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There is always this uncomfortable undercurrent of misogyny in all these fertility discussions along the lines of "how do we coerce women to have more children?

• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• irrational 2y ago
  Not just misogyny, but racism as well. The overall human population is still on the rise, but that’s primarily happening in Africa.
  • soperj 2y ago
    i think it's only happening in Africa. Every other continent is experiencing a decline
• red016 2y ago
  More likely birth control will filter out anti-natalists in the long term.
  • lotsofpulp 2y ago
    “Anti natalism” is not a genetic trait that gets inherited. Any woman can look at what another woman goes through during pregnancy/childbirth/infant rearing and think they might want to avoid that. Or avoid doing it multiple times.
    • RGamma 2y ago
      OTOH there are some with a great desire to procreate even though it might mean (temporary) hardship or doesn't fit with their socioeconomic status. I know several of those. The ones who shall inherit the earth.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    • shiroiushi 2y ago
      >Any woman can look at what another woman goes through during pregnancy/childbirth/infant rearing and think they might want to avoid that. They can, but then in some cultures, their religious leaders will tell them they need to go through all that, many times, or else their god will be angry with them.
      • lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Yes, I was alluding to that. My greatest concern for my daughter or her kids is the eventual loss of women’s rights simply due to shrinking of population of tribes that support women’s rights and proliferation of tribes that do not.
        • shiroiushi 2y ago
          Yes, I don't have a daughter, but I'm also very concerned about that. It feels like there's an assumption that the tribes that don't support women's rights will adopt that cultural mindset over time, but I'm not so sure it's a good assumption.
    • carlmr 2y ago
      >“Anti natalism” is not a genetic trait that gets inherited. Citation needed. There are many things influenced by genetic traits. So many that I think the burden of proof is that you'd have to show that there's no influence of genetic traits here. Add to this memetic influences, and it's clear evolutionary biology that those that want to produce children will have more offspring and thus at some point antinatalism should be reduced as a portion of society.
      • lotsofpulp 2y ago
        It is possible for genes to influence the desire to birth more children, but it seems apparent to me that humans are capable of sufficiently complex cause and effect analysis that genetic influence would be insufficient to drive this specific decision making process, since it’s not a snap decision and there’s so many opportunities to reverse course. Human beings are the only animal (that I am aware of) that can short circuit the process of reproduction by completely de-linking sex and pregnancy. It is possible that evolution resulted a trait (cognitive plus physical ability to manipulate nature) that ultimately is not conducive to procreation. And it is possible that in a million years, perhaps humans continue to exist because a tribe removes women’s ability to not become pregnant, or humans don’t exist but some other species exists with a different mechanism of reproduction, or humans figure out how to make babies in artificial wombs, or humans start living a lot longer, etc etc.
        • kelipso 2y ago
          More likely social evolution will take care of it long before biological evolution. Muslims have fertility rate of 3.1, for example.
          • lotsofpulp 2y ago
            Yes, that is what I meant with > perhaps humans continue to exist because a tribe removes women’s ability to not become pregnant I guess technically it should be “because a tribe removes women’s ability to not become pregnant, be financially independent, and physically independent/secure”
    • faangguyindia 2y ago
      Desire to have kids is driven by mostly fear, uncertainty, death. This is partly why poor people with little social safety net have most kids. The more safeties exist in a country, the less kids are there. Simple as that.
      • lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Completely wrong in my experience. Poor women have children because they often don’t have the choice not to have children. That is why every single country when women gain rights and financial independence, the total fertility rate plummets. Lower and middle class people in developed countries have fewer kids because they want to provide a home with their kids’ own room, be in good school districts because they are afraid of what happens if their kid doesn’t get into a good college, etc. The fear of not being able to provide a certain minimum quality of life prevents many from having kids. It actually switches back to richer women having more kids because they have more security of owning their home, affording childcare while still being able to save for retirement, having health insurance, etc. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-12/the-rich-are-starting-to-have-more-babies-than-the-poor-again https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-12/the-ri...
    • beeflet 2y ago
      I think that children inherit a lot of their values from their parents, its not all genetics
      • lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Evidently, not for this topic, since outside of a couple cult-ish tribes, total fertility rate dropped precipitously across the globe.
• faangguyindia 2y ago
  My developer friend in Japan who always wanted a family never received much dates and when he did not one commited. So he married a woman from India and now they've 4 kids. It wasn't about money, no one was willing to make this sacrifice for him.
  • shiroiushi 2y ago
    >My developer friend in Japan who always wanted a family never received much dates and when he did not one commited. I had absolutely no trouble getting dates here when I moved here. There must have been something about your friend that just isn't attractive to Japanese women. Is he religious, overweight, or have a beard? You can't expect a person to be equally attractive to any arbitrary group; different cultures have different standards.
    • shiroiushi 2y ago
      Edit: if he put right in his dating app bios "I'm looking for a woman who wants 4 kids!" I can see why he didn't get many responses from Japanese women.
      • carlmr 2y ago
        I mean that's a lot of pressure for anybody if it's already a set number. I'd say it's better to advertise that you're open to having kids, or at most that you want to have kids. Even if you want many kids, your potential partner might want kids, too, but feel pressured to have them right away if you say 4.
      • faangguyindia 2y ago
        He only wanted 1 kid but his wife convinced him to have 4. No one wanted kids, he's slight above average looking japanese man with good personality but whenever he tried to get commitment, he got dumped even if relationship was several years long. He told me it's because they don't want to take risk.
        • 2y ago
• pyuser583 2y ago
  Many countries have decades of explicit anti-natalist policies, including Japan. Was it misogyny when official opinion shapers were demanding people have fewer kids, as some are still doing? Feminists generally supported these efforts.
  • kelipso 2y ago
    This is an important point that's usually under discussed. From the 70s onwards, you had multiple governments with anti-natalist policies from Malthusian fears. You had China with the one child policy for urban dwellers, in India max two children were encouraged if you want to be in polite society, feminism encouraged anti-natalist thinking in almost all countries. It was only relatively recently, maybe last 15 years, that concerns about low fertility rates started being discussed.
• yongjik 2y ago
  That's not really what's happening - in Korea, there are many young people, male and female, who would be willing to have kids if life is easier. They don't because they can't afford a house, or they don't want their kids to go through the brutal education system they suffered themselves. Or they are simply overworked and don't have time to raise kids. So, many "pro-birth" policies are aimed at helping women at work so that they don't have to sacrifice their career. But the government isn't doing much (our current president said people should be "allowed" to work 120 hours per week if they wanted to - and somehow still got elected), and what little policy Korea has is constantly attacked by conservative young men for being "sexist" because it's "feminist propaganda" that victimizes those poor young men. And every year Korea slides further into population collapse.
  • lumost 2y ago
    How much of this is due to housing price increases? It naively seems like rising house prices trigger an arms race in education and productivity among young people to afford housing. If the labor quota is high enough… then nothing else will happen. GDP will rise, but individuals will steadily be sacrificing family, entertainment, and joy.
  • faangguyindia 2y ago
    That's completely false. People will say they want to. But they'll not make necessary sacrifices because it's outside their comfort zone There are poor countries than Korea where survival is way more difficult, yet they've kids. It's not about money or affordability, it never was. Poor people in any culture have more kids. Your comment is not based in reality and comes across as if "if I was millionaire I'd have kids".
    • yongjik 2y ago
      In poorer nations people have more children because, while life is hard, it doesn't get much harder if you have one more kid. You don't have to put your kid to 12 years of education; you don't have to worry about college fund. If you are a subsistence farmer life may actually get easier because a kid is a free labor. That was also reflected in past Korean society where people frequently said the cost of one more kid is just "a spoon and a pair of chopsticks." Very different from modern, industrialized Korea, where the lifetime cost of raising one kid equals multiple years of your salary. Unless you don't care about your kids and think they'll just sustain themselves by working in the rice paddy from age six to seventy.