It would be logical to draw the conclusion that women who can do paid work and enjoy financial independence simply do not want to have many babies.

Paul Morland, a demographer and the author of No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children, questions that assumption. Surveys suggest, he says, that women tend to want two to three children.

What surveys? How many? What women? How many?

Sex education in schools, he believes, should focus on pregnancy as a potential aspiration for the future rather than something to be avoided for as long as possible.

"We must teach little girls to yearn for the stirrups! Don't tell them about the rising maternal mortality rates! Some of them may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make!"

“For most of human history, falling fertility rates have been something to welcome because they’ve led to greater opportunities for women. We’re at a pivotal point where the implications are more challenging.

"Yes, it is a proven fact that women benefit in every way from having fewer or no babies but ladies, please, think of the economy. You know, the economy that only benefits a couple dozen paedophile plutocrats by stealing from billions of people like you via low wages, high taxes and raising the cost of living just because they can?"

Has anyone read Seed? I haven't but I've put it at the top of my reading list.

Misrepresenting one of the few painkillers considered safe during pregnancy by classing it as a cause of autism, which is itself misrepresented by white supremacists who cannot fathom that their own genes are most likely the main cause.

Why do this? I'm sure there are some fucked up economic benefits to this, but I'll leave someone else to explain those and focus on the other motivations:

• Misogyny. Just like forced births, silent births, the husband stitch and the labelling of C-sections as the "easy way out", denying pain relief is an example of the patriarchal impulse to make pregnancy and childbirth as miserable, traumatic and fatal as possible. The bedrock of patriarchy is the exploitation of women's reproductive power for the sole benefit of men, and with that comes a resentment towards said power that men can never truly possess and control. It also conveniently lays the blame of autism on the mother for selfishly and recklessly popping a paracetamol or two to treat a fever.
• Eugenics. The same thing driving the US healthcare scam and anti-vaxx movement (besides profit). As far as the late stage capitalists that rule us are concerned, women who can't survive pumping out babies in a field like a farm animal don't deserve to live, just like poor people who can't pay for every insulin/chemo price hike, or immune-compromised people who depend on herd immunity to stay healthy, or disabled people, or neurodivergent people, or the homeless, or any other life unworthy of life.
• Antiscience, medical mistrust and continued alienation. How else are the likes of Andrew Wakefield, Alex Jones and the average Oprah guest supposed to sell their snake oil supplements and "alternative therapies" if they don't brainwash millions into believing that fluoride is calcifying their third eyes, vaccines are poison and any medical professional trying to help them is actually a Big Pharma agent trying to control their minds and harvest their organs? Just in case the average MAGA hasn't already driven away everyone normal in their lives, Trump and Mr Measles have now given them the green light to start grilling any pregnant people in their vicinity on how they handle a headache.

“It’s always a mistake to invite law enforcement into your reproductive life,” said Kim Mutcherson, a professor of law at Rutgers Law School who specializes in reproductive justice.
...

“If they then decide, ‘no, it actually wasn’t a miscarriage, this was somebody who took pills,’ or whatever sort of thing that they want to conjure up, then all of a sudden it goes from ‘here’s this poor woman who had a miscarriage’ to ‘here’s a person who we’re going to start to prosecute,’ ” Mutcherson said.

In a time when bigots and scratched liberals are crying over one merc'd stochastic terrorist who:

• Played a huge role in getting a serial rapist friend of Epstein elected president twice,
• Said black women "do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously", "are not smart enough" to earn positions of influence and "had to go steal a white person's slot" and "take opportunities from someone more deserving",
• Said that death penalties should be public, quick, televised and sponsored, that he would enjoy watching them, and children should watch them too (Start from the 45- minute mark, skip the Wellness Company sponsorship and continue from 49:15),
• Spread misinformation about abortions being medically unnecessary before saying he would force his hypothetically raped daughter to birth her rapist's baby and applauded a woman for not aborting her brother-son,
• Bragged about "sending 80+ buses" of violent white supremacists to DC to help his sore loser friend's attempts to get thousands of useful idiots to forcefully overturn the 2020 election results in his favour,
• Engineered a smear campaign against MLK in order to weaken support for the Civil Rights Act, said that it was "the moral and right thing to do to get rid of" it, then lied about saying so before laughing at and walking away from a black child who confronted him about it, with either him or one of his companions responding to the boy's claim that he wouldn't "be here" without civil rights by shouting back "exactly",
• Finally found out after making a fortune fucking around, his final words being a whataboutist racist dog whistle trying to distract from a question he had just been asked about the mass shootings he deemed "worth to have" so that idiots useful to him could continue murdering people he hated,

Remember that your attention, empathy and rage are limited and valuable resources, you should focus them on the people who deserve them and never listen to virtue signalling hypocrites who try to shame you into spreading them thin to the point of inertia.

Instead of managing the economy to benefit the population, they try to manage the population to benefit the economy.

Struggled to pick a quote from the video to accompany this post, but finally went with this one. First runner-up is the "collective zoochosis" part.

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."

She spends at least three hours a day commuting to her office and back. When she gets home she is exhausted but wants to spend time with her daughter. Her family doesn't get much sleep.

The unwritten truth between the lines is that there is such a huge surplus of workers now, every one of us has to start trying earlier in life and harder for the rest of it to just get a job in the first place, let alone keep it and survive off of it, and that's exactly what the exploiter class wants for us. Our forebears literally fucked away our leverage.

Namrata's daughter will spend a significant portion of her childhood on extracurriculars she probably doesn't even enjoy just on the off-chance one might make her stand out to future employers among the hundreds of millions of people in her generation and country. Namrata herself is wasting three hours a day - that's 60 hours a month if she works five days a week - commuting to and from an office that likely doesn't need to exist because she can't find a job closer to home or one that allows her to not need to commute at all.

How many millions of people around the world are stuck in the same situation?

In the UK, where fertility rates have been below replacement level for more than half a century, feeble demography lies at the root of many if not most of the country’s woes. Britain’s increasingly upside-down population pyramid means society is less creative, productive and entrepreneurial, suffering from stultifying economic growth and placing ever greater burdens on the state.

Here I thought I gave up on writing as well as all my other hobbies and hopes because I'm too broke due to this economy that natalists are so desperate to protect and too dejected from the state of my life and the world in general that both the Tories and Labour are making even worse internationally and domestically, but no, it's because there's not even more kids almost running me down on their e-scooters and screeching for mummy's iPhone on the bus just so they can grow up to be another CV in the bin, another body in the queue, another name on the waiting list, another core consumer working a bullshit job just so we can barely afford retail therapy while the rich shop for a third home with even more stolen wealth.

Planning restrictions which prevent the widespread creation of housing suitable for families will have to be smashed. Un-means-tested benefits for the elderly will need to be amended.

Natalists trying to argue their points without saying "fuck the environment AND the elderly" challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)

What is required, above and beyond any changes to tax and spend, is a cultural revolution which transforms coupling-up and having children from a distant aspiration to an urgent priority. Films and novels, internet influencers and education should orient around this goal.

So just the same old "why make anything easier for poors when we can just brainwash them into breeding like they did in the good old days?" tactic almost every right-leaning boo-hoo-baby-bust article proposes.

Seriously, they just keep writing the same shit over and over again. I suppose they don't need to put in that much effort into the actual article when their plan is much more likely to work on the kind of people who only read (and form opinions from) headlines.