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Being a woman
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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When society and biology don't align, we get a birthrate crisis.
Who could've ever predicted making it very hard financially to be young person and making it practically impossible to buy a house and start a family would mean people stop having families /s
Okay, according to wikipedia ~~as it's my favourite source for lazy research~~ in 2024 we had 132 million/year births and it says currently (whatever it means, I should probably read the source book but have no time) we have 63 million deaths per year.
Where is the crisis exactly?
My parents had children they couldn't actually afford, so they spent most of their time at work instead of raising us. Somehow, they expect me to be grateful to them for not being there and for bringing me into slave world.
I wish I hadn't been born.
Same, but I went another way with it. I decided to have kids and be a better parent than them. Since my brother didn't have kids I was able to break the cycle and put better people into the world than my parents did.
If we don't try to put better and smart people out there then we are destined to fulfill Mike Judges prophecy.
I love kids, being a parent was the only "dream" I was really sure of when I was younger. But I can barely afford to support myself, and as a woman in my upper-30s I can see the door of opportunity closing rapidly.
Thankfully, not all is lost. Working in education means I get to do my part to "put better and smart people out there" without having my own kids. It still hurts that I can't have the life I wanted, but at least I have the ability to positively influence future generations.
Adoption can still be an option, maybe?
I don't think that their problem is not being able to reproduce, it's that they don't have enough money to afford life if they have children.
The "door of opportunity closing rapidly" in the upper thirties suggests she's worried she won't be able to afford kids before she'd have trouble with pregnancy.
Which, yeah, adoption or fostering could address part of that - but some people also want to experience the biological part of that process, and it sucks when they don't really get that choice
Idiocracy?
Edit: Idiocracy.
This is the reality for most people. I'm sorry they couldn't spend more time with you.
Yeah but imagine if we lived in a society where they could afford to have to and had time to raise you, that would've been pretty cool eh?
I prefer to focus on reality. Abuse has been normalized and things need to change. Others have it worse than I do. There are more victims every day.
Recently, when I went to the doctor, the nurse was going to take my blood pressure. I told the nurse it was going to be high, because the waiting room had a child having a meltdown, and a guy blasting what to me sounded like porn from his speaker.
The nurse zeroed in on the kid having a meltdown (not the kids fault at all, a five year old getting bloodwork done can be a nightmare, I know it) and this nurse started telling me anytime her kids acted up shed "pop them" right then and there and they behaved. Talked down on parents not doing this, and I just sat there in shock, and then defended the kid.
Another parent in my neighborhood said to me so casually, yeah I hit him (his special needs son) but I gave him a choice, the belt or my hand, he made his choice. DCF(CPS) is involved with the dude, and I am just shocked he's so open about beating his kid.
It's diabolical out there.
Yikes! It is frightening how shameless some people are; proud, even.
When I was young, I decided I probably shouldn't have kids. I figured that if my parents (who I loved and respected at the time) couldn't raise me without so much pain and fear, I'd probably do an even worse job.
When I told my abusive mother this as an adult, she told me I did not actually have that thought. How convenient for her.
We no longer speak. 🥲
What birth rate crisis? It’s only a crisis for capitalism, that wants to expand exponentially, which is unsustainable. For humanity, less people means less impact on the environment allowing the human race to live longer and healthier lives. It would benefit us all having less people on this planet.
I mean I agree that we don't need to keep growing our population. What I'm referring to is the many people my age (Gen z) who cannot, and likely will not be able to raise families ever despite wanting to.
The rate of the demographic collapse in places like South Korea is also guaranteed to cause significant social issues, like too many old people, not enough people to take care of them sort of social issues.
Careful, someone might call you an ecofascist for acknowledging that obvious reality...
It's like clockwork - you can almost set your watch by someone responding like that to pointing out the obvious that human population is straining global resources and making life worse for everyone.
I like to phrase it as this: who is the ecofascist? The person advocating for sustainable human population, or the person telling everyone we need to tighten our belts, give up meat, eschew fossil fuels and personal transportation, and live like a pauper in a cheap cookie-cutter dystopian apartment complex to prevent overconsumption? I would argue it's very much the latter.
Personal ethics aside (not everyone wants to eat meat and burn gas), everyone could live like a modern-day billionaire if there were fewer people. Everyone could have beachfront and slopeside property. Can't do that with 8.3 billion people. Isn't that the goal of fully-automated luxury gay space communism?
I mean, I've always said that the population is a real problem with no good solutions. People are uncomfortable talking about it because there are no good solutions, but that's no reason to pretend it doesn't exist. But people act like even mentioning it is the same as proposing or supporting an unethical solution.
Too many people are too brainwashed into that "do everything right now and fix everything right now because problems cannot be accepted" mentality which I blame on capitalism and the fast-paced modern lifestyle it imposes.
People treat me like I'm the one who's wrong for being okay with a slower pace of life, for being okay for acknowledging problems without insisting on an urgent need to solve them all right now. Sometimes we need to just accept that there are problems, sometimes we need to stew in those problems because nothing can be done about them. But that's so taboo these days that people won't even consider it a possibility, they can't comprehend someone who thinks like that, so they assume that I mean "no, we must solve these problems even though the only solutions would be evil." That's not what I mean at all.
In effect, it becomes taboo to even mention uncomfortable problems with no good solutions. Everyone wants to pretend they just don't exist. That's precisely what allows fascism to sneak in. People want to pretend everything is okay, and they'll crucify the messenger who says "everything is not okay," every time, until it's too late and there are no messengers left, but the things they were trying to warn about have already become the new reality.
Some people get upset when you mention climate change. Some people get upset when you mention overpopulation. But these aren't separate or mutually exclusive problems. They feed on each other, compound on each other in a feedback loop. They crash into each other violently.
Just as the world is struggling to maintain the balance of its delicate ecosystems, we're increasing the load we're placing upon it. That in turn accelerates the demise of those ecosystems.
Land becomes uninhabitable, glaciers melt and rivers dry up, sea levels rise, storms become more violent, coastal areas flood, rains become sporadic and erratic, arable land decreases, swaths of the globe bake. These things destabilize populations, give momentum to dictators, create resource wars, ethnic cleansings, displacements of people, mass migrations. People then coalesce in the most habitable regions, whose infrastructure and resources aren't ready to handle the influx. This creates local pushback and empowers more dictators. All while powerful people accelerate global warming to try and mitigate the symptoms it's causing, instead of addressing the underlying causes.
It's all predictable. Scholars have been writing about this for decades. I remember reading about it in the early tens, long before we crossed the event horizon. People were warning about this every bit as much as they were warning about global warming.
It's something that needs to be discussed. That doesn't mean we need to enforce birth limits, or kill masses of people, or let them die by famine, plague, and war. But throughout history you can see that whenever the population began to strain the resources of the land that contained it, these things happened and the earth found ways to restore some balance.
People don't like to think about that either, because they think we've conquered nature. We haven't. We depend on nature, and we always will. Only now, there's nowhere left to run. No new lands to expand to. No more new frontiers.
And the destruction is unprecedented, existential even. This is the first time we've strained the planet to the point where it itself might collapse.
And yet we still keep carrying on, pretending that's not an issue.
Unless we find a way to colonize an earthlike planet, or a moon that contains water (maybe borrowing some oxygen from a gas giant like Jupiter), then I don't see any ethical solutions to the population issue until the planet takes it into its own hands and we bring about our own extinction.
But even if we move to another planet or moon, isn't that just a new place to exploit? Wouldn't the population just keep growing, until it eventually strains those resources as well? Or would we be bringing life to an otherwise barren wasteland? Is that a moral quandary, or our inescapable destiny? Is that the purpose of life, to expand into new realms, just as the earliest microbes came to earth from far, far away?
Should we harvest iron from mars and use it to build space colonies at various lagrange points? Would that be exploiting the resources of mars, or is it just a dead planet with no claim to what it holds? Regolith from asteroids, hydrogen and oxygen from Jupiter. Are these resources there waiting for us to take hold of, or do they belong to something else? Can an inanimate object like a planet truly have a claim to those things?
Cutting to the core of the question, is it worth it to take advantage of those resources if it means saving the jewel of our solar system, the earth where life abounds (at least for now)?
Smart people stop having kids, let's make a movie about it!
(I know IQ isn't only genetic ofc.)
The birthrate "crisis" is also in large part due women's access to contraception and control over when they have children and how many.
Even in Nordic gay space communist countries where all the needs of mothers are provided by the state, there is a birth rate crisis (met with immigration).
I think many of us uncomfortable with the dawning reality that achieving the replacement rate of humanity requires oppression of women. Bearing children is an enormous pain in the ass and without pressuring and grooming women into it, we don't get to the maintenance target of 2.1 babies per woman.
There are probably ways societies could THEORETICALLY adjust to make child-bearing more emotionally attractive without social coercion, but, fuck, man, society can't even maintain platonic friendships these days, how are we going to figure out how to have every woman average 2.1 babies?
People need to give up on the idea that the replacement rate needs to be met all the time, everywhere.
It is ok, and natural for populations to decrease intermittently.
We have too many people. We can’t find affordable homes for the people we do have. We can’t meet the energy demands of the people today, without borrowing from the well-being of our planet’s future.
People are correctly looking around at the world and deciding they don’t need to be bringing more people into this world as it currently stands.
Our system is simply not set up for declining populations.
I'd like to think the declining birth rates are a natural correction, and that with fewer people, real estate will come down, and tuitition will drop, etc., but I think the problem isn't scare resources, it's wealth inequality.
And if we decided to move back into liveable cities, we'd have plenty of resources.
Our system is not set up for anything other than to make the richest people richer, by exploiting the labour of the rest of the people.
Our real system, the closed system known as planet Earth is not set up for endless growth of a human economy. All populations go through growth and crash cycles. The longer we push off the decline, the harder the crash will be.
No doubt. Media is rich people propaganda 100%. If anyone has any economists speaking against perpetual population growth, let me know.
Taking away abortion rights and forcing women out of education and careers to stay home.
Well, that's how they're trying to do it in the US right now.
Yup. That's exactly the play.
I was hoping for a more liberal-minded solution, but it probably requires radically smaller communal living, more intergenerational. Even if everything's paid for, having two kids is a real sacrifice, but triply so if you're living alone and your grandparents are dead and your parents live an hour away.
Also check out Britt Hartley's video on Christian men. Religion is traditionally the place for women to have babies and be communal and shit but Christianity is so besotted with female oppression that the light is turning on in the minds of Christian women: Christian men are NOT safe partners.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTCMbGBnDh8
And you're absolutely right. The terrifying thing is that toopush women into having babies again--at least by force--you have to strip away 100 years of rights and close every avenue and loophole out to an independent life and an independent mind. Just banning abortion is not enough. You have to close schools, forbid employment, ban loans, etc.
Women, especially you majority-Trump-voting white women: take note.
It gets really frustrating seeing the conversations around falling birthrates. Everyone only wants to talk about the economy and social safety nets while ignoring the real driving cause - women's rights.
This is a manufactured crisis in order to control women.
I think the crisis is as real as any crisis we're currently ignoring. The left can use it to argue for their policies, and the right can use it to argue for theirs. Neither side is willing to let it go as long as it has political utility.
People have more babies when their economic needs are met.
Sure, but not enough. Would it be the worst thing in the world if people could continue the human race without working 120 hours a week? Nope! But it might not be enough to get 2.1.
It might not, but it might, but it also doesn't matter because the birth rate is only important to capitalism
And everyone that lives under capitalism?
It's only a problem in the first place because of the unrealistic expectations capitalists have regarding economic growth.
The more sparse the labour force, the more expensive labour will be.
Therefore, could it not be beneficial for existing members of the labour force if the labour supply were to shrink? Obviously there are other moving parts like some jobs being replaced by LLMs (which are proving to be just as if not more expensive anyway).
My point is that the birth rate isn't actually that important to the average person (ie. Employees, not employers), capitalists would really like us to believe it is, though.
Why would it matter to anyone that doesn't live under capitalism?
Oh, well, in that case, have at it. I just don't know anyone that doesn't personally.
Women having fewer babies isn't an issue in my opinion, that's all
When I refer to the crisis the real crisis part of the crisis is not people who don't want kids not having them, it's people who DO want kids not having them.
Our governments should absolutely do more to support families.
I don’t think the birth rate is ever going to go back to earlier rates because when given the choice, women have less children than before and they give birth to their first children later in life. Women should maintain access to these rights over their own bodies and lives.
Support families and women because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’ll make women have more babies.
Birth rates are plummeting across most of the world, including more equal places. I believe some of the poorest countries continue to have higher birth rates.
That's not to say there's no economic component, but it's clearly more complicated than that.
Yeah, a society that doesn't take into account biology can't possibly last. The hard discussion is that a lot of it is because we, as a modern society, expect certain things now: access to contraception is good, women having equal ability to enter college and employment is good.
But it's unavoidable that when an increasingly large share of the population are getting established in their careers in their late 20s or early 30s, the window of time to date, marry, and start a family is so much shorter than it used to be. Add in increased housing and living costs, and the window gets even smaller. Also, heaven forbid any step in the process takes longer than planned...
It is also important to take it into account in a positive way. In the 'past' women were disqualified for certain jobs because they might get pregnant and that would require giving them leave and that would cost the capitalist machine profits!
Sometimes I wonder if women's lib was only successful because it happened to align with the capitalist desire to double the labor pool. Is that too cynical? Maybe we still would've gotten there otherwise.
It's irritating that you used to be able to run a 2.4 children household on a male breadwinner, and now two incomes is often not enough. We've normalised everyone working and noone able to focus on home and the family.
I guess the idea of the "stay at home dad" didn't take off enough to normalise a single worker after women were able to leave the house.
(I'm aware of the broad strokes hetronormative language here, but it's relevant)
Part of that is women's wages didn't rise to match men's wages.