These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.

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.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    11 months ago

    This, it’s not as though me and my partner don’t want children, it’s that we want children and we don’t want to be the source of their suffering for failing to care for them as well as we should, due to financial hardship.

    A lot of childless people feel real responsibility to non-existent children, and feel like the world keeps pushing them down, making life harder, and making it feel impossible to be one of the people to have their own children.

    • zepheriths@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Of course. Me and my significant other will end up doing the same thing. Both of us are from heavily catholic families but due to many reasons.