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.
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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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
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.
Great news. Now, time to focus on automating as much of elderly care as possible (and beyond) before it all goes to hell.
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.
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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.
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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.
Loss of biodiversity, climate change, more extreme weather events, ocean acidification, Gulfstream collapse, microplastics in literally everything, the rise of fascism, constant wars/oppression/genocides, everything being politicized and radicalized, capitalistic exploitation of consumers in every market, the mega-rich using their money to cause misery for profits, even more than I can think of right now.
Want more reasons why I don't want to raise my children into the world we are heading towards?
One could argue that the Internet and how we are now so interconnected is the cause of a lot of these things, but I think the biggest reason for it all stems from a lack of compassion. Compassion for fellow humans, compassion for fellow living creatures, compassion for the planet at live on.
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Maybe life shouldn’t be that expensive (food/shelter), and IVF programs be free.
Damn dirty communist out here demanding
Checks notes
Affordable living and healthcare
Just despicable!
Yeah, what are those damn commies going to demand next, human rights?
The gall
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Fuck yeah. I got my nads snipped
Fucking good.
It's fine if rich people's children suffer retribution for the world their parents helped create.
Think about all the lineages of regular people that don't get to carry on because it's too expensive.
They're literally breeding us out of the gene pool.
Their kids are in for a rude awakening.
Aside from the psychological/sociological side of it, PFAS and microolastics have been shown in some studies to reduce women's fertility and to mess with sperm. So environmental damage is also poisoning us and destroying our ability to procreate. Go team!
The rich will fix it by putting out disinformation campaigns telling you it's all fake.
That is one smug-looking baby.
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