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- cross-posted to:
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Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.
But it always comes back to one question: ‘Can we afford it?’
She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one child are already overwhelming - school fees, the school bus, swimming lessons, even going to the GP is expensive.
It was different when Namrata was growing up. “We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do.”
According to a new report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN agency for reproductive rights, Namrata’s situation is becoming a global norm.
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Capitalism needs to choose if it wants everybody to work to exhaustion with slavery wages or if it wants people to have healthy relationships and kids. Can’t have both.
Ah, but there’s the third option, just outlaw contraception and abortions. Capitalism is only incompatible with kids if you give your slaves the ability to choose if and when to have them.
Good
Great news. Now, time to focus on automating as much of elderly care as possible (and beyond) before it all goes to hell.
Life is just too hard, I can’t even get a dog because I’m so busy/exhausted all the time, the thought of caring for a child is just too much. Hard pass, I’ve only got one life and I’d rather live it on my terms.
My wife and I made the same decision. We joke that Octomom had our kids.
8 billion people call Earth home. As another commentor has said, we probably should have half that. Your choice and our choice not to have kids enables that, even if only stupid people reproduce. With how the world is turning out right now, I think we both made the right choice.
Yeah, with what the assholes have done to our trajectory, I think I’m fine leaving the world that’s coming to the stupid people and their stupid kids.
Honestly thats another reason. I know how hard I’ve worked to get a decent life and I can only see it getting harder. It feels like it costs $300/day just to exist, I can’t do that to another person.
But think of the economy!
I know this is in jest, but it’s definitely something the shitheads would push. And my answer goes thusly:
No. The Economy hasn’t done a damn thing for me, and it’s done less for my wife. I’m treading water, unable to afford a house or a car on what was once an unfathomable sum of money when I was younger. It has done less for my wife, who relies on my job to keep a roof over her head. You want us to have kids? Reassure us that our kids will have a better life, and stop vampire-squidding us and sucking down every loose dollar.
Not an English native speaker so this is probably on me, but I find it weird to call it a fertility decline. Like, fertility of people is probably going down but the reasons people don’t have more kids are purely economical, as the article also says.
For me a better descriptor would be something like birthing rate or whatever. Fertility decline sounds to me like people are really at it like rabbits and just cannot get any pregnancies.
Not on you. Your evaluation and understanding are indeed correct.
No, you’re correct, most articles of this type define fertility as “births/women” - whether the outcome is by choice or not. However, there is also a decline in what we might refer to as biological fertility (or “fecundity”).
I love my kids so much I chose not to bring them into this fucked up world.
ive been saying that exact sentance for my entire adult life. lol.
It’ll be weird if the world gets a lot better and in 20 years everyone wants to have geriatric pregnancies
Plenty of kids in need of adoption.
*looks around* That’s a pretty big if.
i believe in us 🥺
We do need to reduce the human population. About 4-5 billion would be ideal.
On the negative side, we don’t know how to handle this situation of declining population. The entire human history is one of non-stop growth interrupted only by catastrophic pandemics, which were the only way the population dropped so far.You’re right, there is no economic system for dealing with this.
We are royally screwed. Global warming will only exacerbate the population drop, both through weather related deaths and less willingness to produce children.
If you’re young, I’d suggest you learn to grow food. Not even joking.
Periodic reminder that overpopulation (which is why, I’m assuming, you say we need to reduce the population; I apologize if that assumption is erroneous) is an ecofascist, classist, and racist myth. It’s convenient for systems such as capitalism and conveniently penalizes “Third World” countries but does not address the real causes of the ills that overpopulation purports to solve.
https://greenisthenewblack.com/opinion-the-overpopulation-myth-example-ecofascism/
I disagree with the conclusion of the article, although the contents do touch on some important points.
The article itself claims there aren’t enough resources for everyone to live a “developed country lifestyle”, which is connected to higher emissions per capita.
One way forward is to reduce the consumption. But the other way is to reduce the population so there is enough for everyone to be at least somewhat wasteful. Imo, the best would be both.A lot of things happen in the developed world that serve no purpose besides economics. Phones could be made to last twice as long, and aren’t getting dramatically better from one generation to the next. We could build houses to last a century instead of 50 years for little more cash. We could make clothes that last longer, but then fashion would have to take a back seat to function. We have much more efficient lighting, but they are also designed to break more often than they could so more light bulbs can be sold. Cars could be made more efficient, and non-car transportation could be incentivized. We could fix food supply/distribution issues so there is less food waste. We could use more efficient, non-fossil methods of heating and cooling our homes, which should also be better insulated so they also cost less to heat or cool.
We may not be able to have 8 billion people living in the lap of luxury, but we could have 8 billion people with a place to live, food to eat, access to a green space to enjoy the outdoors, and access to the rest of the world through modern communications.
Good. We elect fucking fascists and let people murder our world, we as a race deserve to die out.
When business is the world’s first priority, why does it come as a surprise that people don’t feel like bringing an innocent life into the orphan crushing machine?
I was intrigued to see this issue written about in an international context, as usually, the articles I see on this are US-centric and from right-wing sources who really, really want the poors to birth the next generation of exploitable labor and inexplicably ignore that the people they want to birth and parent these children are themselves being exploited and exceedingly impoverished too.
I would never subject a child to the same life I have had to live
It’s abuse
i think there is a difference between low fertility rate and low birth rate. Its not like these people CANT have children, they are CHOOSING not to.
Loss of biodiversity, climate change, more extreme weather events, ocean acidification, Gulfstream collapse, microplastics in literally everything, the rise of fascism, constant wars/oppression/genocides, everything being politicized and radicalized, capitalistic exploitation of consumers in every market, the mega-rich using their money to cause misery for profits, even more than I can think of right now.
Want more reasons why I don’t want to raise my children into the world we are heading towards?
One could argue that the Internet and how we are now so interconnected is the cause of a lot of these things, but I think the biggest reason for it all stems from a lack of compassion. Compassion for fellow humans, compassion for fellow living creatures, compassion for the planet at live on.
Like, I hate to talk shit about capitalism, because it is much more efficient at improving people’s lives, but basically every issue you describe is a result of capitalism.
Population increase is only important to employers.
It’s important to everyone, including you. As the population ages, and fewer young people move into the economy, the tax base shrinks. Who is going to pay for government?
Also, employers will have to compete for the remaining workers, raising wages. That’s good to a point, and then everything becomes too expensive, now you’re in a depression. It’s an economic death spiral.
Taxing the rich only works to a point. Their wealth is mostly in the global stock markets, which will eventually crash. As well, the value of those publicly traded companies will nosedive as fewer and fewer workers are available to produce the goods and services.
We’re facing the global equivalent of the fall of Rome. Nation states will splinter into smaller and smaller, self-dependent groups and the riches we enjoy today will be memories of a better time. If you want a contemporary version of that, look at China restricting rare earths. That’s impacting about every other country on Earth. Now imagine international trade utterly collapsing.
Sure but you can’t have an endless increase in population. Whatever the problems of declining or stabilizing the population are, they need to be tackled, not ignored, yes. You can’t fix them by saying just keep the pyramid scheme going.
The real problem is more like how many workers for each retired person. So there are other ways to fix that. Personally I’m down with working more years so that people don’t have to have kids if they don’t want to. I can’t imagine forcing people to have children.
And you know what? Employers having to face a tight labor market doesn’t sound like it’s worse than employees having to find scarce jobs.
Never proposed that growth should continue, indeed it cannot. But depopulation is going to steamroll us in the next century and I see no way around it.
Humanity desperately needs to move away from capitalism, if it wants any chance of survival. Either that or we install a Universal base income system.
Neither of those proposals answer the issues I brought up. But they’re very good for lemmy upvotes!
No its important for wellfare video
I look at long term trends where the global population peaks in a few decades then heads down all too quickly, and find it important to act to stabilize that at a level a bit below here we are now
It will collapse because we don’t regulate intake. Look at population collapse for rabbits as an example. We’re overconsuming and need to regulate now.
The problem is we’re over-consuming now, over-populating now, but will feel the effects of lower birth rates in 50+ years. There’s extremely delayed feedback on population trends, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
Even conservatives sometime start from a point of truth. The problem is their solution is to turn back rights for women, opportunities for women. Technically correct, if you have no morals or empathy.
For the rest of us concerned about this possibility, society needs to change a lot to remove obstacles from people who do choose to have children. And this would take a couple generations to take effect so we need to start now, to stabilize the dropping population in 50-100 years
Maybe life shouldn’t be that expensive (food/shelter), and IVF programs be free.
Damn dirty communist out here demanding
Checks notes
Affordable living and healthcare
Just despicable!
Yeah, what are those damn commies going to demand next, human rights?
The gall
🤣✊
