Is There Any Practical Way to Increase the Birthrate?

In My Humble Opinion
1501

The Economist (on their podcast) had a bit on some devil in the details in where changes are most in the US that is worth sharing here I think. This from their auto transcription:

“On average, the national birthrate dropped in America by 12% between 2014 and 2023. That’s the same as going from 62 children in 2014 for every thousand women of childbearing age to 55 in 2023. But in those three highest fertility states, Utah, North Dakota, Alaska, the birthrate has fallen by about 20%.

That’s almost twice the drop of the average state. And it’s the same for states a little bit lower down the list, like Texas and South Dakota as well. Whereas the Northeast has experienced a pretty small drop really in fertility, we’re looking at single percentage points for most states.

So New Jersey, in that decade, the number of births has only dropped by 2% basically. In Pennsylvania, which people often think has a really high birthrate, it’s quite a poor urban industrial state. Births have decreased by just 5%.”

From The Intelligence from The Economist: Just getting started: El Salvador’s president for life, Aug 13, 2025
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I’m not sure what to make of that.

1502

Highly religious red states are experiencing sufficient insecurity in various areas that people are choosing not to reproduce?

Young, fertile people moving out of red, rural areas for more opportunities, leaving more elderly and fewer people of childbearing age?

Urban areas have already experienced most of the drop in fertility they’re going to experience so the rate of change is minimal?

If I recall, Alaska has a gender ratio skewed in favor of men - fewer women mean fewer births.

1503

Yet economically red rural had done well during the Biden years, growing in population and declining in poverty.

1504

To speculate, given that Trump’s election really encouraged the Right to openly act on its bigotry, his election set up a spike in domestic abuse and destroyed the relationships that would otherwise have led to children. And red states already have higher divorce rates, although people dance around admitting why states full of woman-haters would have trouble maintaining a marriage.

Trump’s election would only need to make the existing problem worse.

1505

Another hypothesis extracted directly from my nether regions. To wit:

Even in hard red rural Amerika there’s a bunch of brown people. Who were making most of the babies and out of fear are now not. And / or are now leaving for more congenial states.

Couple that with anybody with a brain or ambition, and especially women so equipped, are fleeing impending domestic and public tyranny.

Pretty soon that turns into a rout and only the small minority of quiverful or equivalent women are staying. And while those women are pumping out babies as fast as they can, there simply aren’t enough to make up for all the normies who aren’t making any or who have left entirely.


Which loops back to a point made upthread several times. When only various fanatical minorities are reproducing in numbers, within a generation or so your society is going to be dealing with a lot of radicalized young people grouped into coherent angry and immutable camps.

The political and cultural situation today in Israel with the ultra-Orthodox is a precursor of the USA in 10 to 40 years. Except there will be several competing factions of differing flavors of orthodoxy, not just one.

1506

Again though not consistent with the facts. Beginning in 2020 there in face was a net positive domestic immigration into rural states. Specifically

the population in nonmetropolitan (nonmetro) areas has increased each year since 2020. The growth is from migration, which has offset a population loss in nonmetro areas caused by more deaths than births.

Domestic driven during Covid and more international since.

Secular folk aren’t pumping out more kids than before but American rural religious folk are pumping out fewer than they were. Plus religiousity is not genetic. There is no assurance that those born to religious parents won’t become less so, and the converse also occurs, with some born to very secular families turning to religion to fill a perceived spiritual void and to find connections in a world that feels isolating to them.

1507

I’ve been meaning to post this Twitter article for the best part of a month:

It lists some countries that managed to increase birthrates did it by directly asking women to have more children, and celebrating motherhood. Here’s the conclusion:

1508

This would be my guess. Religiosity dropped first in urban areas, and birth rates fell accordingly. Now it’s dropping in rural areas, too. I don’t know if there is any data that breaks this out, that could support or refute this theory.

1509

The author’s “punchline” (her word) is that women in these countries still enjoy equal rights and access to education. What about opportunities to participate in the workforce, should they so choose?

1510

Yeah, the article’s talking about three countries: Mongolia, Kazakhstan and to a lesser extent Georgia.

Despite the author’s claims about these three countries being “pioneers in women’s rights” because they extended the vote to women a few years before 1925 (which is the same period in which the UK, the US and dozens of other countries also introduced female suffrage, of course), they’re definitely not high on the present-day list of cultural gender egalitarianism.

As for the “celebrating motherhood” tactic that the article is gushing about, it seems to be pretty much good old-fashioned Soviet-style sexist coercive pressure. As this Mongolian blogger notes,

Given the low population numbers, there’s a constant fear that the Mongolian race – the Mongol blood – will disappear. Therefore, the wombs of women are extremely important to continue the Mongolian line. […]

To encourage them, women are told by society that to give birth to Mongolian babies is a central patriotic duty. Those that do are revered and those that don’t are abhorred. […]

But women do not have an equal amount of power in Mongolian society – neither political, economic or social. Political representation is extremely slim, and the political world is seen as the domain of men (an idea that dates back to ancient times). Women are less likely to hold productive assets compared to men. Domestic violence and violence against women are widespread.

Womanhood in Mongolia is a complicated and oxymoronic situation – a push-and-pull relationship of raising women up to godly ideals only to turn around and throw them under the bus.

“Celebrating women” my ass. I mean, it’s great that Mongolia values motherhood, right up until the point where they start “abhorring” non-mothers and shaming and pressuring women into motherhood. That’s not really “celebration” so much as patriarchal manipulation.

Kazakhstan, likewise, is a society where women are making progress in human rights but are still very far from gender equality. (Which that linked Twitter article carefully sashays around by describing it as “a country that doesn’t adhere to western notions of political correctness”. :roll_eyes: )

First, we lack a concept of rape with penetration that is consistent with international standards. We also have no legal definition of sexual harassment or gender-based discrimination in Kazakhstan. These issues are completely ignored on the political agenda, and politicians choose to turn a blind eye to the problems and pretend that everything is fine.

According to a report by UNDP and UN Women, Fewer than 40 percent of the population of Kazakhstan knows what the word gender equality means. A high proportion of men (83,1 percent) but also women (70,6 percent) believe that women in Kazakhstan have either too many or enough rights and opportunities. This despite an obvious lack of understanding of gender issues.

In a society where tradition rules, it is easy for the issue of women’s rights to become entrenched in traditional norms and expectations. Almost 70 percent of men and 54 percent of women believe that a woman’s primary role is to take care of the home, to prioritize family over career, and to accept a subordinate role to men.

The Orthodox community in Georgia isn’t exactly a utopia of gender equality either, of course.

Now mind you, I’m not shaming or condemning any country simply for not having advanced as far as some others along the gender-equality road. We’ve all got a long way to go in that regard, and especially as an American who’s seeing a large part of my society actively trying to reverse course and go backwards, I certainly can’t point fingers.

But I can take a serious and skeptical look at political puffery that glosses over such problems for PR purposes in the cause of boosting birthrates. That linked Twitter article is essentially just more creepy pro-natalist bullshit making excuses for sexist gender roles.

Humanity isn’t running out of people: on the contrary, populations overall are still growing to a degree that is placing severe strains on our ecologically stressed planet. We should still support people having as many children as they actually want, of course, but we shouldn’t fall for this pro-natalist glamorizing of sexist gender roles and lack of women’s equality. When your “celebrating women success stories” are places like Mongolia and Kazakhstan, there’s something pretty fishy about your narrative.

1511

My off-the-top-of-the-head guess would be that US birthrates overall are falling, but new immigrants, who are more likely to cluster in the coastal blue states, tend to have more kids and are keeping the average up.

Hmm, your linked cite seems to be comparing metro versus nonmetro counties, as opposed to blue versus red states. According to your cite, some states have increasing nonmetro populations while others don’t. That, as you note, is largely an intranational migration issue, and somewhat muddying the waters with regard to comparing state birthrates.

1512

You make are lot of valid points, but these countries were picked because they are some of very few to have increased their birthrates back above replacement. There are plenty of other places with equally spotty records on women’s rights that have had continuously falling birthrates; it’s not simply a function of ‘oppress women, get more babies’.

And I thought the point comparing parenthood to service in the armed forces was an interesting one. Parenthood involves hard work and sacrifice; the least we could do as a society is recognise and value that.

1513

The definition of “metro” and “nonmetro” are also highly problematic.

As an example:
I lived 20+ years in Greater St. Louis. Simplifying a bit, there was the established 1920s-and prior constructed city proper, the 1970s and prior constructed surrounding fully suburbanized county, and three surrounding outer counties that were each fully rural in the 1970s but had been slowly turning into suburbia by the 2010s when I left.

The whole time I lived there, the outer counties were gaining population and the interior city & county were losing population. It was all about white flight; it wasn’t about who was making babies and who wasn’t.

And even now in 2025 it’s still reasonable to label the outer 3 counties as predominantly rural in that the suburbs don’t (yet) cover 50% of the land area. Even though WAG 90% of the populace in each of those counties lives in a burb that’s geographically contiguous with the old inner city. Those folks aren’t living on a farm surrounded by other farms.

1514

Sure, I certainly didn’t mean to imply that I think that a dropping birthrate automatically implies less oppression of women.

It’s just that the linked Twitter article was misleadingly selective and effusive, to the point of weird skeeviness, about the means actually used to achieve rising birthrates in Mongolia and Kazahkstan. If the author had just come out and said “These countries use a mix of sexist coercion, cultural shaming, race nativism, Soviet-style social engineering, and societal approval with formal recognition and honors to persuade women to have more children,” then fine, they do them. But framing all that as merely a policy of “celebrating mothers” is outright deceptive.

Also a fair point, and in fact I would have a lot more respect for pro-natalist advocacy in general if they would extend their birthrate cheerleading to include support for single parents. There are a lot of young single women, and even friend groups of them, who would like to have kids and would be willing to help each other out with support networks, but who haven’t found a life partner and don’t have the resources for solo parenthood. There are quite a few young men who similarly would like a child and would be willing to put in a fair bit of the work and support that a child requires, but who haven’t established themselves relationship-wise.

But the way that single moms get stigmatized as “welfare queens” or “Murphy Browns”, and the broad-brush opprobrium towards “absent fathers” and “deadbeat dads”, who wants to let themselves in for that, along with all the intrinsic burdens of parenthood? And most of the pro-natalists are no help whatsoever, with their endless yapping about needing to rebuild the nuclear family and often even more unsavory race-nationalist propaganda about who it is that they actually want to be having more kids.

I say, if what you (generic “you”) want really is simply more babies, and you think societal and cultural resources should be devoted to encouraging the production of more babies, then you should celebrate and recognize and reward all the responsible adults who want to have babies and raise them in a healthy loving way, whatever their lifestyle choices may be.

Don’t be using the specter of falling birthrates and economic shrinkage as a smokescreen for pushing your real agenda of promoting a particular kind of family structure, or a particular racial-demographics target, or a particular role for women in the family and society, or whatever. Put your money where your mouth is, and give all those baby mamas and baby daddies some much-needed and well-deserved admiration and support.

1515

As Dirty Harry didn’t quite say …

Nuthin wrong w lotsa babies …
Long as the right people are havin’ all of ‘em and the wrong people aren’t havin’ any.