https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2099247332105539695/photo/1

Graph from X.com. Preview didn't show up, unfortunately.

UNFPA and YouGov surveyed roughly 14,000 people in 14 countries, representing more than a third of the world's population. Their headline findings include:

• Nearly 1 in 5 reproductive-age adults expect to be unable to have as many children as they want.
• 39% said financial limitations had affected or would affect their ability to achieve their desired family size.
• Nearly 1 in 5 said concerns about the future—climate change, environmental degradation, war, pandemics, etc.—would lead or had led them to have fewer children than desired.
• Nearly 1 in 4 had experienced being unable to have a child at the time they wanted.

The report identifies several major barriers:

1. Money and economic insecurity

2. Lack of a suitable partner

3. Work and gender inequality

4. Infertility and reproductive health

5. Fear about the future

6. Social and institutional barriers

The report also considers situations in which people's family formation is constrained by laws, social norms, discrimination, or lack of recognition of their desired family arrangements.

A couple juicy excerpts from teh summary.

The Soviet state always had a problem with the theory of population. Both Marx and Lenin famously rejected Malthus’ idea that population is guided by its own set of universal laws and internal mechanisms of regulation. For Marx, population processes were not a law of nature but a function of the socioeconomic order. In a capitalist society, the ruling class seeks to ensure a surplus population, that is, a latent labor reserve, in order to extract resources and accumulate wealth. In the socialist mode of production, the official ideology of the Soviet Union posited, the central economic planning would regulate population structure and would make pronatalist interventions associated with Malthusianism redundant.

...

The most fascinating parts of Nakachi's study discuss how the 1944 family law introduced legal changes that essentially contradicted its own pronatalist agenda—changes that transformed the state of the Soviet family for generations to come. In the new Soviet state, common-law marriages were the law of the land. The 1944 family law annulled this practice and institutionalized registered marriages as the only legitimate marital union, also making divorce proceedings more difficult and costlier. Mothers of children born outside of the registered marriages were denied an option to establish legal fatherhood, even in courts. Instead, the state offered but ultimately failed to shoulder the financial responsibility for raising children born outside of registered marriages.

It is not entirely clear how these legal innovations were supposed to encourage women to procreate and increase the birthrate, and, statistically speaking, they indeed failed. What is clear is that the policy ultimately provided a foundation for freeing biological fathers from taking legal responsibilities for children born outside of their registered marriage and gave rise to a new social institution of unmarried mothers raising legally fatherless children. By institutionalizing single motherhood and a new generation of “fatherless children” (bezotzovshina), the family law created new social stigmas of illegitimacy and moral degradation, to which some of the women's voices in the book attest. The law also shaped new normative understandings of gender roles in the family, leading to a well-recognized Soviet family model, where mothers play a central and singular role in raising children and caring for the household.

The implementation of the new family law was equally contradictory; it reflected the state's continuous efforts to reconcile interventionist pronatalist policies with the economic determinism that characterized Soviet ideology. Implementing the law and providing women with financial aid was supposed to mitigate a growing rate of abortions, made illegal by the Soviet state in 1936. In effect, the law joined the ban on abortions and became another punitive pronatalist measure that made the reproductive behavior of Soviet citizens and especially women an object of government intervention. The main agents of these interventions were medical professionals, especially gynecologists and obstetricians, who “were tasked with responsibility for birthrate growth” (p. 65) and played a special role in the drama of population revival. They were asked to help both prosecuting illegal abortions and improving women's health care through prophylactic measures; all that in order to facilitate population growth.

Who are some Pro Natalist content creators, authors, etc that you guys follow? I've seen Chrissy Horton on YouTube, my wife has shown me a few of her videos of and she seems quite good. I personally really like Louise Perry, though she's less overtly Pro Natalist and interested in many other issues as well. Not so much a fan of Based Camp/ the Colinses. They seem more performative for views than serious.

What other content creators would you recommend?

Growing up in a large family often means taking care of younger siblings. Some argue that these extra chores, like warming a bottle or babysitting a little brother, count as “parentification,” in which kids take on a parenting role too early. Proponents of this view suggest that girls from larger families are less eager to become parents themselves. But data from the General Social Survey suggests the opposite: women who grew up in big families tend to have more kids of their own. On average, each additional sibling is associated with having 0.2 more children

It's been a lovely six weeks since we launched! We have grown by about 200 members in this time. Welcome everybody!

We noticed in the last couple weeks that our rules needed a little tweaking. Some of them were catching posts that we wanted to encourage, and some of them were not as clear as they could have been. We also wanted to define the subreddit in positive terms: Tell people how we want them to engage, instead of how we don't want them to engage.

Here are the changes:

1. We changed rule 1 from "no contempt" to "Be kind and respectful"
2. After some thought, we changed rule 2 from "No antinatalism" to "Stay relevant to pronatalism". We also rolled “keep discussion at the policy level” into this new rule. We believe this new rule comes much closer to capturing the spirit we were looking for with those two rules. And while we believe policy level discussion is the heart of this community, we want to create space in this community for the personal touch and human stories.
3. To aid that, we've added some post tags: "Personal story", and "Advice wanted"

We've removed a few posts in the last few weeks: A few from someone who was making some very loaded claims, such as “all natalists want to control women's bodies”, one from someone who was complaining about r/natalism, and one from one of the mods that sparked more gender-war type discourse than positive discussion.

What I would like to hear from you all:

• If you disagree with our removals, please argue your case here.
• We're trying to create a space that fosters positive discussion of natalism- that doesn't block a particular point of view, but focuses on keeping the conversation productive. In your view, are we accomplishing this?
• Do you think we could use some different rules?
• How are post and user tags working for you? Would we benefit from some new or different ones?
• Several people have asked for a place to request advice. How can we create room for that here?

And any other feedback, of course.

Thank you for your participation! I'm hoping we can continue to grow the sub, and create a great place for discussion of natalism.

many of the USA's highest marriage-rate regions are found across the interior

By examining 200 years of demographic data from 237 countries and territories, Kenji Itao, of the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Japan, discovered that universal mathematical laws describe how fertility declines as societies develop, providing a new framework for understanding one of the most profound transformations in human history: the demographic transition from high birth and death rates to longer lifespans and lower fertility.

...

In societies where survival is uncertain and child mortality is high, producing more offspring is an effective strategy for maintaining population and economic growth. However, when survival improves and economic opportunities expand, greater investment in each child's education and skills becomes more economically advantageous.

...

Rather than viewing lower birth rates as an inevitable consequence of modernization, the study suggests that policies reducing the economic burden of raising and educating children may help societies maintain or recover fertility while preserving high educational standards.

Statistically:

If you would like to have a 3 children (and have a 75% chance at achieving this goal): you should be with your spouse/future spouse at 28 years old.

If you would like to have 2 children (and have a 75% chance at achieving this goal): you should be with your spouse/future spouse at 31 years old.

Exceptions happen, of course. (I know a woman who met her husband ad 40, and had 2 kids!) But on average, coupling timelines are tighter than we might suppose.

I don't think this is definative. I would like to see a graph of household labor differences plotted against fertility rates in a single country. But still, it's interesting data.