What would you think a declining birthrate portends for the United States?

It portends fewer people using/wasting less resources.

Immigration pressures must certainly swamp any possibility of population deficit. As things sit, recent immigrants are already supplanting the “natives” as the bedrock for viable economy in rural America.

Well, it’s a sign that the economic system is not working for most people. Young people don’t see a path to a happy future – never mind the ability to afford to have children. The US doesn’t have anything resembling a guaranteed living wage, and there is no helping hand to assist parents who actually want to raise their children. The US doesn’t even have guaranteed parental leave. And a parent doesn’t have many options when it comes to raising a young child. Not only is there no guaranteed free childcare so parents can get an education or job training or work – child care is absurdly-expensive.

It’s just too expensive to have kids.

I don’t know what this will mean for the economy and the country moving forward. But I’m more interested in dissecting what it means when a society has made it so only the wealthy can have kids, and the rest have no choice whether or not to participate in the rather human activity of having and raising children.

* Did I mention how much it actually costs to give birth in the US? If you’re lucky enough to have health insurance, the average is over $10k. If you don’t have insurance and end up with a complicated birth and c-section, it could approach $70k.

I see it as a positive portent in so many ways from natural resources, pollution, to modern feminism. People are finally realizing it’s a choice to be a parent, not a requirement, and it’s exciting.

^ How is it “feminist” to remove the choice from women to have children if they want to by making it financially-impossible for women to have kids?

As a side note: aren’t you anti-choice? Besides being explicitly anti-feminist, it would seem that someone who is anti-choice would prefer to reduce abortion. Abortion is now the only financially-prudent option for many women. Sounds like you don’t want women to be able to choose to abort or choose to give birth.

Also, environmental destruction and the extraction of natural resources is not tied to population. So a reduction in birth rates will mean nothing.

@hello321 Removing the choice…come on, that sounds really dramatic, but it’s not true. It’s just often a harder road without a support system and we’re talking about it more.

I see it as giving women an option to NOT have children, see how the other half lives. We no longer have to rely on our wombs for a sense of purpose or reproduce mini-me’s to have value to society.

Here’s a paper on the correlation of natural resources and population.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ608199.pdf

^ It’s amazing how “choice” is redefined to mean “lack of choice”. Please review your position here. You’re in favor of choices being made for women and taking agency away from them. That is what you call “feminism”. Fantastic.

Also, take a look at country per-capita environmental impact. The US doesn’t have too many people. It simply uses too many resources. This is built into the economic system. A reduction in birthrate (a slowing of the increase in population) isn’t going to have an effect on the environment. Rather than keeping non-wealthy women from being able to have children, we should be addressing the real cause of environmental collapse.

@hello321 Women can choose far more today than most any period in history, not buying it.

^ Again, I’m not even sure you understand what “choice” and “choose” actually means. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if you are “not buying it”. Economic reality is economic reality.

The point is that women no longer have much choice regarding whether or not they are going to devote themselves to parenthood. I would suggest the falling birthrate directly correlates with the fact that two fulltime incomes are required for an average couple to keep their heads above water. Leaving the treadmill on the slightest excuse for more of us than we care to believe, can be the difference between a life of reasonable comfort or one of impossible, sometimes lifetime struggle to catch up, with the crippling expense of the kid as a bonus.

@stanleybmanly And I’m saying that many of us just don’t want them and are becoming more open about that fact. I just don’t see it as a bad thing, personally.

Ok there’s that too