I do think an artificial womb would create a sea change. Also, a way to store eggs.
Excellent points both.
The chance to create a baby using one’s e.g. age 20 high quality eggs & sperm, but fertilized 20 years later when the 40-ish couple is ready to be established mature parents would be a game changer.
Having a machine then gestate the delayed-start fetus so the woman is exposed to none of the serious hazards (and petty inconveniences) of pregnancy nor delivery would likewise be huge.
Having and raising children used to be the ultimate do-it-yourself project:
How many people live the nearly self-sufficient lifestyle of a rural subsistence farmer anymore? It wasn’t even that long ago that husbands were carpenters, plumbers, electricians and auto mechanics, while wives were from-scratch cooks and seamstresses (how many households own a sewing machine anymore? Anyone remember darning socks?) We now live lifestyles where almost everything we do cycles through the money economy. We work jobs, to earn money, to pay for… damn near everything we do. There’s simply no room in that cycle for children anymore, unless we actually do develop entirely artificial methods of procreation.
Yes, if it were relatively easy to become established in a career, collect some capital, and then have kids without the health costs of pregnancy, I think it would be a lot more attractive. Heck, that’s one of the attractions of younger wives for middle-agreed men.
I mean ‘not that long ago’ is a very, very relative thing. In living memory, absolutely. But in generational time it’s not recent. To a perhaps somewhat limited extent I grew up with DIY parents like that - my father grew up trapping animals for pelts and with a subsistence farm in his small town backyard. But I’m early GenX and was born more than half a century ago. Two generations is a lot when it comes to culture.
My nieces and nephews did not grow up with parents like mine. Because while me and my siblings are modestly handy enough with and will do very small stuff (I just replaced a toilet fill valve the other day) we’re not near as DIY as my parents were. Because we were raised urban and it is either no longer realistic (working on modern cars) or just not worth our precious time and effort (I have replaced a whole toilet once before, but although simple it is kind of a bitch in very tight spaces - never again).
And vice versa.
A young woman gets an established mature spouse who’ll be a much better provider for her shiny new babies than some recent grad her age. Or at least that’s her hope.
I don’t think of that as “nerding out” so much as preferring to avoid sources (AI) that could be grossly inaccurate.
I think that, on the SDMB, answers provided by AI do not impress. I was a bit surprised to see such a post, actually.
My suburban Maryland county has a quandary in that several of our schools are aging and overcrowded, needing repairs and/or expansion. Yet projections are for enrollments to steadily decline in the near future.
Managing this along with the aging population will require some skill from our mostly Republican commissioners.
I’ve seen the film Children of Men twice, a work of SF based on: What would the world be like if births suddenly went to zero? The answer is: Very crappy. Scenes of a former elementary school with trees growing in through the windows and wild deer running through the halls. The only glimmer of hope for sinking humanity is the one woman who gets pregnant, maybe scientists can figure out how she did it, and she’s on her way to them…
Children are expensive. These figures take no account of tax rebates or government subsidies and assume a healthy child with no costly handicaps.
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In the UK, the cost of raising a child from birth to 18 years old is £259,028 for a couple and £290,807 for a lone parent, according to Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG)’s research published in December 2025.
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Based on previous U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates, it could cost anywhere from $241,106 to $513,722 to raise a child to age 17, not including higher education.
Yep.
And no government anywhere is gonna pay parents the local equivalent of $20-$30K per year per child to create new workers.
And that’s just compensating expenses, not actually paying parents enough to turn a profit on having children, which is what encouraged procreation in preindustrial agricultural societies.
True.
And also interesting; because it’s one of the few forms of work which are absolutely essential to having a society at all. Those essential jobs do tend to be poorly paid and poorly respected; but this one is expected to be done for free, and unless done under specific circumstances may carry opprobrium instead of respect.
Heard a bit today on The Economist’s podcast The Intelligence about dropping birthrates in India, and other countries that we might not expect, including parts of Africa.
Here’s a BBC bit on India:
The Economist bit notes that it correlates with female education even when women are not in the workplace and marriage rates at early ages remain high.
From their transcript.
“But actually, if you look around the world now, over two-thirds of all countries are below replacement rate. We see middle-income countries, Brazil, Iran, Thailand, Turkey, that have been a long way below that rate for a long time. But now poorer countries are joining them as well.
So Sri Lanka has a TFR of 1.3, Tunisia is 1.6, Morocco has just fallen below replacement rate. One of the most striking examples is that Nairobi, that’s the capital of Kenya, may be approaching the replacement rate. So these are not the kinds of places people think about when you think about low fertility.
And you’re seeing these kinds of falls happen, often despite marriage remaining near universal, and often even though few women are working.
So why the change then? Why is this trend coming to poorer countries?
So I think you can look at three really big factors. So first of all, and demographers have emphasized this for a really long time, girls’ education. So when girls go to school, they gain more autonomy in life decisions, fertility falls.
It’s no coincidence that in the 90s, you saw a big surge in girls attending school in India[…]”From The Intelligence from The Economist: Pregnant pause: India’s slumping fertility, Jun 5, 2026
Pregnant pause: India’s slumpi… - The Intelligence from The Economist - Apple Podcasts
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By the time Western countries recognize the need to attract young immigrants from these countries they may be working hard to not let them go anymore.
Thailand oddly enough has a slumping birthrate even though they are NOT as heavily modernized as the “four Asian tigers”.
Something I’d be interested to know is how compared to the general birthrate what the rate is for the subset of women who won’t use oral contraception because their body chemistry/ hormone balance doesn’t tolerate it well. IOW, are declining birthrates primarily due to cultural factors and so non-Pill women are simply motivated to use alternative contraception methods? Or is oral contraception so uniquely convenient and effective that its very existence altered reproduction patterns? Did birth control pills essentially alter the baseline of the human condition from “women have children unless they specifically choose not to” to “women don’t have children unless they specifically choose to”?
Doesn’t seem to be about oral contraceptives specifically. Even nowadays, AFAICT, only about 1/8 of reproductive-age US women use the Pill.
And birthrates are dropping in developing countries where oral contraceptives are much rarer. Declining birthrates seem to be linked with female education and autonomy, not specific contraception technologies.
In fact, those effects were seen long before the Pill existed: the 1800’s saw US fertility rates decline from over seven to less than four children per woman. Remember, the traditional form of pregnancy avoidance, in societies where women had enough education and autonomy to be able to support themselves in other ways than marriage, was simply to remain unmarried.
Good news!
I am less sure. Big drop fast is likely quite problematic.
Less human, less CO2, etc. Of course that doesnt mean I want a die-off or anything. India and Africa until very recently had rather high birthrates. A birthrate of 1.9 is not bad, unless it continues for decades and decades.