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.
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.
Not surprising at all with how uncertain and how difficult things are these days.
I love my kids so much I chose not to bring them into this fucked up world.
It’ll be weird if the world gets a lot better and in 20 years everyone wants to have geriatric pregnancies
*looks around* That’s a pretty big if.
The reason there are fewer child births in the US since the 90s is mainly the reduction of pregnancies in the demographic “25 and younger”. They didn’t made a conscious choice, looking at their abacus and evaluating the state of the world. They slipped into it and were forced to make it work. Interestingly, they then still had children later in life as well, for more complex and personal reasons.
It seems to me, that if you give woman the choice, they choose not be pregnant at the cost of their career.
Aside from the psychological/sociological side of it, PFAS and microolastics have been shown in some studies to reduce women’s fertility and to mess with sperm. So environmental damage is also poisoning us and destroying our ability to procreate. Go team!
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Great news. Now, time to focus on automating as much of elderly care as possible (and beyond) before it all goes to hell.
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.
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.
Fertility rates and what influences them have been discusses a lot. It’s something influences by a multitude of factors, and each region in the world has a different mix or ratio of factors, so that makes it hard to disentangle. Income, inequality, living cost, childcare cost, housing cost, societal expectations, double income families, commuting, urbanization and environment less suitable for children, pressure to be productive, promotions as status, prioritization of spending money on goods and travel, change in gender roles, dating and marriage changed, more single people, pressure to monitor and invest more time in children, economic instability, the increasing threat of AI and robots taking job … The list continues.
The main problem for modern society is that these things can’t be changed without modifying society itself and/or lots of money is involved. So policy makers are stuck. They’re under pressure to increase fertility rate but only in a way that it doesn’t cost employers money and makes sure that consumption of goods doesn’t drop. They also have to make sure there are enough workers but increasing immigration is problematic. The end result is that they do some token gestures and just let it play out. They probably hope that big tech arrives with their AI and robots to do the jobs and help with elderly care.
US has the cheap solution: higher immigration than most developed countries. I’m sure we’re going to encourage that while we try to figure out how to make having children more appealing. No one would mess that up, right?
They’re under pressure to increase fertility rate but only in a way that it doesn’t cost employers money
That’s what is wild to me. Boiled down to the basics, the quandary we’re facing is having a functional society or a few hundred billionaires; and the billionaires are our priority.
There’s this possible ending in Cyberpunk 2077 that I think speaks to how Billionaires view the world. The leader of the Japanese megacorp Arasaka is arguably the most powerful man in Japan, more-so than even the Japanese emperor. His company’s security forces includes an aircraft carrier, not to mention endless drones and faceless goons equipped with … if not the best technology on the planet, then the second best. And they’ve unlocked the technology of digitising a person’s consciousness and storing it.
The CEO’s son is a bit of a rebel, trying to undermine his father. He eventually gets very hands-on (integral part of the plot that your character witnesses first-hand early in the game) and bumps his father off and takes over Arasaka. And if you play the game a certain way, you reach an ending where the daughter of the CEO assists her dead father in … coopting the son’s body, displacing his consciousness, and ‘reincarnating’ in the son’s body, to continue his centuries of ownership of Arasaka.
This is fiction, but Cyberpunk is all about assuming the worst of our corporate overlords. I don’t think it’s an overreach.
Money is power in this society, and billionaires have the most money. See also climate change what is again the choice between a few hundred billionaires and a livable planet, and the billionaires are winning.
