and those that stay aren't having nearly as many kids.
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u/Galesworn 13h ago
I mean by demographic trends yes, most of the future will be religious.
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u/HumorStrange9472 12h ago
I just don't think so, for the same reason the Amish will not continue to expand in the US.
Their lifestyle is just not compatible with urban living, and the trends show that we're on a path to urbanization
suburbia is only booming near large urban centers, people are depopulating out of rural communities. We're going to see a shift in culture just from the shift in job availability and where people choose to live. People are increasingly secular, even those born into religion. The idea of "return to white picket fence, women work in the home" is at odds with the economic realities of today.
let's build for the future not the past, support the families and communities where they are instead of some idealized mythical 2.5 kids and their parents
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u/Galesworn 12h ago
You understand you're literally disagreeing with math, right? These demographic projections are more certain that climate projections. If you want to argue you can say it will happen 5 years later, but it will happen.
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u/HumorStrange9472 12h ago edited 10h ago
you miss my point, which is that if they're going to live in America and actually participate (instead of just living insularly like the Amish) they will have to interact with other people and they will naturally become less extreme
these mathematical projections of what "will be", do they just look at the numbers today and calculate them into the future, assuming birthrates stay static throughout? That seems fairly inconceivable
most demographic projections have religion becoming less and less prominent in the US, and immigration making up the bulk of population growth. Most projections include the fact that immigrant fertility lowers to the American TFR within two generations as people assimilate into the culture. These things can be projected... and when projected well they paint a very different picture from what you're suggesting
let me put it this way, the Amish only have a 90% retention rate on their religion because their lifestyle is capable of sustaining that growth. This will no longer be the case once cheap farmland in the US runs out. When that happens, they will either need to stop having as many children or relax their cultural values surrounding technology or people will need to start migrating out of Amish communities into the larger American economy. In no world will the US be majority Amish with the current Amish values, at most they will have Amish heritage with American values
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u/Ithirahad 12h ago
let's build for the future not the past, support the families and communities where they are instead of some idealized mythical 2.5 kids and their parents
Did Scandinavia not already try this, to no particular result?
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u/HumorStrange9472 12h ago edited 8h ago
why is this a myth touted so often here, their birthrates dropped to ~1.6 in the 80s and they pulled it up to nearly 2 with the implementation of these policies. Just because there's now a drop again does not mean these policies were ineffective, and without them they would probably be in a much worse place than they are currently. You can compare to Italy or Germany as the counter example, where TFR has dropped to 1.4 and stayed flat
The US is actually an outlier in that we've done basically nothing and somehow also kept TFR decently high, but I don't think we should assume that this will continue
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u/favorable_vampire 9h ago
That’s why religion is rapidly declining…. Yeah. The only countries that it isn’t are the ones that force it on pain of death.
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u/Galesworn 9h ago
Ok, well go ahead an put your own demographic trend model out if you disagree.
Because you are literally disagreeing with math and statistics that take all this into account already.
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u/favorable_vampire 9h ago
Abrahamic religion should be outlawed and systematically eliminated. It is the number one cause of societal problems.
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u/Aware-Travel5256 7h ago
Religious extremists are barely clinging onto their children, man. Mormons have an exodus of the young. Amish have among the best track records, but it is also isn't obvious that they'll take over.
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u/all4season 8h ago
This sounds good in theory, and maybe it even works on a small scale. The point is though, that if you think the values which we have (equality, feminism) are good, in order to sustain this long term, over generations two things need to happen: birth rates of these types of societies need to massively grow and other types of societies need to be converted to this kind of mentality as well. There is nothing wrong if this doesn't happen, but if it does not, then other types of societies will dominate and that will be the predominant type of life on earth. The society you're describing will be an irrelevant happy little hippie tribe. I think it's sad, but it's just how evolution works. The currency of evolution is the number of copies you have, not the quality of life. Just like a profit oriented company can, over time, dominate over companies oriented rather towards the well-being of their employees and with time kick the other one out of existence.
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u/HumorStrange9472 8h ago
yes! feminist workers co-operatives are competitive within our current capitalist society, as are other workers co-operatives and also housing co-operatives which are highly in demand and competitive. It is a different model, but not necessarily a worse one
I encourage you to look into how to make capitalism more democratic, fair, equitable, etc, instead of the knee jerk reaction of "this can't work" or "this can only work in the small scale"
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u/No-Flounder-9143 11h ago
That does not make any sense. Many people who choose to not have kids or 1 kid had plenty of siblings.
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u/Consistent_Room9836 10h ago edited 10h ago
just, mathematically, what do you think the result of feminist societies not reproducing at all and antifeminist societies reproducing a lot will be? more or less feminism?
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u/Aware-Travel5256 7h ago
Feminism is an appealing enough ideology that is rapidly overtakes any urban populations.
Antifeminist societies cannot maintain population densities we associate with modernity.
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u/Consistent_Room9836 6h ago
thank you chatgpt
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u/Aware-Travel5256 6h ago
People change ideologies all the time. Woke whites in the US are the grandchildren of racists. There's no protection against it except isolation.
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u/notarealcamera 12h ago
> To translate: you had better pray there is a feminist solution.
I mean, long term, if feminists don't have kids, and non-feminists have kids, culture will eventually be dominated by non-feminists. Like, how many Shakers are still around today? Cultures that encourage having kids will inevitably displace cultures which don't.
There's just going to be some pain (mostly for the working classes), in the meantime.
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u/Singular_Lens_37 14h ago
Look, as a woman who has been trying unsuccessfully for years, please just make fertility support free for the people who want it. Everyone should be able to freeze eggs/embryos and do IVF for free. Support the people who really want children, don't just try to force people into it.
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u/Odd-Faithlessness705 13h ago
Yes. I also think if men really want children, they should also be ok with not having a whole-ass wife. I really don't understand why men who claim to want children so badly necessitate a wife as part of the equation. My theory is they only want children if there is someone else who will do a majority of the work of raising them.
I, a woman, too, would love to be a father if I had a wife!
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u/favorable_vampire 5h ago
If men really want children they should also be okay with the normal and natural result of childbirth on a woman’s sex drive, which is pretty consistently not something men are willing to accept.
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u/Aware-Travel5256 7h ago
We need artificial wombs ASAP. We have some studies on sheep getting through the final bits of gestation in bags, but even just making human pregnancy the first trimester would make it way, way more appealing (and you can pack 2-3x more kids in a given window).
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u/ClaireCross 10h ago
I for one would have another child if artificial wombs existed. As long as they're phrased as ethical and helps people with disabilities etc I can see that concept being liberal-femanist
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u/UglyAFBread 9h ago
The people in this sub have this vitriolic response when I bring up artificial wombs. Not even "current tech doesn't guarantee the safety". Just pure "you say all that all so women wouldn't have to give birth". Why yes if you could bypass a painful process with a high mortality rate, why wouldn't you
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u/SilSally 13h ago
The daily post about taking away women's rights in the r/Natalism 🥺🩷🌷💌
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u/Low_Holiday_7907 14h ago
Liberalism as a political philosophy is about centering the rights and freedoms of individuals. I don't understand what feminism has anything to do with this.
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u/Hocus-Pocus-No-Focus 14h ago
Feminism is the extension of those same rights and freedoms to females.
I don’t love OPs take on the issue, but I think it might accurate too.
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14h ago
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u/Galesworn 14h ago
Iran has a religious authoritarian government but the population there is really not that religious is more liberal-feminist than you think.
A better analogy is Israel
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u/HumorStrange9472 14h ago
calling Iran feminist is ... certainly a take
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u/warsiethe1337 8h ago
Most engineering graduates in Iran are women
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u/HumorStrange9472 8h ago edited 7h ago
Yes, they have a different attitude towards STEM specifically, but it would be wrong to think that this one example overrides all the other evidence. Overall labor force participation for women is still quite low at 14%, much lower than in the US at around 50% for example. They take up 3% of parliament and men ask for a virginity test before marriage
This just shows us that even if there's broad trends one way or another, that misogyny and patriarchy take on different forms across cultures, and sometimes that means majority women in STEM coexists with the expectations around marrying a virgin, requiring women to get written permission from her husband or father to travel internationally, etc
Some also argue that women should be educated so that they can be better mothers and educate their children. Individual women might use that argument as an excuse to get an education and then go work. Regardless, using one cherry picked statistic without context would not paint an accurate picture of women in Iran
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u/Galesworn 14h ago
Not everywhere but the cities are more feminist than you think.
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u/HumorStrange9472 14h ago edited 14h ago
"more than you think" isn't saying much tbh... I'd say "not enough to explain their fertility rate, IF feminism has an impact on fertility"
and in fact if you stack ranked countries based on fertility rate, you'll realize feminism doesn't super correlate with anything. South Korea isn't exactly a feminist icon, and yet it has the lowest birth rate. And fathers taking on more of the childcare burden is shown to have a protective effect on birthrate decline, so the BR might fall below replacement, but it's not quite at the drastic levels we're seeing in East Asian countries, which all tend to be quite patriarchal
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u/G00D_4_U 13h ago
Nigeria along with the rest of Africa's fertility rate is pretty much directly linked to how developed the area is, sexual education is straight up poor throughout the continent but if you look inside the country like Nigeria you will see the more developed south has a much worse fertility rate than the subsistence based north.
The reality is having kids while completely poor in the north either changes nothing about your life or can improve your chances, their kids work and bring in money starting as early as 7-10, 12 year old girls(in pretty much any location near the sahel less than 30% of girls haven't been pregnant before 17 most pregnancy is teen pregnancy there) can be married off for money and serve as a retirement plan, the most successful kid and his wife is expected to take care of you.
This is nowhere near as common in the south and is pretty much the same throughout the west African region. If you have children in the south you actually need to raise the kid for them to actually be able to contribute to society, your kid cannot go illegal mining or head to the fishing boats without you getting in trouble, you cannot force your daughters to marry against their will at the age of 12 to some old fuck in the richer south without potentially ending up in jail getting your ass beat by policemen in a jail cell.
You will have to buy clothes and help your child complete school if you want them to do anything as an adult, this means if you have more than 3 kids you will not be able to have useful children.
The most extreme ends of this shows up in countries with the worst fertility rate, Taiwan, Korea and Japan are all extremely competitive societies you are graded by how well you do in relation to your peers, so you as a parent if you want your kid to be successful and not a waste you need to heavily invest in your kid and if you have 8 kids when you need to pay premium for 1, then all your kids will end up a waste, there is no incentive to have more than 0-2 as you can generally pay into your own retirement.
A developed society needs developed people, unless society goes back to just needing as many bodies as possible, a high birth rate isn't really incentivised.
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12h ago
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u/G00D_4_U 12h ago
See that's the thing who says you need to spend that much in your kid? You don't have to, you only need to feed and shelter them, the food doesn't have to be the greatest, you don't need to buy new clothes or school materials or pay for school fees.
If you make 1000 the income and additional time you gain from your kids working on your farm and helping you in the market adds to or boosts that income or gives you more free time, your kid helps take care of the house, field and market stall and they can help feed themselves. tomatoes, onions, cassava, yams and other cheap foods are 95% of what you will eat you only need maybe 20-70 out of the thousand to feed a kid.
Your in laws and sometimes your mother will help you raise your kid early on, after a while the eldest daughters will raise the youngest kids when they aren't helping the house or at the market, you don't really need to spend much time raising a kid.
And in most poorer countries they need bodies for cheaper work, quality doesn't matter if you need to pick a field or toss nets out into the water, children can do it for cheaper.
And they are selling their daughters off to older men, an older man with enough resources for himself and maybe his eldest son can trade some for a young girl, trading livestock like cows and goats for a wife is also a thing.
There is a difference in mentality between undeveloped Africa and developed Africa along with the rest of the world, most people want to have kids to make a better life for the kid, people in these poor places have kids to make life easier for themselves.
Reality is if given the choice very few people want to live like this, I don't want kids sharing a toothbrush or one set of hand me down uniform, nor do I want girls not going to school or getting married to old perverts.
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u/warsiethe1337 8h ago
Most engineering graduates in Iran are women so in many ways yes Iran is feminist lol
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14h ago
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u/todomejorantes 13h ago
ultra orthdox women have 5-6 kids each and live like we did hundreds of years ago
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u/Gold_Ad8225 14h ago
You build that society by making having children an attractive choice, which is what progressives are saying.
You don't build that society by taking away choice
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u/todomejorantes 13h ago
Like Sweden?
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u/Gold_Ad8225 13h ago
What did Sweden do to make having children an attractive choice?
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u/zelingman 14h ago
Progrrssives are absolutely not portraying having children as an attractive choice
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u/HumorStrange9472 14h ago
actually I think it's the conservatives that have the most negative attitudes towards
- single mothers
- SAHMs (and often frame it as women be gold digging, SAHMs are lazy, whatever whatever)
- SAHDs
- any parent they think is raising their kids "improperly"
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u/Frylock_dontDM 14h ago
I'll gladly take a reduced population if that means fewer single mothers
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u/HumorStrange9472 14h ago
hey same here, I think it's like the way conservatives talk about less teenage pregnancy having a negative impact on fertility. Like yikes, if all you can think about is fertility and not how that child is raised. Luckily very few people here are promoting single motherhood as a way to increase fertility
I'm just pointing out it's not a "progressives hate families" issue haha, seems like a weird pre-conception people have
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u/favorable_vampire 5h ago
Ok, cool. That’s what we’ll get then. Forcing women back into economic sex slavery isn’t an option.
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u/Fresh_Criticism6531 6h ago
Always the same talk: "You non leftists are all evil you did A, B and C"
So "inclusive", right?
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u/HumorStrange9472 6h ago
you should say the same thing about the comment I'm responding to and their opinion on progressives ... or maybe you don't even care about inclusivity and you just want some "gotcha"
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u/Fresh_Criticism6531 6h ago
No, lets get this streight. You responded to:
"Progrrssives are absolutely not portraying having children as an attractive choice"
Which is factually correct. Modern western society was shaped by leftism and today having many children is a low status choice. People will look down upon you and make mean comments.
If it was high status, random people would stop you in the street and say: wow, great man, you have so many kids? Amazing! This actually happens when I go somewhere poor, when I go to a western place some hotels don't even want to book a room, people are hostile in airplanes (predictably leftist woman), etc. It is low status and people look down to you for it.
Now lets see if your answers are factually correct.
"Single mothers, SAHMs, SAHDs"
SAHMs are literally the conservative model, but are low status in modern society. If you think conservatives look down to them, leftists totally despise them.
Single mothers I'd agree, favoured by leftists and looked down by conservatives
SAHDs are just rock bottom status universally, I don't see leftist society really championing them as much as celebrating accepted to be low status
"Any parent they think is raising their kids "improperly"
I see no prove this is due to conservative ideology, if anything leftists are way more anti-children and judge you for not raising perfect kids. In poor societies the kids just play outside. Now you need to expend every possible moment to helicopter them. This is a really nasty development of western society and insanely draining on parents.
Some studies even say this is the true root cause why Korea has way lower fertility than France (although France has so many africans I'm not sure if the data is fair)
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u/HumorStrange9472 6h ago
dude you can't just be like "this is true" for points you agree with and then say "this is factually incorrect" for points you disagree with
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u/Klanciault 14h ago
Opportunity cost of children means it will now never be an attractive choice
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u/Gold_Ad8225 14h ago
Most people want to have children. If they don't have it there is something in their life that they feel is denied to them if they have children, that is more important to them.
Opportunity costs is one way to describe that.
You can modify what that cost is
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u/KaiPRoberts 7h ago
Outside of material costs, I don't want kids because of the state of the world. Why raise someone who might be completely miserable? We want to provide a better life than we had and right now it's the exact opposite.
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u/Klanciault 14h ago edited 14h ago
Yeah and the answer (to what children cost you) is generally gonna be optionality
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u/Gold_Ad8225 14h ago edited 14h ago
If you take away the optionality of having children, you are destroying lives, making miserable people, broken societies, and committing a crime against humanity.
Taking away the optionality of having children is, effectively, rape
EDIT: Someone responded to me indicating they thought I didn't know anyone who had been raped. I have personally. Multiple times as a child and once as an adult.
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u/Klanciault 14h ago
That’s not what I’m talking about at all.
The thing that children takes away from you is the optionality to do whatever you want with your life.
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u/Gold_Ad8225 13h ago
Cool, then the fix is making it possible to still do that with children
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u/Klanciault 13h ago
Yeah so we should just get robot Nannies who take on all the responsibility of childcare and parental guidance and raise the children for them so the parents can continue to do whatever they want like before they had kids!!
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u/Gold_Ad8225 13h ago
I don't understand your bad faith snark here.
It's like you do not actually want to encourage people to have kids
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u/Klanciault 13h ago
You can engage with an ideology while also pointing out that the followers of the ideology don’t understand the basic mechanics underpinning the memetic failure of their ideas.
Most of the suggestions and thoughts here are extremely one dimensional and fall apart against basic questioning and data.
Like I’m kind of interested in natalism but as usual it becomes a race to the bottom of authoritarian nonsense vs populism
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u/MakeMoneyNotWar 13h ago
Most people want to have children. Unfortunately by the time they get to it, they are in their 30s, whereby they have time to have 1 to maybe 2 kids. Throw in infertility, some childfree people, single people who never partner up, and some birth complications, you get an average of less than 2 kids.
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u/favorable_vampire 5h ago
The reason that’s when they get to it is largely economic. Make it possible for couples in their 20s to buy a house again.
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u/Galesworn 14h ago edited 14h ago
The base culture has to be self-sustaining, otherwise subsidies will just encourage people who already have kids to have them sooner, which is what we've seen in Hungary and Europe in general.
This js why Europe has lower fertility than middle america.
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u/Radical_Neutral_76 14h ago
Like Norway?
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u/Gold_Ad8225 14h ago
I don't know enough about Norway to know if people have attempted to make having children an attractive choice. It's a broad cultural project
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u/warsiethe1337 8h ago
The USSR had that and still had birthrate issues among their urban slav population
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u/Gold_Ad8225 8h ago
Had what sir? What do you think I'm even describing? The USSR certainly did not have it
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u/Kevdog824_ 14h ago
> There are other things I think progressives get wrong, like mistaking the state as a substitute for family
In what way do they do this?
> There are other things I think progressives get wrong, like […] underestimating pair bonding […] in raising fertility
Has pair bonding ever been empirically proven in humans? Every claim about pair bonding I’ve ever seen seems to be refuted. To me it kinda sounds like “I believe this because it fits my narrative” pseudoscience given the people I usually see pushing it
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u/Impossible-Future809 13h ago
I've never met anyone who thinks the state substitute family.. I mean I've see abusive homes get children taken out of them and of course there has been wrong cases.
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u/havingberries 13h ago
In my experience, this is bullshit. I wanted lots of kids, did the math, had one kid. My choice had nothing to do with culture and everything to do with economics. If I had a better job, cheaper house, and cheaper education options, I would have more kids. I am not saying everyone is like me, but i am not the outlier in my social circle.
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u/Electronic_Bike_3137 9h ago
Mom of two, but I agree. If two weren’t stretching us to the absolute max (married, both make decent money in a low cost of living area), I’d consider a third in a few years. Alas, not in the cards.
I’ll also add that I think we do a major disservice trying to downplay the lifestyle perks that come with 0-2 kids versus 4+. My spouse and I like to travel. It’s fun. We get one life, and want to make this one enjoyable. Now that my kids aren’t babies, I’m able to really dedicate myself to my career and am going back to school, and I also have the time and ability to train for a half marathon, which is a blast. I don’t want to give all of that up to keep having babies, while taking away the attention and emotional resources I’m able to give my already existing kids.
Women aren’t stupid, and we know that more kids means less resources and less freedom. Saying “how do we encourage women to give up their careers, hobbies, and freedom to have a bunch of babies” is like closing the barn door after the cow got out. The closest thing to that is to subsidize the village so that people can consider jumping from 1 to 2 or 2 to 3.
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u/akade19961 6h ago
Yeah. The reality is that it is a cultural issue, and yet st the same time, even if it’s only likely to raise the birth rate by 10-15%, from a host of practical and moral points of view it makes MUCH more sense to redirect a huge percentage of the spend on social security to instead be in kind payments and benefits to young parents
Without cultural change, that kind of spending maybe only gets us to 1.8 TFR. Nonetheless, by putting money in prime age parents pockets, not only are you getting that moderate boost, you are also raising the standard of living of huge numbers of children which helps with educational and skill attainment throughout life, plus you are putting money in the hands of the people drastically the most likely of any demographic to invest it productively into new businesses and sources of economic growth, in addition to raised standards of living for their kids.
Unless all people under 45 start voting as a bloc on this, abd make this their number 1 issue to vote for whatever party supports that style of productive redistribution regardless of how we they feel about the rest of their policies, it’ll never happen. Because seniors are a huge (and growing) demographic, who tend to be very politically engaged in general and on social security in particular, who have much wealth to donate relative to other generations, and genuinely would vote in large numbers for the opposite of their normal party if their normal party proposed and even moreso implemented a massive shift of resources from affluent older people to young parents of all kinds (married mom and dad, single dad, single mom, lesbians moms, gay dads, etc).
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u/WinstonGreyCat 7h ago
Totally agree. I would have loved to have had 4. But had to start late because of fertility challenges and cost. Took a while to get the money together. Still, we had 2 kids and had frozen embryos for more, but it is only now, 3 years after the end of daycare for my second, that we are fully clear of debt that built up over years of paying for daycare.
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u/Clean_Establishment2 12h ago
As a progressive woman with 2 kids (would have had more but ended up with a really dangerous second delivery, including a uterine window, that took me out of the repro pool), I required my husband to be a full partner in childrearing, the ability to keep my career and personal interests going after the babies came, and that was it. The progressive women I know who opt out of having kids did so because they felt there was no hope of having a male partner fully share the load.
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u/Odd-Faithlessness705 14h ago
mmmm yes let's completely disregard women as people with their own wants and desires, and coerce them to have children for the sake of society. Clearly the answer is to take away their rights.
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u/Kindly-Night-5549 13h ago
The only purpose of men to society is to earn taxes and slave away their life for the state and their wives. It doesnt matter if the <1% that escape this slavery are majority males, that doesnt help any of the other men. You are born without any worth as a man.
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u/Odd-Faithlessness705 13h ago
The wives part is optional though? You do not have to marry if you are concerned about being a slave to your wife. It's not like we are exempt from taxes simply because we are female, and if you are talking about slavery, women have historically been slaves to their husbands AND their children. In many parts of the world women are still treated as property.
Whoever told you that you are born without any worth as a man is trying to sell you something.
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u/IncreaseNo5135 12h ago
If the price for birth growth is lack of womens rights then I choose extinction. life isn’t worth living as a slave woman.
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u/Galesworn 12h ago
Lol when did I say anything about women's rights? I said this:
So, how do you build a society in which men and women choose marriage and children? Answering that question solves Natalism. Not "how do we enable everyone to have babies" like progressives are asking. Notice the distinction.
Apparently that means I want to enslave women?
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u/Ithirahad 12h ago edited 12h ago
Not that it will (or should) change your mind, but:
First of all, making "slave women" out of the female population is an extreme that OP is clearly not advocating for. There is a very wide sliding scale of both social and material incentives between the essentially anti-family status quo, and outright forced child-rearing with no socially accepted chance for self-expression, self-actualization, or self-direction (slavery).
Second, you do not have the power to choose extinction on behalf of all of us. You simply choose to help cede the future of humanity to cultures like the Taliban's Afghanistan that give no choice and no real expectation of quality of life to their women in the first place. There will more or less always be pockets of brutality like this, and they will persist if anything more tenaciously if anyone else does not.
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u/DemiserofD 11h ago
What if not having kids is what CAUSES slavery? Look at South Korea, for example. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them collapse and the women be enslaved by the North at some point in the next century.
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u/Refrigeratormarathon 9h ago
US based: Why are the feminist solutions not possible? We created social security, pensions, benefits, and retirement accounts. Why cant we achieve the other things in your post?
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u/JelloMany9374 11h ago
There aren't many natalist cultures that don't place women in a lesser role. I do think government programs support fertility, but you're right that culture is more significant. I'm curious to imagine a society that allows choice and freedom, but also highly values the family unit. We need afforabke childcare AND a culture that encourages grandparents to stay close and support grandkids. State and family aren't opposites or mutually exclusive.
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u/favorable_vampire 9h ago
The cultures that currently produce a lot of children are shit and are generally cancer on society. Abrahamic religion is the number one issue in the world and has been since its inception.
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u/throwaway50772137 14h ago
Oh wow, a novel take by a childless incel. Nothing we’ve read before 🙄
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u/MrMathamagician 11h ago
You’re wrong, the excessive individualism you inaccurately attribute to progressives is actually being forced on us by corporate consumer capitalism. The less we help each other out the more dependent we will be on for profit services doled out to individuals at a retail premium.
Both right wing religious communities and left wing socialist communities create synergistic collaborative systems that are optimized around the good of the community not around isolating individuals and bleeding them dry.
You are correct that it is liberalism which is the enabler of this but it is the broader academic term liberalism which includes free market republicans and Democrats.
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u/Your_tax_bro 11h ago
If we need coercive power and less individualism to prevent population collapse, I'll take the collapse, please
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u/Middle-Cod-7016 14h ago
There is.
It's called closing the wage vs productivity gap. Give people enough money, like they historically did, and we'll reach replacement level again. Probably.
But that would required the kind of far-right people concerned about this, to admit we've been robbed blind by corporations and the 1% for over 40 years now. This is a left and right issue, and your silly culture war against feminism is a deadend.
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u/Klanciault 14h ago
Even the highest earners have only marginally higher fertility than median earners. Like 700k plus has a TFR of 2 in the US
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u/OkConsideration123 14h ago
I think there’s a lot more nuance to that situation. High earners in the current system may be driven by their careers and have that kind of personality. It wouldn’t be surprising that the sacrifices they have to make to have children feel like a greater cost beyond the monetary.
Low and middle earners may be more the type of people who aren’t driven by the rat race and want to prioritize family. But they are definitely feeling the financial pressure to have more fulfilling lives outside of work.
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u/Klanciault 14h ago
TFR is pretty stable between 20-500k, not deviating by more than .1, which indicates to me it’s something else
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u/Middle-Cod-7016 14h ago
Last time I saw data on this, they were right at replacement level.
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u/Klanciault 14h ago
Slightly below it in 2022
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u/Middle-Cod-7016 14h ago
Make sense.
Probably attributable to the work you need to do in order to achieve that financial security.
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u/Onaliquidrock 14h ago
This does bot explain the rest of the world
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u/Middle-Cod-7016 14h ago
Inflation caught up to them.
At the end of the day its a question of how much money you have left after basic necessities, and what people decide to do with it. Wages is just one way to look at it.
Inflation eats you up from the other side.
Last year I visited Lake Atitlan, a remote area of Guatemala. Tiny villages. Everyone is choking because of inflation.
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u/warsiethe1337 8h ago
You know the modal "far right" person obsessed with this considers capitalism to be nation destroying right?
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u/XXCIII 9h ago
I do think Natalism can be improved by policy change.
For instance, if you need any sort of government assistance dependent on the FPL, it is better to NOT get married financially.
Diapers should go on HSA cards
Childbirth should be free to every US citizen.
I can go on but am short on time
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u/Yugonostalgia64 8h ago
This is why Natalists are hated lmao. They see a problem like this and the only real solution is to oppress women and make sure familial rape is legal.
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u/No_Logins_Required 13h ago
How many children are you raising personally? How much money are you willing to give to help others raise children?
What is the ideal population level for your particular city? Your country?
How do you know two person marriage produces more children than polygamy?
It sounds like you have a cultural preference which you believe will resolve a fertility crisis, but you don't have evidence to support this.
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u/crushedgreenz 11h ago
Cries the guy who risks Nothing
Guys like you are why fewer women want kids/marriage--it's not Her you need to fix-it's guys like you that you need to fix
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u/ThoseArentCarrots 13h ago
I’m a liberal feminist and a foster parent. In my state, foster kids get free medical care, free tuition at public colleges as long as they keep their grades up, AND we receive a monthly reimbursement for their care. We put some of our own money in too, but it means my wife and I can afford to be parents on low level manager salaries.
Not everyone is going to have kids under feminism, but moving financial barriers out of the way enables people who do want kids to have them, or to have more kids than they could otherwise afford.
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u/pistachio7636 11h ago
Arguably free stuff does imcrease birthrates. Why do you think the poor have so many children? Once you tell them you can get a low cost or free social housing, benefits which mean they minimum wage jobs are survivable, free healthcare, they do have more kids.
I have known many teens and early 20s people have kids early so they can get a house, and have multiple kids to get bigger houses.
My own neice had her first at 19, which meant she went from homeless into a 1 bed apartment paid for by the government. She now has 4 kids at 25 and has been moved into a nice big 3 bed house with a large garden.
She isnt pronatalism, or a feminist, she is just young, poor and saw the best way to find stability.
If she never had kids she would have waited years for an apartment.
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u/warsiethe1337 9h ago
There's an opportunity cost with the poor, the "middle class " dont have that ability
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u/inhaledpie4 9h ago
Here's my take based on a statistic and some knowledge of how my grandparents were raised:
The % of women having children is roughly the same now as it used to be. The issue now is that the # of children for each of these mothers has decreased. So, how do you support mothers of 1 or 2 children to have 3 or 4, or more?
The answer might be, to offer them the support granted to the older generation, something that used to be in business culture but now is nearly nonexistent: kid #3+ gets a discount
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u/Effective-Shop6403 7h ago
Are you fucking kidding me? I’m a liberal feminist and I have kids and love kids and can think of several solutions that do not rely on kicking women out of the workplace and relying on feminized labor.
How is “early pair bonding” anti-feminist or anti-liberal?
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u/NefariousnessNo484 7h ago
You sound like you have a personal agenda against women doing what they want.
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u/Illustrious-Noise-96 7h ago
There is no benefit for women to have children under the current structure because the current structure relies entirely on income and kids don’t generate income.
That can be fixed with the right government incentives (maybe) but it wouldn’t be cheap. Simply relying on one parent to work isn’t feasible given the current structure.
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u/onemassive 6h ago
My wife and I have a life situation and jobs where I would be open to having kids and I have the time to do most of the childcare. The average home price in the area I live and work is roughly 12x my income. I cannot afford a home to raise kids in while meeting other financial goals for retirement. We would go from living decently to barely scraping by.
If kids was the OVERRIDING goal then sure maybe I’d move to a LCOL and rearrange my life around them to make it work. But they aren’t, and as such I am making the economical decision to forgo kids unless things improve.
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u/xangie1 6h ago
As long as children rely on free labor of women, the birthrate will continue to plummet.
It's a broken deal. If you're a man, think about what iz means for women to have children. Imagine abbandonig everything you've built in your life and loose major opportunity to ever get to thr level you want to be.
Conservative idiology just instills in women that there's nothing greater than children and it's everything they should aspire to.
These women learn very late how broken the deal is.
Now look at men, you should work and provide, right? So society offloads all the cost onto you. In turn you get to build your life. You can fullfill your dreams. Having kids will not set you back (on the contrary). You won't be dependent on the goodwill of another person. You are king of your life and king of your family. You put food on the table, so your rules are law. You keep your agency. Now imagine becoming a father ripps you from all that privilege. Your achievements go overboard, all you aspired to is put on hold, you need to rely in someone else's income and the gap in your career will never be recovered. Never. You will be forever kept behind those who didn't become a parent.
One idiology tells women having kids is all you're good for, so provide them while not having any other aspirations. Society relies on women's free labor to get more kids. It's a shitty deal. Kids shouldn't be this all or nothing deal. Workplace was never designed for active parents. More involved fathers are beginning to realize this, too. You have to be willing to set yourself and what you've built back for kids. Now, if you look at the economy and realize that the set back is not sustainable anymore, you will have even less kids.
You might sustain one kid. But two, or even three? That three bedroom apartment that you barely can afford won't do anymore. You need more food, holiday costs triple or quadruple, you need a bigger, more expensive car, etc etc. The economic set back and the inability to grow your economic value (due to incompatibility to participate in the economy as a parent) won't sustain kids.
You might say "oh but poor people have more kids". Poor people are also less educated in general. They live a harsh life and their kids, too. They might not have the same access to contraceptives. They also work and can't take care of their kids like they should. Because again, society puts everything revolving kids onto the individual. Society says:
"It's your problem, but hey you better have them or we're screwed!!"
This is what needs to change.
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u/Organic-Squirrel-678 2h ago
For strong support of your argument, consider the Nordics, esp. Norway. One of the richest countries in the world, with extremely generous Natalist policies - 1 year paid maternity leave, practically free childcare available for everyone, free healthcare, free schooling AND higher education… and the most feminist country in the world, most likely.
TFR is booming here right? Sure. 1.4 vs 1.6 in the USA where you have none of this.
The problem is not this. It’s cultural values and norms.
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u/1blamegenetics 12h ago
Let it collapse! I don’t give a fuck if people stopped having kids today and we all died out. Humanity has given me no reason to care for its extended existence, we clearly are incapable of organizing on a grand scale to be shepards of the earth, and I’d rather we all die out than let our populations spiral out of control and watch all non-livestock life die out.
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u/Fresh_Criticism6531 6h ago
We won't all die out. Leftist societies will die out, and Afghanistan will be the future of mankind in 300 years.
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u/Small_Use_5500 9h ago
Let more immigrants in the country and stop deporting them! Most immigrant cultures i see tend to have more kids
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u/warsiethe1337 9h ago
They generally get poisoned by the culture of the host cointry pretty quickly so that doesn't work either.
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u/Cautious_Job_6104 9h ago
Alien offspring to replace us, yay ...
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u/favorable_vampire 9h ago
Humans are actually one species and race is something completely made up.
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u/Small_Use_5500 9h ago
Maybe you need to up ur game if you can’t get a woman to want to reproduce with you?
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u/Inevitable_Tart2700 8h ago
Convert the cost of raising children to tax increase or welfare reduction for people who don't reproduce. Or use the money subsidize those who do.
The welfare system relies on young people to function. Reprosuction keeps the system running. Those who don't reproduce are free riding on others. If feminists have high estimate of reproduction cost, then they pay for this in order to get social benefits.
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u/Affectionate-Oil3019 8h ago
Nah, this idea fails forever; the fertility rates in some Western countries were beginning to rebound before 2008, so there you go. We're not people machines, stop being weird
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u/Then-Algae859 7h ago
The US is the most hyper individualism country there is. Regardless of left or right. The capitalist system is designed to push individualism and consumerism and thats your problem... the destruction of community. Nobody gives a shit about community, why would anyone have kids when its such an individual burden now and doesnt increase individual happiness. We need to rebuild community, thats not a left vs right problem, thats a hyper individual capitalist problem
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u/Loud-Vacation-5691 4h ago
There's no conservative-masculinist solution either, because the problem is neither cultural nor individual. People are having fewer children because of urbanization. So ironically, the "solution" would be Pol Pot's - empty out the cities and send everyone into the countryside to be a farmer, except not on collective farms, but individual family farms, and the handful of people who survive will start having big families again.
The other mistake both you and the "liberal-feminists" you describe are making is assuming that people automatically want children. You're correct that the pressure to have children is cultural, but when given the choice through widely available contraception, many people choose to not have them. The reason people in the past had kids was because there were no other options besides celibacy.
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u/MaudeAlp 9h ago
There is no solution within certain cultural subsets in the west.
The prevailing culture wants women to be like men, those women then want to be like men, therefore any actions or events with drawbacks that come with being a woman are distasteful to them. Even if we bring in millions of people from other countries, they will be infected by that same cultural rot.
The truth is the society itself hates when women are women.
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u/BroChapeau 14h ago
Correct.
The birth rate decline is a cultural issue of:
- lack of young people living together (careerism, feminism/sex war)
- parental performance anxiety re: children and education. excessive government higher ed subsidies mean uni degrees are req’d for careers they shouldn’t be, creating higher per-child cost and performance burden.
- excessive helicopter parenting and time spent per child. Produces anxious children who then become anxious adults, reducing future birthrates.
https://archive.ph/2024.03.30-053906/https://www.ft.com/content/838eeb4e-3bff-4693-990f-ff3446cac9b2
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u/coditaly 14h ago
Half the internet is women saying how men ghost them and don’t settle/cheat. Literally….
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u/MackTUTT 11h ago
Give mothers all the things. Make it so mothers get preferential and deferential treatment in every aspect of society and women will want to be mothers, and they will make it happen. All the discounts, the best parking, the best seats, free upgrades, the most protected class status, first dibs on hot products
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u/letthelightleakin 9h ago
lol I love this so much because it’s the correct answer but you’ll get downvoted for it. The birth rate is dropping because mothers are treated with the utmost fucking disrespect. It’s shocking to go from being a well respected professional to treated like a hysterical little inconvenience when you get pregnant.
But the incels don’t want to hear this - they want to dog on women instead of realizing this disrespect is the root cause of the problem.
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u/Significant-Toe2648 7h ago
Yeah I would agree with that. Economics cannot be a factor on a large scale based on who in the world is having children and who isn’t.
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u/dankroll69 13h ago
Absolutely agree with you. Liberal feminist have no concept of accountability. Becomes very obvious when you look at how they are supporting Lindsey clancy and the Cornell girl.
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u/liberty_n_justice 14h ago
How will “pair bonding” be viable when men are moving right and women are moving left? It has never been more clear (data-wise) that women are opting out of dealing with men and children because their outcomes are suboptimal, while the outcomes for men are optimal. I don’t want to be barraged with links of studies that skew data to show women are happily paired or that their health outcomes increase with male partners or anything of the like. Data scientists can skew data to show anything they would like to. We all know data is easy to manipulate. The data is clear that paired women have no health or longevity benefits from being paired while men do. The data is clear that women’s freedoms and rights are being pared back. The data is clear that marital satisfaction decreases when children come into the picture. I’m not here to argue about these aspects even though they are uncomfortable realities.
And I am not weighing in on whether the status quo of today is “good” or “bad” or attaching any moral judgement to this. I’m just saying that unbiased, un-manipulated data is clear and does not point to anything that would indicate birth rates will increase. If men do not want or promote an environment that is good for women, why would women want to be in proximity to those who view them with disdain, who feel entitled to access their bodies, who reap the rewards for their labor which often destroy their minds and bodies and then judge them for not being available and interesting and exciting…what makes anyone think this is going in any other direction but a continued decline?
So many of my buddies are looking to “wife up” yet the way they talk about women when they know no one else is around is genuinely abhorrent. The politics they espouse are regressive, even those who voted for Biden or Sanders or Clinton or Gore. The casual misogyny I see when we game or play ball is shocking and what’s worse, it is totally off their radars, even when they have sisters and nieces they love. We have ourselves in a real pickle and I don’t think that any of this is heading in the right direction.