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Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

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61–70 of 172 posts

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#61

Everything about this thread is weird and woefully online. As an n of 1, we are surrounded by so many births that we just trade baby gear since we are either a handful of months ahead or behind many other parents. Our assumption was that we were in a stealth baby boom. Truly everyone we know has a minimum of one very young child with a high number of parents with between 2 and 4. It certainly runs counter to many onl…

> Our assumption was that we were in a stealth baby boom.

That somehow evaded fertility statistics?

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#62

Everything about this thread is weird and woefully online. As an n of 1, we are surrounded by so many births that we just trade baby gear since we are either a handful of months ahead or behind many other parents. Our assumption was that we were in a stealth baby boom. Truly everyone we know has a minimum of one very young child with a high number of parents with between 2 and 4. It certainly runs counter to many onl…

This still runs contrary to national statistics, which would include these births unless there is a wave of children/births unregisted with the state. There is good public data on this, for example here:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr74/nvsr74-3.pdf

That said, I think there is a perspective issue at play. It may seem like lots of people are having kids. A lot of our friends are too. However, I dint live through the 70s or 40's to have a comparison for what that seemed like when the fertility rate was higher.

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#63
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Oedipalizing them into the world as linguistic subject I don’t think this means what you think it means

I mean that in the Lacanian sense. This is the symbolic Oedipal, not the Freudian familial romance. Reductively, transistion through the Lacanian Oedpial creates the linguistic subject, structuring the unconscious as a language with a relation to the master signifier. Entry into the symbolic register provides the semiotic pathway for linguistic media to be effectuating.

I kind of meant more broadly.

Your notion of “the left” as some sort of… swirl of evil linguistic specters that prey on the good and civilized flesh-and-bone right is better suited to post-OT III Scientology than Lacan. If you want a philosophy that your ideological detractors are literal evil ghosts they have recruiting offices in most major cities.

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#64

Everything about this thread is weird and woefully online. As an n of 1, we are surrounded by so many births that we just trade baby gear since we are either a handful of months ahead or behind many other parents. Our assumption was that we were in a stealth baby boom. Truly everyone we know has a minimum of one very young child with a high number of parents with between 2 and 4. It certainly runs counter to many onl…

After putting it off for many years, many millenials are finally settling down and starting the families that perhaps more traditionally we began 15 years earlier - but outside ones with fertility issues, we are getting on with it. Im in the same boat as you, left leaning with left leaning friends, mostly late 30s and we're all getting on with having or raising young kids at this point - so n=2 from real life observa…

You might be interested in the link I provided in a sibling post.

A larger percentage of births are to older women, but total number of births are still dropping accross all ages.

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#65
post #6

[flagged]

How do these conversion numbers compare to changing demographics via immigration? The problem with this view in my eyes is that you can get minority/interest groups to vote left in a host country by advocating for them, while these same people vote for ethnonationalists in their home country. See: Erdogan polling very well with Turks abroad, Isreal, to name 2.

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#66

Every time this sort of news pops up, I think "why aren't they incentivising and subsidizing fertility treatment"? You want to raise the fertility rate, yes? You could convince an entire population to have more babies the hard way (social or economic pressure). Or literally just let the people who are already trying, but can't for some physiological reason, have one. They already want children, if they're pursuing fe…

Because it encourages society to delay childbirth further. If two groups have kids at 20 and another society has them at 30, over those two generations the first would be twice as large as the second.

We know how to raise the birth rates: give money to men, discourage parental co-habitation.

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#67

Every time this sort of news pops up, I think "why aren't they incentivising and subsidizing fertility treatment"? You want to raise the fertility rate, yes? You could convince an entire population to have more babies the hard way (social or economic pressure). Or literally just let the people who are already trying, but can't for some physiological reason, have one. They already want children, if they're pursuing fe…

It makes sense, but it's probably pretty far down on the list of "what could we put money towards in order to increase birthrate". Could probably get a lot more result for the money by funding efforts to pair people together, make them want to have kids, make them more financially equipped to have kids, etc.

It's fairly obvious that to raise the birthrate, all you have to do is get rid of proper sex education and promote abstinence-only education to teenagers (because it doesn't work), and get rid of social media for them. Prohibit them from buying alcohol but give them plenty of ways to acquire it. Use teenage rebellious nature to socially engineer them getting drunk together. Teenage pregnancy is how to get them.

Of course this is absolutely abhorrent to the left, but the article is discussing the left's lowered birth rates, and giving teenagers, especially women, sex education that works can't be ignored. It's some Handmaiden's Tale shit to dupe teenage women into having kids so they're beholden to a man and their family, so they don't get an opportunity to have their own lives, and are instead merely baby making factories, but this is the future of the human race we're talking about here!

No one would ever admit to this being the plan out loud, but it's pretty obvious if you look at it from a societal standpoint, on the level of Dune or the Foundation series of sci-fi writing. Or Idiocracy.

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#68
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean that in the Lacanian sense. This is the symbolic Oedipal, not the Freudian familial romance. Reductively, transistion through the Lacanian Oedpial creates the linguistic subject, structuring the unconscious as a language with a relation to the master signifier. Entry into the symbolic register provides the semiotic pathway for linguistic media to be effectuating.

I kind of meant more broadly. Your notion of “the left” as some sort of… swirl of evil linguistic specters that prey on the good and civilized flesh-and-bone right is better suited to post-OT III Scientology than Lacan. If you want a philosophy that your ideological detractors are literal evil ghosts they have recruiting offices in most major cities.

No ethical position on the message itself is taken here. Brood parasitism is an ecological niche. The right could do this as well, if they can capture the levers to do so, and as another reply pointed out, perhaps they're getting better at exactly that.

In fact, that's a very real threat if you're the left, since if this mechanism reverses, now you've got a real reproduction problem.

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#69

My take on this as someone who swings left is that desire for children isn’t meaningfully lower among the left, but would-be parents want to provide quality of life that is as good or preferably significantly better than that of their own childhoods. This rolls in several other assumptions, such as reasonable assurance of financial stability, low housing and relationship drama, capacity to take unexpected disaster in…

I'm Russian, my generation was raised in the ruins of socialism when wages often went unpaid for months (if not years) and people had to grow their own veggies. We're now doing better than our parents in every way, yet children still get delayed.
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