493
Trump may soon offer a motherhood medal, an idea popularized in Nazi Germany
(www.motherjones.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
493 points (98.4% liked)
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Governments are always offering weird wacky incentives for women to have children, when the solution is usually patently obvious: you can increase fertility by making it easy and affordable to have children. Stipends for food, paid maternity/paternity leave, free childcare services, affordable housing, and a good economy with an abundance of high-paying jobs.
I mean... there's a reason the baby boom happened in the 50s! But no, that would be socialism!!
I think you're forgetting the marital rape, financial dependence on men, lack of choice, sexist culture and general helplessness and misery of women involved in creating the 'baby boom'.
Were those new problems that didn't exist before the 50s?
Germany has most of these and a low birth rate.
You still need 2 working parents, few people want to balance a career and children. We're not designed for it. And their social help, while good for global standards, amounts to a fraction of the cost of having kids. In prehistory a whole village raised children and people barely worked. Social policies help but we need a global structural change.
Yes, the social support structure is essential. If you have extended family for example; that will help you out a lot with costs and care. Families are small, atomized and fractured today.
But that'd hurt billionaires.
Nooo not the billionaires!
There are also signs that there is an opportunity window that closes for large families.
As families sizes shrink, the children of those families go on to have a family size similar to what they grew up in. This is especially problematic for single child households.
That's how you create a society of responsible adults capable of critical thinking. They want a society of mindless workers used to hardship and deprivation of their rights.
Ehm, on paper I agree, but you've witnessed the generation that came out of the post WW2 baby boom, right?
What were they called?
These fuckers will do anything to invent a flying machine except the proven model that works because they knoooow it gotta be possible with large square blocks of quarried marble tied to huskies. Just need more dogs. Or maybe more marble. mush! Ok add some more marble see if that works.
I posit that if we add a spoiler with 20" rims and a high flow muffler, this block of marble will surely take flight.
Well somebody's about to get added to a Signal chat
IIRC. the US is one in two countries in the entire world that does not offer paid maternity leave.
I'm pretty sure Somalia does not have paid maternity leave
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#By_continent
Somalia does not have a functioning state apparatus to enforce any of its laws in most of the country
Because all the Sommelier babies are wine-drunk.
Honestly, we need to reform our economic system and not continually rely on fertility to solve all of our problems.
I'll add that even those incentives probably won't help, as fertility declines are strongly associated with education levels and money (and women's liberation in particular). Give women options and unsurprisingly, some will choose not to have children.
Fertility and demographic collapse aren't about supporting an economic system. Even if we were a post-scarcity communist utopia women would need to average 2.1 children/woman to maintain the existing population (2.1 isn't growth, it's maintenance - if you wonder why it's slightly higher than the number of people involved with making new people it's because you also have to cover for infertility and mortality among those children) or the same population-level result would occur. The nasty thing about demographic collapse is that it's subtle until it isn't and by that point it's really hard to fix. There is no economic system where people don't need to make more people to have a stable population, at least not unless/until we achieve some kind of immortality.
Ultimately you have three options when it comes to the topic, and they all have downsides:
Get your people to make more people. Downsides: Those new people aren't really contributing to society for a couple of decades, which means it's a long term fix for a problem that might be a big problem in a shorter term than that depending on where we're talking about. Also, there aren't a lot of ethical ways to do this, and the ones that are ethical aren't extremely effective.
Import people from elsewhere. Downside: If you do this too quickly and/or without pushing for assimilation you will irrevocably change if not destroy your culture. This is why places like Japan and South Korea aren't allowing unlimited mass immigration from anywhere people are willing to come from despite being on the cusp of the "until it isn't" part of "subtle until it isn't."
Do nothing, and hope it just fixes itself. Downside: This is essentially a death spiral for your people.
Also the belief the future will be better and more abundant. People need that as possible parents being scared of the future are not having (more) children.
And the society we live in tells us money, expensive status symbols and varying experiences you can brag about are the most important things. Having many children stands in the way of that