Thanks for discussing this. I’m a migrant married to an Australian and privileged on every scale. We had two children in the 1990s. It was phenomenally hard and almost killed me. His family were 8 hours drive away, mine a 24 hour flight. The most wonderful thing was a community crèche with extremely intelligent, caring and creative staff. They were paid a pittance and were being defunded by state and federal governments. The implication is that raising kids is just what happens (it doesn’t, they have developmental needs and loving carers and community is vital). Also that caring for others is not the business of important work and so financial and other support is seen as a safety net for the weak. Decades of neoliberalism has made us believe that money is what matters. Money gives you the power to receive and dominate without being either inclusive or belonging. We do need joy, and play and a deep appreciation for the complexity of life. The economic system, and the emotional underpinnings of extraction and control, have hollowed out our people. The plastic crisis (and all the others) have been made and intensified for decades. To stop them would require a rebuilding of care for the earth and a redistribution of power and wealth. It’s not going to happen while money buys immunity and the ability to ignore or destroy via powerful institutions and beliefs.
So many sides covered so well here, Sarah. And I agree with your conclusion. It's kind of all moot. Fertility is going to be the least of our problems in the coming years. And I also feel (know?) that the universe/God/a higher intelligence is really at play here. We can philosophize and opine about it, but births are just going to continue to decline. The real scary part, I feel, is how society is treating the scapegoat -- primarily women and girls. How will that continue to play out as collapse continues?
Thank you Sarah, a thought-provoking article as ever. A few musings:
#1 - Men's sperm count is on such a steep decline yet I see little in the media about them cutting out drinking or adapting to fertility-boosting behaviours. Why do we keep absolving them of responsibility?
#2 - In the US we see young adults' belief systems start to veer with age, women to the left and men to the right. But this has been challenged in Australia with a stemming of the conservative veer for the first time in recorded history. Does this mean our young folk are staying politically aligned? Or, is there a general alignment in the middle with steeper minorities veering extreme left and right? I would love to dig deeper on this.
#3 - In all the chatter concerning the above, there seems to be only A or B solutions presented. A: Women marry less, have less children, stay single for longer or forever. B: Women sacrifice their belief system and marry into misalignment for the greater good. Alternately, I am again drawn to the uncomfortable third option. C: Mens blissful trajectory and unhealthy social norms are challenged, they take better accountability (as in thought #1), and they put in the work to evolve their social structures and belief systems in order to find healthy relationships and continue civilisation. It's sad that such thinking is utopic.
Besides the larger questions as to why, how many, and if we should have kids?
This whole situation seems to stem back to a lack of joy in people’s lives.
Sex comes easy when people are truly happy, it is a natural end point of connection and joy.
And then if you are lucky to be able to, then come children.
Strip away capitalism, feminism, natalists and pie graphs.
The fact that we can’t even talk to each other anymore is the biggest concern. That men and women do not have a shared vision in mind. That truly brings meaning to their life.
I feel that what Brooks and others are hinting at is this sad fact. The choices we are making as individuals and couples are not making us happy.
Society has structured itself so that joy is elusive.
Does a career making widgets or moving numbers make us happy?
Or does coming home to a safe environment, making good food, and nurturing each other and those souls we are lucky enough to bring into the world bring us true joy and meaning?
And in order to be able to do this, the society we would need to create, can only bring us joy. Through connection, and a pace of life which supports us and the planet.
(Ps France did the right thing, the handmaidens tale is a distinct possibility, and there are some dodgy bros out there 😅✌🏼)
The world is becoming more inhospitable, both socially and environmentally. So many factors are contributing to this phenomenon but these are a few observations of my own.
I’ve spent the last six years working in the policy space on plastics and PFAs. There’s tentative steps to tackle these two issues, and I mean very tentative. But there’s total denial at a gov level when it comes to other endocrine disrupters, like glyphosate. Maybe they’re more worried about what banning things like glyphosate will do to food supply? Don’t want that to sound conspiratorial haha.
Another thing I’ve seen is many friends who’ve chosen to have kids have kids with developmental issues, many more than previous generations. And it’s not a diagnostic phenomenon, these kids are obviously challenged. It’s heart breaking.
Those of us without children are already talking about how we’re noticing our hormones change in our mid 30s (not sure if this is happening to my friends with kids, they don’t talk about how they’re feeling hormonally, some are still trying for more kids). But we think that maybe endocrine disruption many mean an earlier menopause for us. Only time will tell.
Oh and one thing that isn’t being discussed is the fall in population of all wild animals. This isn’t just a human thing.
This is a really incredible post Sarah. Thankyou. So well researched and easy to follow as you pull the various threads together.
I find this oddly reassuring for many of the environmental reasons you mentioned. Although I feel guilty about that as I know many people who are trying very hard to get pregnant.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with the most worrying aspects of this about the growing divide between men and women.
The problem with fertility collapse is that many structures are built on the presumption that the following generations will support the preceding generations. To do that, those generations must be born. Therefore, we could say that generations with fewer children have caused their own problems, which are already being felt in pensions and the number of people employed in less attractive professions.
However, you have given many reasons for fertility collapse, but one reason that springs to mind is that we do not consider the future when it comes to family planning. In fact, very few people seem to have considered the future when marrying or starting a relationship. It seems to be a danger of prosperity that we all assume that it is self-evident that things will continue without our contribution. After all, how can we think pragmatically about having children when the earth is overpopulated?
It seems, and this is a recurring theme, that we lack balance in our decisions. We choose a course of action without considering its implications; we get into situations without considering how to get out of them; and we focus too much on short-term solutions. This hasn't just caused the collapse in fertility. It has been the cause of most of our problems throughout history, and increasingly so in the twentieth century when the results came much sooner than ever before.
It has also come with an increasing detachment from nature and the assumption that we can manipulate nature, even down to creating a super-race via eugenics. We are blissfully ignorant of the working conditions of those who make our shirts, the pittance that people are paid for providing our coffee and tea, or the price that people in “third world” countries have paid for our global economy. Blissfully ignorant, that is, until we feel the crunch.
Thanks Sarah for the effort and detail your discussion goes into.. I am 26, and although this conversation is mostly about the fertility rate issues and so on, I am deeply concerned as well about the divide between men and women in my generation. Sometimes I feel that the women I am surrounded by are such fierce and ruthless fighters and that I struggle to connect on a similar level with any men, which makes me concerned for how unconcerned they are. I have been thinking a lot lately about how our political views or views in general are becoming more polarised and about where this divide will take us. In following the me too movement and teach us consent campaign, or the rise in womens rights in general, it seems like more men feeling more threatened by competition. How can we still fight this battle but maintain allies and how can we (we as in society and structural systems) also support men so they don't conform to radical anti feminist ideas like the andrew tates, whilst also encouraging them to recognise that they are not being oppressed or being discriminated against? My brother in law told me that at his place of employment (in a mine), in some positions they are only hiring women and men see this is discrimination and are complaining. I don't really know how to think about that...
Sarah - thank you so much for this piece, and for pulling together so much data with such cognecy and calmness - a rare gift in the often hysterical and polarised 'fertility' space.
As a psychotherapist, thought-leader and speaker who has been an advocate for childless not by choice women for 13 years through my organisation 'Gateway Women', my TEDx talks, my book, etc, this essay pulls together much that I've been seeing. And echoes my concerns for how conservative forces are weaponising the data around population decline as a way to roll back reproductive rights...
However, what this essay perhaps misses out is that at least 50% of those women who don't have kids wanted them (data is extremely patchy, but between 6%-50% of midlife women without children identify as childfree by choice). For those for whom it wasn't a choice (childless) the biggest reason I'm seeing, amongst the tens of thousands of women I've been in contact with, is that of being childless due to not having a willing or suitable partner during a woman's potentially fertile years... This is a doubly-shamed position for heterosexual women in our pronatalist, patriarchal society, as it positions the woman as 'not being chosen' as either a partner or mother by a man.
Many women choose not to have a child on their own as they know they do not have the resources to bring up a child alone. Those women that do try to have a child on their own through fertility treatments often discover that fertility treatments mostly fail, (something I know that Sarah has personal experience of...) Childrearing was never meant to be a two-person job (the nuclear family) and it's almost impossible as a one-person job (something that many women who have grown up with single mothers not by choice know through personal experience...)
A decade ago, I was one of the 4 original founders of AWOC (Ageing without Children) in the UK and, cusping 60 myself, my Substack 'Gateway Elderwomen' focuses on the issues of those of us who, for whatever reason, find ourselves facing old age without the potential or fantasy of children to care for us as we age. There is often the idea that 'care' is just about intimate care, but it's about so much more - it's about having someone from a younger generation to help you to continue living independently - to help out when your tablet updates and you struggle to get the online banking to work (and there's no phone helpline), it's about someone to give you a lift back from a medical procedure when you're not allowed to drive. The answer to this is COMMUNITY, something I know many of us here are hungry for... but how do we create that in our local areas when so many of us have lost our roots? How do we express our vulnerability when we are so scared of being taken advantage of? There are many of us around the world hungry for this, and some of us who are working out how to make it happen.
Ageing without children is scary, but it's also a fierce opportunity to regenerate the commons and create communities of care around us, ones that will benefit ALL of us, parents + non-parents, and people of all ages. As we move deeper into collapse, community is what we'll all need... and will be drawn to create - the muscle memory of it runs deeper than our current civilisation... Capitalism has, in many places, eviscerated community and has attempted to monetize each aspect of it and sell it back to us - including caring for the vulnerable. It's time to take it back.
Read my Substack essay: "It's not like she's got anything else to do, is it? -
Wonderful to read this discussion and as a 75 yr old who predicted that we might reach a point at which interference with nature willl ensure our demise as a species .Men do appear to have reached their useful role and women seek out babies from gays who exhibit kinder tendencies even though amongst themselves they can be aggressive and bitchy!
I question if the plastic age is upon us when we see a neurodivergence in people who may not have previously been labelled yet needing understanding that it is now a normal part of our survival 🥴
Sarah, I love your writing but please don’t use the term TERF. From what I can understand this is a term that is being directed at women who are fighting to maintain hard won women’s rights which are under serious threat in many western countries. This is something that should concern us all and we shouldn’t be accused of bigotry and hatefulness if we express that concern. Keep on being brave and curious and thoughtful though, in sharing your thoughts you are often inspiring, thank you!
Wow, Sarah, yet again we are en sync, just last week I was watching some video essays about the dire birth rates in South Korea. Several women were interviewed about their thoughts on the issue. Most if not all mentioned that the crazy work culture is too stressful - long work hours, many years of studies, lack of support to raise children. The self-actualisation aspect was also important to women, who knew that once they have kids, they have no time for themselves, as traditionally, women deal with all the domestic tasks. Also, the Korean men are problematic in so many ways - see up skirting issues, bathroom cameras, sex "tape" black mailing, rape culture. Japan has similar issues, I remember reading about the incredible high rate of virgins - they don't even want to have sex, how are they supposed to reproduce.
Apparently, the gen Z have less sex than all other generations, which doesn't make much sense given the freedoms they have these days.
So not only we have physiological fertility decline, we also have women and men opting out of having children or enough children.
In theory, fewer people should be good for the planet. From a social/economic point of view, having fewer children/young adults causes all kinds of problems.
Now, show me a mother who's not overwhelmed. Having, raising children is the hardest thing one can, will do. It takes a toll on one's body and mental wellbeing. That is if you have healthy children, a half-decent partner and have somewhere decent to live. When people can't even afford to rent, when two incomes are needed to have a roof over one's head, when there's an environmental collapse, pandemics and as you well put it, a greater divide between men and women, I don't blame any woman for thinking, knowing that it's too hard and not an enticing prospect. As much as the first world has progressed when it comes to gender roles, the burden/privilege of raising children is still greatly on women, who now don't have a village to support them.
--------------------------
BTW, I was born in Romania in the 70s, my poor mum had to contend with those "interesting times". Interestingly enough, I only have 1 sibling, most of the kids I knew, went to school with came from 2 kid families, on rare occasions, you came across a family with 3 kids. - the oopsies. The largest generation of kids was in the first few years after the abortion ban - 66-69, but in the 70s, the birth rate dropped again. Women were working as many hrs as men (inc on Saturdays), if you were lucky, you lived in a 2 or 3 bedroom apartment (under 60m2). So what the abortion ban accomplished in short: the highest rate of female mortality, a great rate of abandoned children, including lots with birth defects, malnourished children etc. and after a few years of higher birth rate, women/people found a way to have only two offsprings, despite the authoritarian efforts.
Sarah, just chiming in, guess you saw our new governed general , Sam...hope this is a good thing...AND was surprised recently to see Stella Assange spending Easter with the POPE (!?) Which feels a bit molochy, OR she's doing all in her power to free beautiful courageous Julian. Throwing that in. Congrats to all the folk keeping it together. X
I’m baffled that anyone is surprised that people are having fewer kids, given the cost of living and crises surrounding us? Who is in the mood? Seems so obvious that it’s women delivering a natural corrective. Let it correct!
Thanks for discussing this. I’m a migrant married to an Australian and privileged on every scale. We had two children in the 1990s. It was phenomenally hard and almost killed me. His family were 8 hours drive away, mine a 24 hour flight. The most wonderful thing was a community crèche with extremely intelligent, caring and creative staff. They were paid a pittance and were being defunded by state and federal governments. The implication is that raising kids is just what happens (it doesn’t, they have developmental needs and loving carers and community is vital). Also that caring for others is not the business of important work and so financial and other support is seen as a safety net for the weak. Decades of neoliberalism has made us believe that money is what matters. Money gives you the power to receive and dominate without being either inclusive or belonging. We do need joy, and play and a deep appreciation for the complexity of life. The economic system, and the emotional underpinnings of extraction and control, have hollowed out our people. The plastic crisis (and all the others) have been made and intensified for decades. To stop them would require a rebuilding of care for the earth and a redistribution of power and wealth. It’s not going to happen while money buys immunity and the ability to ignore or destroy via powerful institutions and beliefs.
So many sides covered so well here, Sarah. And I agree with your conclusion. It's kind of all moot. Fertility is going to be the least of our problems in the coming years. And I also feel (know?) that the universe/God/a higher intelligence is really at play here. We can philosophize and opine about it, but births are just going to continue to decline. The real scary part, I feel, is how society is treating the scapegoat -- primarily women and girls. How will that continue to play out as collapse continues?
Jeeze Sarah, I love your brain - I get mental whiplash following you! - in the best way :-). All food for thought. xo
Thank you Sarah, a thought-provoking article as ever. A few musings:
#1 - Men's sperm count is on such a steep decline yet I see little in the media about them cutting out drinking or adapting to fertility-boosting behaviours. Why do we keep absolving them of responsibility?
#2 - In the US we see young adults' belief systems start to veer with age, women to the left and men to the right. But this has been challenged in Australia with a stemming of the conservative veer for the first time in recorded history. Does this mean our young folk are staying politically aligned? Or, is there a general alignment in the middle with steeper minorities veering extreme left and right? I would love to dig deeper on this.
#3 - In all the chatter concerning the above, there seems to be only A or B solutions presented. A: Women marry less, have less children, stay single for longer or forever. B: Women sacrifice their belief system and marry into misalignment for the greater good. Alternately, I am again drawn to the uncomfortable third option. C: Mens blissful trajectory and unhealthy social norms are challenged, they take better accountability (as in thought #1), and they put in the work to evolve their social structures and belief systems in order to find healthy relationships and continue civilisation. It's sad that such thinking is utopic.
The first word that comes to mind is
Joy
Where has it gone to?
Besides the larger questions as to why, how many, and if we should have kids?
This whole situation seems to stem back to a lack of joy in people’s lives.
Sex comes easy when people are truly happy, it is a natural end point of connection and joy.
And then if you are lucky to be able to, then come children.
Strip away capitalism, feminism, natalists and pie graphs.
The fact that we can’t even talk to each other anymore is the biggest concern. That men and women do not have a shared vision in mind. That truly brings meaning to their life.
I feel that what Brooks and others are hinting at is this sad fact. The choices we are making as individuals and couples are not making us happy.
Society has structured itself so that joy is elusive.
Does a career making widgets or moving numbers make us happy?
Or does coming home to a safe environment, making good food, and nurturing each other and those souls we are lucky enough to bring into the world bring us true joy and meaning?
And in order to be able to do this, the society we would need to create, can only bring us joy. Through connection, and a pace of life which supports us and the planet.
(Ps France did the right thing, the handmaidens tale is a distinct possibility, and there are some dodgy bros out there 😅✌🏼)
This was a fab read and I love your positive spin on it. Is this just the world correcting itself? I'd like to think so.
The world is becoming more inhospitable, both socially and environmentally. So many factors are contributing to this phenomenon but these are a few observations of my own.
I’ve spent the last six years working in the policy space on plastics and PFAs. There’s tentative steps to tackle these two issues, and I mean very tentative. But there’s total denial at a gov level when it comes to other endocrine disrupters, like glyphosate. Maybe they’re more worried about what banning things like glyphosate will do to food supply? Don’t want that to sound conspiratorial haha.
Another thing I’ve seen is many friends who’ve chosen to have kids have kids with developmental issues, many more than previous generations. And it’s not a diagnostic phenomenon, these kids are obviously challenged. It’s heart breaking.
Those of us without children are already talking about how we’re noticing our hormones change in our mid 30s (not sure if this is happening to my friends with kids, they don’t talk about how they’re feeling hormonally, some are still trying for more kids). But we think that maybe endocrine disruption many mean an earlier menopause for us. Only time will tell.
Oh and one thing that isn’t being discussed is the fall in population of all wild animals. This isn’t just a human thing.
This is a really incredible post Sarah. Thankyou. So well researched and easy to follow as you pull the various threads together.
I find this oddly reassuring for many of the environmental reasons you mentioned. Although I feel guilty about that as I know many people who are trying very hard to get pregnant.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with the most worrying aspects of this about the growing divide between men and women.
The Trad Wife thing blows my mind!
The problem with fertility collapse is that many structures are built on the presumption that the following generations will support the preceding generations. To do that, those generations must be born. Therefore, we could say that generations with fewer children have caused their own problems, which are already being felt in pensions and the number of people employed in less attractive professions.
However, you have given many reasons for fertility collapse, but one reason that springs to mind is that we do not consider the future when it comes to family planning. In fact, very few people seem to have considered the future when marrying or starting a relationship. It seems to be a danger of prosperity that we all assume that it is self-evident that things will continue without our contribution. After all, how can we think pragmatically about having children when the earth is overpopulated?
It seems, and this is a recurring theme, that we lack balance in our decisions. We choose a course of action without considering its implications; we get into situations without considering how to get out of them; and we focus too much on short-term solutions. This hasn't just caused the collapse in fertility. It has been the cause of most of our problems throughout history, and increasingly so in the twentieth century when the results came much sooner than ever before.
It has also come with an increasing detachment from nature and the assumption that we can manipulate nature, even down to creating a super-race via eugenics. We are blissfully ignorant of the working conditions of those who make our shirts, the pittance that people are paid for providing our coffee and tea, or the price that people in “third world” countries have paid for our global economy. Blissfully ignorant, that is, until we feel the crunch.
Thanks Sarah for the effort and detail your discussion goes into.. I am 26, and although this conversation is mostly about the fertility rate issues and so on, I am deeply concerned as well about the divide between men and women in my generation. Sometimes I feel that the women I am surrounded by are such fierce and ruthless fighters and that I struggle to connect on a similar level with any men, which makes me concerned for how unconcerned they are. I have been thinking a lot lately about how our political views or views in general are becoming more polarised and about where this divide will take us. In following the me too movement and teach us consent campaign, or the rise in womens rights in general, it seems like more men feeling more threatened by competition. How can we still fight this battle but maintain allies and how can we (we as in society and structural systems) also support men so they don't conform to radical anti feminist ideas like the andrew tates, whilst also encouraging them to recognise that they are not being oppressed or being discriminated against? My brother in law told me that at his place of employment (in a mine), in some positions they are only hiring women and men see this is discrimination and are complaining. I don't really know how to think about that...
Sarah - thank you so much for this piece, and for pulling together so much data with such cognecy and calmness - a rare gift in the often hysterical and polarised 'fertility' space.
As a psychotherapist, thought-leader and speaker who has been an advocate for childless not by choice women for 13 years through my organisation 'Gateway Women', my TEDx talks, my book, etc, this essay pulls together much that I've been seeing. And echoes my concerns for how conservative forces are weaponising the data around population decline as a way to roll back reproductive rights...
However, what this essay perhaps misses out is that at least 50% of those women who don't have kids wanted them (data is extremely patchy, but between 6%-50% of midlife women without children identify as childfree by choice). For those for whom it wasn't a choice (childless) the biggest reason I'm seeing, amongst the tens of thousands of women I've been in contact with, is that of being childless due to not having a willing or suitable partner during a woman's potentially fertile years... This is a doubly-shamed position for heterosexual women in our pronatalist, patriarchal society, as it positions the woman as 'not being chosen' as either a partner or mother by a man.
Many women choose not to have a child on their own as they know they do not have the resources to bring up a child alone. Those women that do try to have a child on their own through fertility treatments often discover that fertility treatments mostly fail, (something I know that Sarah has personal experience of...) Childrearing was never meant to be a two-person job (the nuclear family) and it's almost impossible as a one-person job (something that many women who have grown up with single mothers not by choice know through personal experience...)
A decade ago, I was one of the 4 original founders of AWOC (Ageing without Children) in the UK and, cusping 60 myself, my Substack 'Gateway Elderwomen' focuses on the issues of those of us who, for whatever reason, find ourselves facing old age without the potential or fantasy of children to care for us as we age. There is often the idea that 'care' is just about intimate care, but it's about so much more - it's about having someone from a younger generation to help you to continue living independently - to help out when your tablet updates and you struggle to get the online banking to work (and there's no phone helpline), it's about someone to give you a lift back from a medical procedure when you're not allowed to drive. The answer to this is COMMUNITY, something I know many of us here are hungry for... but how do we create that in our local areas when so many of us have lost our roots? How do we express our vulnerability when we are so scared of being taken advantage of? There are many of us around the world hungry for this, and some of us who are working out how to make it happen.
Ageing without children is scary, but it's also a fierce opportunity to regenerate the commons and create communities of care around us, ones that will benefit ALL of us, parents + non-parents, and people of all ages. As we move deeper into collapse, community is what we'll all need... and will be drawn to create - the muscle memory of it runs deeper than our current civilisation... Capitalism has, in many places, eviscerated community and has attempted to monetize each aspect of it and sell it back to us - including caring for the vulnerable. It's time to take it back.
Read my Substack essay: "It's not like she's got anything else to do, is it? -
Childless daughters and caregiving":
https://jodyday.substack.com/p/its-not-like-shes-got-anything-else
Watch webinar: Fireside Wisdom with Childless Elderwomen 'Caring for the Caregiver': https://bit.ly/gwe-fwc
Wonderful to read this discussion and as a 75 yr old who predicted that we might reach a point at which interference with nature willl ensure our demise as a species .Men do appear to have reached their useful role and women seek out babies from gays who exhibit kinder tendencies even though amongst themselves they can be aggressive and bitchy!
I question if the plastic age is upon us when we see a neurodivergence in people who may not have previously been labelled yet needing understanding that it is now a normal part of our survival 🥴
Sarah, I love your writing but please don’t use the term TERF. From what I can understand this is a term that is being directed at women who are fighting to maintain hard won women’s rights which are under serious threat in many western countries. This is something that should concern us all and we shouldn’t be accused of bigotry and hatefulness if we express that concern. Keep on being brave and curious and thoughtful though, in sharing your thoughts you are often inspiring, thank you!
Wow, Sarah, yet again we are en sync, just last week I was watching some video essays about the dire birth rates in South Korea. Several women were interviewed about their thoughts on the issue. Most if not all mentioned that the crazy work culture is too stressful - long work hours, many years of studies, lack of support to raise children. The self-actualisation aspect was also important to women, who knew that once they have kids, they have no time for themselves, as traditionally, women deal with all the domestic tasks. Also, the Korean men are problematic in so many ways - see up skirting issues, bathroom cameras, sex "tape" black mailing, rape culture. Japan has similar issues, I remember reading about the incredible high rate of virgins - they don't even want to have sex, how are they supposed to reproduce.
Apparently, the gen Z have less sex than all other generations, which doesn't make much sense given the freedoms they have these days.
So not only we have physiological fertility decline, we also have women and men opting out of having children or enough children.
In theory, fewer people should be good for the planet. From a social/economic point of view, having fewer children/young adults causes all kinds of problems.
Now, show me a mother who's not overwhelmed. Having, raising children is the hardest thing one can, will do. It takes a toll on one's body and mental wellbeing. That is if you have healthy children, a half-decent partner and have somewhere decent to live. When people can't even afford to rent, when two incomes are needed to have a roof over one's head, when there's an environmental collapse, pandemics and as you well put it, a greater divide between men and women, I don't blame any woman for thinking, knowing that it's too hard and not an enticing prospect. As much as the first world has progressed when it comes to gender roles, the burden/privilege of raising children is still greatly on women, who now don't have a village to support them.
--------------------------
BTW, I was born in Romania in the 70s, my poor mum had to contend with those "interesting times". Interestingly enough, I only have 1 sibling, most of the kids I knew, went to school with came from 2 kid families, on rare occasions, you came across a family with 3 kids. - the oopsies. The largest generation of kids was in the first few years after the abortion ban - 66-69, but in the 70s, the birth rate dropped again. Women were working as many hrs as men (inc on Saturdays), if you were lucky, you lived in a 2 or 3 bedroom apartment (under 60m2). So what the abortion ban accomplished in short: the highest rate of female mortality, a great rate of abandoned children, including lots with birth defects, malnourished children etc. and after a few years of higher birth rate, women/people found a way to have only two offsprings, despite the authoritarian efforts.
Sarah, just chiming in, guess you saw our new governed general , Sam...hope this is a good thing...AND was surprised recently to see Stella Assange spending Easter with the POPE (!?) Which feels a bit molochy, OR she's doing all in her power to free beautiful courageous Julian. Throwing that in. Congrats to all the folk keeping it together. X
I’m baffled that anyone is surprised that people are having fewer kids, given the cost of living and crises surrounding us? Who is in the mood? Seems so obvious that it’s women delivering a natural corrective. Let it correct!