On the subject of birthrate, I’m for the radical middle. I completely reject the arguments on either side for policies to either increase or decrease the birthrate. Both sides are not only wrong, if their plans were implemented they would cause more harm than good. China with its one-child policy used authoritarian force to control women’s bodies. Romania with its high-birthrate policy also used authoritarian rule to control women’s bodies. The experience of both countries is an argument against attempts to mess with the birthrate.
My position can be stated in four succinct words, which I wear on a t-shirt:
TRUST WOMEN
PROTECT CHOICE
Pro-choice means let women have full control of their own bodies. To trust women is important, because once given freedom of choice, women adjust their own birthrate as needed, and their collective free choices will bring the best possible result with the least authoritarian interference. There is no crisis on the horizon of either overpopulation or demographic collapse, so don’t mess with it. Don’t be China and don’t be Romania. Be pro-choice.
I couldn’t agree more. Even though birthrate in the US is at a historical low, nothing should be done about it. It takes pressure off of limited resources, and what’s wrong with a world that’s a little less crowded? Humans are certainly not on the verge of extinction. People should worry about something else, and let women choose to go through childbirth or not.
There are people who push vigorously for parents to “own” their decision to have a baby, to be individually self reliant, and to have a “winner take all” competitive approach to the disposition of opportunities for young people as they enter adulthood.
Many of these people are shocked that parents are now having fewer children because it is necessary to use their personal resources to
pay for everything and
provide their children with access to opportunities
ensuring that parents wait longer to have kids, so they actually have personal resources to begin with, and have fewer kids so each child can have access to enough resources to have a chance of future success.
ETA, if you want to increase the birth rate, stop punishing people for having babies. Make child rearing easier for everyone, less of a drain on your personal resources. Women (and men) will continue to choose what is best for their lives.
Lower Birthrates worldwide is a very good thing. It should be encouraged until the population drops to a more reasonable level naturally. I’m not sure what that figure is, but I figure a billion is a good benchmark. Keep in mind less people means less burning of fossil fuels for energy.
So educate girls worldwide, as their education goes up, the birthrate goes down is one thing we do know.
Make birth control easily available. This will have a side effect of cutting down on abortions for those hung up on said issue.
Make the burden of raising a college or trade educated child easier on families.
Of course we better come up a good working nurse bot sooner than later, we’re going to have an aging population with a shortage of caregivers.
We’ve discussed the successes and failures of attempts at birthrate modifications many times. In very short words, absolutely nothing anyone has ever tried in hopes of increasing birth rates has much effect. Even the generous subsidies and women-friendly policies of Scandanavia have next to no effect.
IMO that’s not what this thread is for. But I defer to the OP to define what they want to talk about. FWIW, I see no debate framed either. But ISTM the topic is the meta–question of whether any attempts in any direction are ever morally justified. Not whether attempts work practically or what they should be, or even in which direction they should be. I can cite a half-dozen long thoughtful threads on these other points.
@Johanna : What GD are you wanting to have? Or is this more of a (well justified) rant in search of affirmation. FTR: I affirm your stance.
It appears the debate is about the birthrate itself. You’re edging close to Jr. Modding with your last sentence. Please don’t. We review these threads fairly quickly to see if they should stay in Great Debates or move elsewhere.
It’s also not the first time that birthrates plummet, I was reading a book about the English Civil war and it said that economic problems had that effect at that time.
It seems like human birth rates fluctuate and the high rates of the last 2 centuries or so are not pre-ordained.
Accommodating society to withstand the problem will take some thinking and work, but it should be possible.
It may be a bit harder for us than for early-modern era England because old people live longer but on the other hand we have the industrial revolution and they don’t.
A gradual drop in population is a good thing. A rapid drop will cause massive societal problems.
Any attempt to force women to have unwanted children would in itself be a massive societal problem; in its effect on women, and also in its effect on the children; and also in its effect on all the men in their lives. I am very much opposed to doing any such thing. I am also very much opposed to setting a maximum number of children that anyone’s allowed to have.
I suspect that the human species will adjust eventually to the existence of effective birth control at some level well above zero; that is, if we don’t finish ourselves off otherwise, possibly by killing off some minute creature essential to the existence of an ecology we can live in, possibly without having noticed it enough to name it first.
For personal, cultural or religious reasons, some people chose to have more children than others. Simple logic says that with time, people who prefer to have more children will become more predominant in society, eventually raising birth rates. So things will work out. Sort of.
What scares me on that part is it seems to be the Religious, anti-Science people that go for the larger families. The long term results of that may not be great for humanity.
It’s a religious-demographic pendulum. Religious people have lots of kids, the population becomes larger, overpopulation hits, people get less religious, non-religious people stop having kids, the population drops, and the process begins anew. We’re on the downswing now, at least in industrialized countries.
Was the 20th-21st Century population boom really the result of higher birth rates and a desire for more children? Seems to me the increase was caused by higher survival rates. It’s really only quite recently that people have been empowered (in some places) to choose not to have as many children as possible.
I’d argue against the premise that trying to increase the birth rate is somehow synonymous with restricting access to birth control and abortion. Even among the GOPers who are advocating for that position it’s really because they want to control women’s bodies, it’s no more about increasing the birth rate than their transphobic policies are about protecting children.
As other posters have mentioned if you want to increase the birth rate try making having and raising a less obscenely expensive endeavor.
According to what I read in the book I mentioned that’s not true.
IIRC it said that:
People did not have children outside marriage*
People did not marry until they had a house and the means to support it.
Due to bad economic circumstances the first 2 conditions were hard to meet and thus birthrates fell pronouncedly.
* How did the avoid having children before marriage? they were not particularly less prone to having sex without being married, but they used coitus interruptus, non-penetrative sex and if all else failed many children were abandoned to die (I may be wrong on that last one, confusing early modern England with ancient Rome).
Ok, but this framing puts decisions into two big buckets: decisions that are consciously there to affect birth rates and decisions where the unintended side effect is to affect birth rates and draws a bright red line where the former is forbidden and the latter is forbidden to be examined.
Things like income inequality, housing policy, women’s education policies, heath subsidization polices etc. are known to affect birth rates. Women’s individual choice are downstream of their material conditions and it’s all well and good to champion a woman’s right to choose but it’s blindness to not then ask, “choose from a palette of what options”?
The only way to move honestly forward is to accept that many structural decisions in our society do affect our birth rates indirectly and there is a role for direct decisions to consciously counter some of them. But that’s uncomfortable because it forces us to take a stand on what our values actually are vs retreating to process based arguments.
I’d add that a lot of pro-natal folks and governments these days want to have their cake and eat it too. They want:
High birth rate
A young global population
Small global population
Those things are mutually contradictory. You can’t have that without some sort of mandatory euthanasia program for all elderly folks, and that’s not happening for obvious moral reasons. But these pro-natal folks complain every time their magical good-Catch-22 scenario doesn’t unfold. Planet reaches 8 billion? Too many people! Societies like China, Japan, etc. are becoming elderly-heavy age wise? Too old! People having 1.1 kids per couple? Too few!
The only thing I’d disagree with the OP about is the argument that “collective free choices lead to the overall best outcome.” We can see lots of examples in capitalism, climate change, shopping carts in parking lots or elsewhere where collective free choices make things worse, not better.
Keep in mind that a lot of these people (nationally, not here) are white nationalists who talk about “white genocide” and would most definitely counter the rising birth rate with a very high death rate among “undesirables” if they could.
