"This is extremely concerning!!" says extremely divorced disowned dad about feeemales not breeding enough.
"This is extremely concerning!!" says extremely divorced disowned dad about feeemales not breeding enough.
What's the implied (final) solution to this extremely concerning situation, bucko? 
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not many culprits in this thread, but i feel i must bring this up. often leftists (and i will say, especially men) like to point at "material conditions" as more or less the sole reason for declining birthrates. often going as far to imply that the issue would simply go away (i.e. birthrates would return to what they were 100 odd years ago) if the right economic supports existed, or say, under a communist framework. this is not only a myopic view, it's reactionary and essentialises women basically to the right wing view of being broodmares for men. the reality that many leftists still need education on, is that when women are afforded more reproductive rights, and broadly, the freedom to choose their own path in life, they have less kids. this is a material reality. i won't argue that everyone being poorer isn't a factor in falling birthrates, but it is not the only one, and any future revolutionary project will have to grapple with the issue in more realistic and inventive ways than "improve material conditions and birthrates will return!" it's idealist and wildly misogynistic.
I think declining birth rates are fine as long as people are comfortable and happy and therefore they should have improved material conditions anyway.I think declining birth rates are fine
Even the chuds implicitly acknowledge this when they mention overpopulation. The only reason they care about birth rates falling is their racism
that's fine, just saying it's something future society will have to plan for and figure out. i don't have all the answers it just grinds my gears when men act like "just pay women and they will go back to having kids" is somehow a woke idea or even holds any water at all. not saying you were doing that, and like i said there are thankfully few culprits in this thread but i still have a bad taste in my mouth from the last couple struggle sessions about this.
When people say improve material conditions, I believe most are referring to making birth and raising a child essentially free.
I believe many socialist countries have had state funded childcare, and obviously many have socialized medicine. This allowed women to both work and have children.
Yeah, as women gain more autonomy and reproductive rights, the birthrate will go down, but we should at least make it as easy as possible for those who do want children.
Anecdotally, I know three couples who want to have children, and all of them say they can't because they can't afford it. They all had to move back in with their parents, too. I can't help but feel money plays a major role here because it creates a barrier of entry to those who do want kids.
Then again, anecdotally, to your point, my wife and I can afford children but simply don't want any. We aren't the only ones.
when women are afforded more reproductive rights, and broadly, the freedom to choose their own path in life, they have less kids.
The Soviet Union broadly had low birth rates (positive connotation) due to this, right?
not something i have much knowledge on unfortunately, would love to read a proper Marxist/sociological analysis of the phenomenon though. i have a copy of Women, Family and the Russian Revolution that's high on my list, perhaps it will hit that topic.
Hopefully, sounds rad tbh.
It's also a view that does not match reality. The material conditions are much worse in most nations in the global south and raising kids is more difficult, yet people in these countries are still having lots of children. In fact, one might obverse that the opposite is true, the more wealthier countries and societies are having the least amount of kids. So "improving the material conditions" by giving people access to education, birth control, etc has resulted in less people having children, as you already said.
While I don't know why that is, I'd guess that a clash between traditional patriarchical values and more modern egalitarian values could be at play. Creates a dissonance that leads to long term relationships failing or not even being considered as an option in these societies.
While I don't know why that
I don't know in general, but especially when moving from rural to more industrial/city based work, the incentive to reproduce is different. Traditionally, having children has been seen as beneficial in rural economies because the family is building its labor force, and the family works together as a unit to provide more stability overall. Wage labor in cities is more individualized and doesn't require the family unit to achieve a singular goal together, so children begin to be viewed as a drain rather than a benefit.
Exactly, the priorities of women have changed with their entrance into the professional workforce. Society has not kept up with how this changes the incentives regarding children, has not rectified the fact that having children is detrimental to professional careers for women.
birthrates would return to what they were 100 odd years ago
what is severely misunderstood about "birthrates 100 years ago" or "developing country birthrates" on both the left and right is that it isn't individual economic pressures that guide the explosions in population we see with industrialization. there aren't rural masses that are mass migrating to urban centers anymore. we already have the sanitation improvements that made phenomenal growth possible in those cities. unless you take it all away, kill everyone excess of 1860s numbers, you can't fucking do it again with the same tools!
(i.e. birthrates would return to what they were 100 odd years ago)
I don't disagree with your main point in that "just improve the material conditions it's so easy!!!" is very wrong and there's way too much misogyny thrown around when this topic is brought up, but this part isn't true, I'm pretty sure not a single person on this site wants to go back to a fertility rate of over 3 here (which is what it was in 1924 in the united states), because it would cause massive population overgrowth, the main concern is getting it to (or at least very close to) 2.11 so that the population remains steady. And I do think there's another side to this conversation, in that a lot of people on the left also very much stick their fingers in their ears and insist that dramatic population drops won't cause massive societal problems, because talking about it brings in too many racists and misogynists (bleating about fertility rates has been a racist dogwhistle for decades as well).
For my 2 cents, I don't think this is problem is necessarily insolvable. I think there's 3 main things besides improved economic that could get people to willingly have more kids.
The first is that pregnancy and obviously especially birth just fucking sucks for women and just makes having kids much more disadvantageous for the woman off the jump. Even just the pregnancy can have life changing effects on your body, let alone giving birth. Maybe this is too bazinga tech brained, and is decades if not over a century away, but I think artificial wombs are the obvious solution. It will immediately revolutionize reproductive labor, and equalize the day one burden on women and men. I think a feminist from like the 70s or 80s wrote a book about this one time, right?
The second is that childrearing is still unfair to women. Men still don't take their fair share in reproductive labor even post birth (not to mention home care labor or emotional labor). Additionally, having children (and even not having children!) disadvantages women far more in the work place as they are passed over for promotion due to pregnancy, childbirth, or especially the employer's fear of it. I think this is far more simple to solve, especially for socialist countries, as evidenced by the massive gap between women's participation in STEM between even former soviet-bloc countries and western ones (not that these places are perfect of course). With state-led intervention (idk maybe make all men take "respect women" classes in school would help lol), these problems should be especially solvable.
The last is that there's too much opportunity cost in being a parent. By this I mean you lose out on a lot of freetime becoming a parent compared to being childless, because we don't really raise kids communally anymore. If you're lucky the kid's grandparents will be willing to help, or other close family members. If everyone in society helped with raising kids, this would free up a lot of parent's time, and make being a parent far less unappealing. This is the problem I'm least sure how to deal with, because how do you get people to live communally? I'm very interested to see how Cuba's family code turns out, and I'd love to see something like it implemented in a more industrialized society to see how that changes communities.