These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
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If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.
In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.
nods for me, my depression comes out of having an invisible disability that most people think is a joke excuse that arises out of being on too much tiktok or something. I don’t know if I would be sad if society actually valued me for the unique qualities of my brain…. but it doesn’t and there is no way I would want to give a kid the experience I have had trying to push through that. It has been awful honestly and I don’t understand what possible point there could be to it OTHER than to scream in my ear that I shouldn’t pass my mind on to another human.
Maybe I will get a dream job one day that accommodates me and lets my strengths come out…. but statistically it’s just not that likely. Why would I knowingly set a kid up with such a shitty diceroll?