I think this is where a lot of modern civilization is falling apart at. If you want population replacement and growth, you actually have to make it advantageous to have children, and at appropriate age for your society and culture. The GOP thinks they can do it by destroying reproductive rights, civil rights, and marriage laws, if they harm women enough they’ll HAVE to be baby makers! Dehumanized baby factories! And even conservative voters are fighting against it, because it’s insane and it’s against our current culture. It has to work for everyone. It would be more intelligent to create free childcare, better pregnancy and birth leave for both parents, and child tax credits. They could use WIC to absorb the cost of having a child and public education sooner with preschool. If people are hopeful their children will have high education access and a stable life they will be a lot more likely to have kids. Being horrified that your children will live in a fascist theocracy and intentionally kept uneducated and poverty stricken, they might actually voluntarily avoid sex to not have kids.
What if we don’t want infinite growth? What about stability? Or (gasp) a population reduction so we don’t destroy the planet. Have less babies. Feed the ones we have. Educate them.
Sure, easing into a deflating population over several hundred years is fine but tanking it and ending up with a society having to support a vastly older population ain’t easy either. Better for governments to provide positive reasons to have children but there’s zero chance of that.
We’re going to run into a crisis within our life time whether we like it or not. Within 10-20 years, possibly longer if legislation somehow hampers it, pretty much the entire working class will be unemployable because machine labor will be cheaper and more readily available than any human. Yes, some people will still have jobs, but not the working class.
Long before we have a crisis of too many elderly for the working to care and provide for, we are going to have a crisis of not enough jobs paying a liveable wage for one, let alone a family, because corporations are going to be able to replace large swathes of their workforces with machines that cost less to maintain per unit than minimum wage, so why would they ever hire a person?
I just have to pont out, If you have to have a job, you are working class. It doesn’t matter if it’s a well-paying automation job, you are still working class.
I have a modest proposal.
Let’s all just skip a generation and no one have kids this time. We can easily start having kids again later with a nice clean slate.
Good idea, right?
There was a theory that roughly 15 years after Roe v Wade crime started decreasing because people who weren’t ready for or didn’t want children could now have an abortion. Many of those kids that were previously born “unwanted” were in poor households and so the kids getting to about 15 years old in those conditions would start getting into trouble and start committing crimes.
For any fuckwit that says “make better decisions then! Use protection!” I’m the result of a broken condom, that shit absolutely happens. I was a “pleasant surprise.” Honestly I wish they’d have just had the abortion.
A debunked theory