ot. no more babies?

[scaredyclassic]

one of my friend’s kids told me there was no way in hell under any circumstances she would ever have kids. She was saying this in a way that kind of persuaded me. Her view is that we are all fucked, it’s going down in herlifetime, that there’s no way any sane person would bring a kid into the shitstorm we’ve created.

I’d chalk this up to the musings of a young adult, not dissimilar to mine in substance when I was young, but perhaps a bit more insistent in intentsity and commitment. i read this is a bit of a trend among the young uns.

are they going to snap out of it and breed like humans tend to do, and continue to buy houses and washing machines and such, or will a giant chunk of the youth opt out of the dna spreading game?

personally, I kind of see their side, especially with the poor air quality lately, but the urge to procreate is strong…

[barnaby33]

Any 20 something woman should be taken with more than a grain of salt when she says, “no babies.” If she’s 35 and says that, then I’d take her seriously.

That being said the trend is for less kids and less of us to have them. I mean even Latinos are having less kids and they were/are the engine of population growth in CA.
Josh

[spdrun]

We should have a one-child policy here in the US, enforced through lack of any tax breaks beyond child #1. Enough to satisfy people’s psychological needs, but also doing our part to depopulate the planet to sustainable levels. Georgia Guidestones are right … goal should be 500 million.

[an]

She’s self selecting to remove herself from the gene pool.

[sunny88]

Controversy has long surrounded China’s one-child policy, not only because it was a radical intervention by government in the reproductive lives of citizens but also because of how it was enforced and because of some of its unintended consequences. Although some enforcement methods were mild, such as providing contraceptives and offering incentives for compliance, millions of Chinese had to endure stricter methods, such as forced sterilizations and forced abortions. Long-term unintended consequences of the policy included a decline in the number of females in China (in 2016 there were 33.59 million more men than women), a population that was aging too rapidly, and a shrinking workforce.

[svelte]

Stumbled across this today. I know it can be folly to predict something 80 years out, but the long term trend lines point to the world population falling by 2100.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2020/07/17/world-population-expected-to-peak-in-just-44-years-as-fertility-rates-sink/?sh=4371a54c372a

Japan 128M falling to 53M
China 1.4B falling to 732M
Spain 43M falling to 22M
US 328M going up to 364M (2062) then falling to 286M

“Falling fertility rates are mostly associated with increasing education and work availability to women and access to contraception. In other words, over the course of the last half-century women able to and choosing to have fewer children.”

[Hatfield]

Historically, the reasons for having lots of kids were 1) you need more hands to work the farm, and 2) most of those kids won’t live to adulthood.

Thanks to urbanization and modern medicine, those two things are no longer true in the developed wolrd and much of the developing world. Still, we’ve far exceeded the carrying capacity of our planet, yet we have a world economy utterly dependent on consumption and expansion.

[barnaby33]

My firsthand experience says this is wrong. Latin American countries experienced massive population growth in the last hundred years and most people aren’t farmers. There isn’t enough arable land in most Latin countries that isn’t already occupied. Infant morality rates have fallen pretty predictably as well.

People like to fuck. They hate wearing condoms. They probably always will. Education (of women) seems to be the key to lowering birthrates and is probably the single most important aspect of our near term future. Forget the US, birthrates here are falling and have been for most of my life.

[svelte]

While rates had already been dropping, the pill helped that trend line become a steeper decline.

I believe the pill began widespread use in 1959.

[img_assist|nid=27283|title=Birth Rate By Year|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=466|height=250]

[Author]

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