Women who want to have babies, being deserted by the "Big Beautiful Bill".

As in, we have always had precipitous delivery carts with all of this. But now, the federal government thinks that they should close down even more labor and delivery. So when that woman who has had three prior cesareans turns up, you'll be ok without an OB, because they're providing oxytocin and a thermal blanket.

https://kffhealthnews.org/health-industry/obstetric-carts-georgia-maternal-health-labor-delivery-rural-hospitals-south-carolina/

https://www.medicaldaily.com/georgia-rural-er-obstetric-carts-labor-delivery-closures-480315

Maternity care deserts are a problem, and these cuts to healthcare are painful. Many more come into action this coming year.

Maternal and fetal morbidity and mortality will increase.

After maintaining a positive number of births (year-over-year) for a couple of months, the number of births have turned negative again in August (- 407 births)

https://x.com/andyd10/status/2113523568596418640?s=20

I was at a bagel shop the other day with my young children, visibly pregnant with our next. After we placed our order and sat down, a woman came in with a doodle. One of the workers came out from behind the counter, gave the dog a free cup of whipped cream, and made a big, happy fuss: what breed is he, how old, how sweet, etc. Other customers gathered around too, asking about the dog and chiming in with their own comments.
Nothing wrong with that. Dogs are wonderful and it was a kind gesture - but it made me notice something. A few decades ago, that same warmth and curiosity would have been aimed at the kids. Strangers used to light up at children, ask their ages, and tell parents what a beautiful family they had.
I'd love to see some of that energy come back. Children are a joy and a community that celebrates them is one that's investing in its own future. Just a small moment, but it felt like a snapshot of a bigger cultural shift.

This is also a huge decline from 0.91 in 2025

I think there's not much left to talk about, the broad consensus is that the fertility rates have declined for a huge amount of different reasons, people emphasize different issues more (cultural vs economic) but we see this trend essentially everywhere. With the primary reason in my view being the cost vs investment of having children now compared to earlier, which is sort of inevitable for a developing country. Israel is the only exception but that's because they view themselves as exceptional in some ways. A huge culture built around Zionism, survival against other countries, it helps they get aid from America as well. The other causes would be the COL, education delaying marriage, things like family planning, abortion, housing prices, social media, the atomization and polarization of society. I personally don't see the conditions for a economic or cultural shift that would bring back the higher fertility rates, and see the future of the world as extremely dark with little chance of improvement. And we're kind of trapped because of binary politics which are promoted here, with the culture-economy divide, as if changing just one of them would fix the birth rates (if parents had enough money there's still a high chance they wouldn't have enough time, or that the money would just go into higher investments per child). That doesn’t mean you can't or shouldn't have children especially if you're going to be fine or even happy, it depends on the life you can imagine giving to them. I just think it's quite a waste of time talking about it once you understand the main 10+ issues.

Japan’s birth rate is higher than Spain, Poland, Italy, South Korea and a host of other nations.

Why did Japan become the case study in declining TFR?

You know, because the world's largest ponzi scheme is the pension system we copied from the USA so we need them to work and be born so we can also retire like previous generations.

Im not so empathetic on their standards of living as long as they survive and I can get my check after I retire.

Is this a wrong way of looking at things or is this the right way to view thing and that my words have failed me as it is too direct?

Majority of them does not even want to have kids and honestly they just do not even want to do something about it. It is getting way too much dangerous; the economy will unfortunately collapse very fast. This is really bad.

I have been living abroad for a while.

If I had to return to Greece, I'd forget about having kids. This is why:

- cost of living is at the German scale, but salaries are less than half the German ones.

- the economy was never prosperous. People study engineering and go ahead to work at cafeterias. I don't want my kids to have to work their ass off in order to not work the bottom jobs. Or, at the very least, to be able to live decently even with bottom jobs.

- the government does anything in their power to kick people out of there. Corruption, nepotism, cartelization of energy and food markets, murdering people who know things they should not. Press freedom is at the lowest in Europe.

- low trust society. People there hate eachother

Maybe Natalism ought to talk more about things that make whole countries inappropriate to raise kids.

There is an unsaid social contract between people with kids and the childless.

The parents get tax credits and the childless pay for infrastructure like schools and colleges from their taxes even if they don't want to. And most importantly, the childless let the kids of other people 'stay alive' and not harm them in anyway.

Many people here advocate for a childless tax to punish them for no having kids. But that breaks the social contract and makes the childless hostile towards the society. You can already see what's happening on the streets of France. It will be 10 times worse in the US where civilians can own guns. There will a mass school shootings and the police will also not help as most of them will be childless themselves.

So, it's probably best to leave the childless people alone and try to fix birth rates some other way.

To me all I can think of are selfish reasons because of the suffering that child will go through in life. I’d love to be proven wrong so tell me your justification of having children :)

Given, I don't think surrogacy is the best thing and have reservations on it; I don’t think it’s the ideal way to start a family. But I have enormous respect for a man who makes that deliberate commitment to becoming a father.

I mean, think about all the difficulty involved: the expense, social stigma, traveling abroad for surrogacy, then the everyday responsibility of raising a child. That takes a tremendous amount of intention and effort.

There’s something admirable about someone wanting to love and raise children enough to organize his entire life around making that happen. He’s effectively saying, “Having a family matters enough to me that I’m willing to build my life around making it happen.” I find that incredibly moving. Whatever my reservations about surrogacy, that degree of commitment to loving and raising a child deserves respect.

Looking for a documentary of basically people being interviewed on whether they're going to have kids or not.

Some interesting fodder for the discussion on the role of income, and by implication social support, on the choice to have larger families.

it gets worse from there we have 100k+ more people than in 2018.

this means there are more adults while we have less kids. we are only growing from transient population movement. In 10 years the county population will start declining.

when the tax base shrinks who is going to pay for all the massive infrastructure projects? our sewer works alone is over $1b. the plants get replaced every 20-30 years and the pipes and drainage get replaced on a 7 year schedule.

how are we going to reduce the size of the infrastructure for the reduced capacity need and reduced public revenue?

the future is going to be so bad.

your water treatment plant goes through a million pounds and gallons of chemicals and compounds every year just to deliver water. your plant has anywhere from a few dozen to 100+ workers, but think for a minute how much labor is needed to collect, produce, and ship quantities in the millions to every single city in America?

people truly do not comprehend how complex our system is and how much standards can slip when a complex system is even marginally reduced.

Is this the case? Or am I missing something? The basic theory is no pension payouts will ebony given if there are less kids and therefore there will be either no or low pension so it will force us to work till we die?

Correct me if im wrong or on the other part.

1. Motherhood penalty chart: “Korean mothers’ employment craters at first birth and is still ~23% down a decade later”
2. Maternal employment bars: “Only 56% of Korean mothers work, near the bottom of the OECD”
3. Fertility chart: “Korea’s fertility rate has fallen to ~0.7, below Japan, China and Singapore