Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.
But it always comes back to one question: ‘Can we afford it?’
She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one child are already overwhelming - school fees, the school bus, swimming lessons, even going to the GP is expensive.
It was different when Namrata was growing up. “We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do.”
According to a new report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN agency for reproductive rights, Namrata’s situation is becoming a global norm.
Capitalism needs to choose if it wants everybody to work to exhaustion with slavery wages or if it wants people to have healthy relationships and kids. Can’t have both.
Ah, but there’s the third option, just outlaw contraception and abortions. Capitalism is only incompatible with kids if you give your slaves the ability to choose if and when to have them.
Good
Great news. Now, time to focus on automating as much of elderly care as possible (and beyond) before it all goes to hell.
The reason there are fewer child births in the US since the 90s is mainly the reduction of pregnancies in the demographic “25 and younger”. They didn’t made a conscious choice, looking at their abacus and evaluating the state of the world. They slipped into it and were forced to make it work. Interestingly, they then still had children later in life as well, for more complex and personal reasons.
It seems to me, that if you give woman the choice, they choose not be pregnant at the cost of their career.
This warms my heart. A rare bit of good news these days.
Good
Ditto
I love my kids so much I chose not to bring them into this fucked up world.
ive been saying that exact sentance for my entire adult life. lol.
It’ll be weird if the world gets a lot better and in 20 years everyone wants to have geriatric pregnancies
Plenty of kids in need of adoption.
*looks around* That’s a pretty big if.
i believe in us 🥺
Life is just too hard, I can’t even get a dog because I’m so busy/exhausted all the time, the thought of caring for a child is just too much. Hard pass, I’ve only got one life and I’d rather live it on my terms.
My wife and I made the same decision. We joke that Octomom had our kids.
8 billion people call Earth home. As another commentor has said, we probably should have half that. Your choice and our choice not to have kids enables that, even if only stupid people reproduce. With how the world is turning out right now, I think we both made the right choice.
Yeah, with what the assholes have done to our trajectory, I think I’m fine leaving the world that’s coming to the stupid people and their stupid kids.
Honestly thats another reason. I know how hard I’ve worked to get a decent life and I can only see it getting harder. It feels like it costs $300/day just to exist, I can’t do that to another person.
But think of the economy!
I know this is in jest, but it’s definitely something the shitheads would push. And my answer goes thusly:
No. The Economy hasn’t done a damn thing for me, and it’s done less for my wife. I’m treading water, unable to afford a house or a car on what was once an unfathomable sum of money when I was younger. It has done less for my wife, who relies on my job to keep a roof over her head. You want us to have kids? Reassure us that our kids will have a better life, and stop vampire-squidding us and sucking down every loose dollar.
Not an English native speaker so this is probably on me, but I find it weird to call it a fertility decline. Like, fertility of people is probably going down but the reasons people don’t have more kids are purely economical, as the article also says.
For me a better descriptor would be something like birthing rate or whatever. Fertility decline sounds to me like people are really at it like rabbits and just cannot get any pregnancies.
Not on you. Your evaluation and understanding are indeed correct.
No, you’re correct, most articles of this type define fertility as “births/women” - whether the outcome is by choice or not. However, there is also a decline in what we might refer to as biological fertility (or “fecundity”).
Good. We elect fucking fascists and let people murder our world, we as a race deserve to die out.
We do need to reduce the human population. About 4-5 billion would be ideal.
On the negative side, we don’t know how to handle this situation of declining population. The entire human history is one of non-stop growth interrupted only by catastrophic pandemics, which were the only way the population dropped so far.You’re right, there is no economic system for dealing with this.
We are royally screwed. Global warming will only exacerbate the population drop, both through weather related deaths and less willingness to produce children.
If you’re young, I’d suggest you learn to grow food. Not even joking.
Periodic reminder that overpopulation (which is why, I’m assuming, you say we need to reduce the population; I apologize if that assumption is erroneous) is an ecofascist, classist, and racist myth. It’s convenient for systems such as capitalism and conveniently penalizes “Third World” countries but does not address the real causes of the ills that overpopulation purports to solve.
https://greenisthenewblack.com/opinion-the-overpopulation-myth-example-ecofascism/
I disagree with the conclusion of the article, although the contents do touch on some important points.
The article itself claims there aren’t enough resources for everyone to live a “developed country lifestyle”, which is connected to higher emissions per capita.
One way forward is to reduce the consumption. But the other way is to reduce the population so there is enough for everyone to be at least somewhat wasteful. Imo, the best would be both.A lot of things happen in the developed world that serve no purpose besides economics. Phones could be made to last twice as long, and aren’t getting dramatically better from one generation to the next. We could build houses to last a century instead of 50 years for little more cash. We could make clothes that last longer, but then fashion would have to take a back seat to function. We have much more efficient lighting, but they are also designed to break more often than they could so more light bulbs can be sold. Cars could be made more efficient, and non-car transportation could be incentivized. We could fix food supply/distribution issues so there is less food waste. We could use more efficient, non-fossil methods of heating and cooling our homes, which should also be better insulated so they also cost less to heat or cool.
We may not be able to have 8 billion people living in the lap of luxury, but we could have 8 billion people with a place to live, food to eat, access to a green space to enjoy the outdoors, and access to the rest of the world through modern communications.
When business is the world’s first priority, why does it come as a surprise that people don’t feel like bringing an innocent life into the orphan crushing machine?
I would never subject a child to the same life I have had to live
It’s abuse
I was intrigued to see this issue written about in an international context, as usually, the articles I see on this are US-centric and from right-wing sources who really, really want the poors to birth the next generation of exploitable labor and inexplicably ignore that the people they want to birth and parent these children are themselves being exploited and exceedingly impoverished too.
i think there is a difference between low fertility rate and low birth rate. Its not like these people CANT have children, they are CHOOSING not to.
