"How do you convince people to have babies?"

Now that people are getting vaccinated and the media assumes everyone has had a chance to forget all the articles covering how hard it was to try to work from home while children were studying remotely, I guess we are due for some natalism in the form of an article telling us all the measures governments can implement to encourage reproduction.

Not until the very end are alternatives proposed: migration and allowing older people to continue working at least part-time. This is when they finally bother to mention that reducing population can help climate change, and that some of the measures designed at aiding reproduction might actually benefit society in other ways if the benefits are given to everyone. In short, it is basically the standard pro-breeding bullshit, including an interview with a woman who was pressured into having a kid. Can we stop pushing for kids and start looking at a sustainable rather than growth-based economic model, already?

Why the fuck do we need more people? While the pandemic has already claimed a LOT of lives, it's certainly not a big enough chunk of the world's population to worry about human extinction. How about instead of making more goddamn people, we work on fixing the shithole of a planet that people are going to be allowing their kids to inherit?

China's birth rate is going to decline? One of the most densely populated nations in the world will have fewer people? Ohhh say it isn't so!

I can't speak for other countries, but at least in the US, even if you throw all these benefits at people in an effort to make them reproduce, many will still choose not to because more people are figuring out that they don't want kids before having them, or they see the horrible world around them and realize it's not a good world to bring a new life into. Or they just plain can't afford it.

Plus, each of the perks described has its downsides. The subsidized childcare, as evidenced by the interview, may have such a huge waiting list that the people who breed for the perks can't take advantage of them because all the other new parents got to it first. Childcare has to be affordable and available.

Making work more flexible for just parents and wanna-breeders is going to cause issues with the unchilded employees who may well go on strike or report unfair business practices or simply quit their jobs (or intentionally do things to get fired to get unemployment). Allowing women to work from home in order to let them be with their kids more is a bad idea, as evidenced by the number of parents who have learned just how much they hate their kids during pandemic isolation/lockdown. Without a third party to dump their sproggen on to minimize contact with them each day, I'd say people will be much less likely to reproduce or reproduce again.

And looooooool good luck getting men to do anything domestically. If r/breakingmom is any indication of how useless the average man is regarding any sort of household duties (up to and including raising their own kids), you couldn't pay a Duh to do any housework. Maybe it's different in Europe and if so, bully for them! They should be happy they have competent men. A lot of the guys in the US would gladly let the house burn down around them before they'd ever get off their asses and throw water on the flames. Again, see any of the man rant posts on BreakingMom for proof of this. Even if they did pay men to help out in their own homes, they'd just do it half-assed, say, "Og do good!" and get paid for work that their wives will need to redo later.

I feel like the useless men bit is a personal problem masquerading as a social problem. Why is it my, or the government's business, if a woman chooses to reproduce with a loser? Have some standards, some expectations, and if he can't meet them, don't enter into a long-term relationship, and especially don't have a baby with him. This is not a problem for society to compensate for, this is a problem where women need to take responsibility for their own choices. If you don't want to deal with sexism, don't accommodate it in your personal life.

It's like if I married a serial cheater and then expected the government to do things to help me out in that situation, such as giving me funds to hire a private eye to follow him. It sounds ridiculous, right? It sounds exactly the same way to me when women are asking for the government to help in some way when they've married useless man-babies.

The government just wants women to breed to create cannon fodder for the endless wars the GOP so love.

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Passive Aggressive
Master Of Anti-brat
Excuses!