4 ms·

If you look at the historical birth rate through the 20th century (hard to find data before 1950, but not impossible), the birth rate hovered around 5 children/

If you look at the historical birth rate through the 20th century (hard to find data before 1950, but not impossible), the birth rate hovered around 5 children/woman or 35 children/1000 population. These numbers drop immediately and precipitously starting in 1960, the year "the pill" became publicly available. Lots of people, young and old, take pills every day. People forget and unwanted pregnancies still happen, but a) that's not suggestive that the pill doesn't work or that it isn't responsible for a significant drop in realized fertility (the birth rate data makes that clear), and, b) the medical advances and cultural shift the pill enabled (casual sex is okay, sex outside of marriage is okay, children outside of marriage still pretty undesirable for most people) also paved the path for emergency contraception and the widespread acceptance and availability of abortion (to the extent that we now end the lives of 73 million unborn per year - that's a top-20 country, by population, per year). In summary, is it more complex than "the pill did it"? Yes, but not much more. Birth control (of all types) is responsible the bulk of the reduction in birth rate.

mlrtime 3y ago
Agreed, from everything I've seen the catalyst for this [low birth rates] is birth control and women's rights. Both gave women choices [a good thing]. When they use these choices it creates large demographic shifts. Enough time has passed that 2-earner households are required for a similar QoL, which makes children more expensive.
- lucubratory 3y ago
  Birth control + abortion + IVF are what makes fertility rates a choice for those with the wealth + health to choose them, but like you (I think) I wouldn't actually call the existence of the choice the root cause of declining fertility. Instead, the lack of choice covered up the fact that many people would not choose to have children in our society, which is the root cause of falling fertility rates and a failure of our society. As well, there is structural bias against the choice to have children, because birth control is extremely cheap & accessible compared to IVF - if we imagined a population overall neutral on having children, the higher availability of birth control compared to fertility increasing treatments would bias it towards less children anyway, the same way that a tax on cigarettes leads to less people smoking. Why don't people choose to have children? Part of it is cultural, aggressively anti-child beliefs. A big part of it in my generation is depression about the future - many people feel the future is hopeless because the government is not doing enough about climate change and we seem to be getting closer and closer to a large war. Most of my friends would express that sentiment when asked why they don't want children. A big part of it is financial & health related - a lot of people don't feel comfortable having children unless they are in perfect health & quite wealthy, because of proto-eugenicist ideas that are just accepted as part of our culture. Some of this is individually rational choices: if no one will provide you with appropriate financial & medical support for the full-time, critical-to-society job of raising children, some people accurately believe their standard of living will drop dramatically if they have a(nother) child. All of these issues can be solved. The government can act on climate change and de-escalate tensions rather than preparing for war in order to let people have hope for the future again. The government can make IVF and other fertility increasing treatments free to the end user and otherwise as accessible as possible to lower the barrier to entry as much as possible. The government can choose to compensate people for the critical-to-society job of making & raising children, ensuring that having children is not a financial burden compared to not having children, & structure healthcare + educational outcomes such that people do not feel they and their children's lives will be worse after having a child, or at least that that isn't a true statement in terms of personal standards of living. Western governments choose not to do these things because they don't need to, because they can rely on other countries having widespread lack of choice + poverty & instability to push young people to emigrate to the West & keep Western demographics very healthy. This solution works (at the expense of poorer countries), and while it can't last forever it can last for a very long time from our perspective. Eventually though, countries will need to solve the fundamental problem or accept widespread decreases in wealth & standards of living as population decreases.
KaiserPro 3y ago
> Birth control (of all types) is responsible the bulk of the reduction in birth rate. Birth control is a tool, which requires conscious thought. If you look at the UK: https://www.statista.com/statistics/281981/live-births-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/281981/live-births-in-th... You can clearly see two peaks in the last 40 years. Given that the last peak comes after liberalisation of the morning after pill, it breaks the correlation between availability and birth rate. > end the lives of 73 million unborn per year I'm assuming your joining 48hr contraceptive with <28 week abortion, otherwise those numbers would mean that (I'm assuming the USA) every woman in the USA alive would be having an abortion at least every two years. Given the number of clinics capable of carrying that out, I find that number difficult to prove.
- argiopetech 3y ago
  Two peaks on a downward trend are still a downward trend. That trend is more obvious if you look at population-corrected rates. https://www.statista.com/statistics/281416/birth-rate-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/281416/birth-rate-in-the... 73mil/yr is the world number. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-worldwide https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-world...
  - Jochim 3y ago
    The peak in the 60s occurs a while after the pill was made available in the UK and begins to trend downward before it was made more easily accessible. Contraceptive measures are not an explanation in and of themselves. They provide no information regarding the "why". I'd argue that the reduction is more specifically reflective of people's willingness to have children in times of economic hardship or declining living conditions; perceived or otherwise.
    - argiopetech 3y ago
      The pill was not readily available (absent a reason pregnancy may be harmful to the mother) in the UK until 1967, and not to unmarried women until 1974.
acdha 3y ago
> Yes, but not much more This is only true if you don’t think women having full personhood is “not much”. Cheap, effective contraception came on the market around the same time that women started gaining legal rights, which is also when women were no longer forced into marriage and started to have independent careers of their own, whereas before the main option was motherhood, especially prior to social welfare systems supporting the elderly. It’s not a coincidence that we’re seeing backlash “men’s rights” movements now that a non-trivial fraction of men are learning that they aren’t worth settling for now that social pressure isn’t doing most of the work for them. > to the extent that we now end the lives of 73 million unborn per year This is overstating it considerably: it’s about 900k in the United States and 13M globally.
- argiopetech 3y ago
  It's also not a coincidence that women's happiness has been falling for decades. We won't be alive to see the final results of this experiment in societal change. I'm not sure I'm sad about this. Ref for 73 mil: https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-worldwide https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-world...
  - Jochim 3y ago
    The answer isn't to go back to women requiring a husband. The problem is that companies were allowed to capture all of the value of women's emancipation, to the detriment of everyone. Women joining the workforce should have meant two people working 20 hours per week instead of one person working 40. Instead, two person households are working 80 hours and one person households are struggling to get by.

mlrtime 3y ago

Agreed, from everything I've seen the catalyst for this [low birth rates] is birth control and women's rights. Both gave women choices [a good thing]. When they use these choices it creates large demographic shifts. Enough time has passed that 2-earner households are required for a similar QoL, which makes children more expensive.

lucubratory 3y ago
Birth control + abortion + IVF are what makes fertility rates a choice for those with the wealth + health to choose them, but like you (I think) I wouldn't actually call the existence of the choice the root cause of declining fertility. Instead, the lack of choice covered up the fact that many people would not choose to have children in our society, which is the root cause of falling fertility rates and a failure of our society. As well, there is structural bias against the choice to have children, because birth control is extremely cheap & accessible compared to IVF - if we imagined a population overall neutral on having children, the higher availability of birth control compared to fertility increasing treatments would bias it towards less children anyway, the same way that a tax on cigarettes leads to less people smoking. Why don't people choose to have children? Part of it is cultural, aggressively anti-child beliefs. A big part of it in my generation is depression about the future - many people feel the future is hopeless because the government is not doing enough about climate change and we seem to be getting closer and closer to a large war. Most of my friends would express that sentiment when asked why they don't want children. A big part of it is financial & health related - a lot of people don't feel comfortable having children unless they are in perfect health & quite wealthy, because of proto-eugenicist ideas that are just accepted as part of our culture. Some of this is individually rational choices: if no one will provide you with appropriate financial & medical support for the full-time, critical-to-society job of raising children, some people accurately believe their standard of living will drop dramatically if they have a(nother) child. All of these issues can be solved. The government can act on climate change and de-escalate tensions rather than preparing for war in order to let people have hope for the future again. The government can make IVF and other fertility increasing treatments free to the end user and otherwise as accessible as possible to lower the barrier to entry as much as possible. The government can choose to compensate people for the critical-to-society job of making & raising children, ensuring that having children is not a financial burden compared to not having children, & structure healthcare + educational outcomes such that people do not feel they and their children's lives will be worse after having a child, or at least that that isn't a true statement in terms of personal standards of living. Western governments choose not to do these things because they don't need to, because they can rely on other countries having widespread lack of choice + poverty & instability to push young people to emigrate to the West & keep Western demographics very healthy. This solution works (at the expense of poorer countries), and while it can't last forever it can last for a very long time from our perspective. Eventually though, countries will need to solve the fundamental problem or accept widespread decreases in wealth & standards of living as population decreases.

KaiserPro 3y ago

> Birth control (of all types) is responsible the bulk of the reduction in birth rate. Birth control is a tool, which requires conscious thought. If you look at the UK: https://www.statista.com/statistics/281981/live-births-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/281981/live-births-in-th... You can clearly see two peaks in the last 40 years. Given that the last peak comes after liberalisation of the morning after pill, it breaks the correlation between availability and birth rate. > end the lives of 73 million unborn per year I'm assuming your joining 48hr contraceptive with <28 week abortion, otherwise those numbers would mean that (I'm assuming the USA) every woman in the USA alive would be having an abortion at least every two years. Given the number of clinics capable of carrying that out, I find that number difficult to prove.

argiopetech 3y ago
Two peaks on a downward trend are still a downward trend. That trend is more obvious if you look at population-corrected rates. https://www.statista.com/statistics/281416/birth-rate-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/281416/birth-rate-in-the... 73mil/yr is the world number. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-worldwide https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-world...
- Jochim 3y ago
  The peak in the 60s occurs a while after the pill was made available in the UK and begins to trend downward before it was made more easily accessible. Contraceptive measures are not an explanation in and of themselves. They provide no information regarding the "why". I'd argue that the reduction is more specifically reflective of people's willingness to have children in times of economic hardship or declining living conditions; perceived or otherwise.
  - argiopetech 3y ago
    The pill was not readily available (absent a reason pregnancy may be harmful to the mother) in the UK until 1967, and not to unmarried women until 1974.

acdha 3y ago

> Yes, but not much more This is only true if you don’t think women having full personhood is “not much”. Cheap, effective contraception came on the market around the same time that women started gaining legal rights, which is also when women were no longer forced into marriage and started to have independent careers of their own, whereas before the main option was motherhood, especially prior to social welfare systems supporting the elderly. It’s not a coincidence that we’re seeing backlash “men’s rights” movements now that a non-trivial fraction of men are learning that they aren’t worth settling for now that social pressure isn’t doing most of the work for them. > to the extent that we now end the lives of 73 million unborn per year This is overstating it considerably: it’s about 900k in the United States and 13M globally.

argiopetech 3y ago
It's also not a coincidence that women's happiness has been falling for decades. We won't be alive to see the final results of this experiment in societal change. I'm not sure I'm sad about this. Ref for 73 mil: https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-worldwide https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-world...
- Jochim 3y ago
  The answer isn't to go back to women requiring a husband. The problem is that companies were allowed to capture all of the value of women's emancipation, to the detriment of everyone. Women joining the workforce should have meant two people working 20 hours per week instead of one person working 40. Instead, two person households are working 80 hours and one person households are struggling to get by.