It's contraception. The solution is for the government to randomly introduce placebos into the contraceptive supply. Or just accept that, given the choice, people don't want kids that much.
I am, frankly, dreading the replies to this comment, as the thread already tilts heavily towards the sort of dehumanizing abstraction of women’s rights that often precedes more explicitly misogynist arguments cloaked in utilitarianism, so I will just say that if you consider coercing women into traumatizing and often debilitating situations to be an acceptable “cost” of a hypothetical economically optimal birth rate, I do not consider you to be capable of engaging in good faith and will not respond.
I would also suggest that concerns about “birth rate” or other abstracted metrics are often a screen for concerns — from men — about access to sex. I mean, in the context of intensifying climate change, a decreasing birth rate is not really our biggest problem as a species. It might actually be an asset.
To quote from the WaPo article below (some people may not be able to read it):
"it turns out that having a child can have a pretty strong negative impact on a person's happiness, according to a new study published in the journal Demography. In fact, on average, the effect of a new baby on a person's life in the first year is devastatingly bad — worse than divorce, worse than unemployment and worse even than the death of a partner."
"Researchers Rachel Margolis and Mikko Myrskylä followed 2,016 Germans who were childless at the time the study began until at least two years after the birth of their first child. Respondents were asked to rate their happiness from 0 (completely dissatisfied) to 10 (completely satisfied) in response to the question, "How satisfied are you with your life, all things considered?""
"On average, new parenthood led to a 1.4 unit drop in happiness. That's considered very severe. To put things in perspective, previous studies have quantified the impact of other major life events on the same happiness scale in this way: divorce, the equivalent of a 0.6 "happiness unit" drop; unemployment, a one-unit drop; and the death of a partner a one-unit drop."
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/after-israeli-study-regretting...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/0...
Also, I think the study needs to be much more longitudinal than "2 years on". Arguably the pay off for having children comes much, much later. For some, the pay off doesn't really come until they have grandchildren.
Yes, having children is often a monumental PITA. But humans are social animals, and nothing is really comparable to fill that hole than having a family of your own. The question as posed by the study is silly: yes, you might find less day-to-day happiness if your child is screaming all night long and you need to feed them and change their shitty diapers. But if the question had been 10 years on, and you asked those same mothers "do you regret having children", you would get a very different answer.
What a ridiculous false dichotomy. Earth has a huge (and increasing) number of humans on it. We are in far greater danger from unsustainable depletion of natural resources than we are "dying off" from gradually declining birthrates.
I'm much more worried about climate change leading to war and famine than I am about women voluntarily choosing to have fewer children. As far as I can see, population decline is only a problem because our current economic system assumes endless growth.
In the meantime, our species has much more urgently pressing issues.
Fucking the environment is very unlikely to destroy humanity, and that is really the only concern of any species.
As conscientious pieces of a greater whole, however, there are definitely more pressing issues.
Why should that be scary?
> The trauma, in particular, is weirdly something that people don’t talk to young women about, and that often remains hidden from view.
Everybody talks about it. It's why society discourages girls from getting pregnant.
> Of the women I’ve known personally who have given birth, all but one had PTSD from the experience.
Well your experience is rather the anomaly. Most first time mothers choose to get pregnant again? 80% of first time mothers choose to do it again. Sure the birthing process isn't a walk in the park, but to say it is "trauma or PTSD" is absurd from a statistical and evolutionary point of view.
> I would also suggest that concerns about “birth rate” or other abstracted metrics are often a screen for concerns — from men — about access to sex. I mean, in the context of intensifying climate change, a decreasing birth rate is not really our biggest problem as a species. It might actually be an asset.
It's obvious your bias leans towards low birth rate but this is absurd and makes it hard to take you seriously. To say concerns about "birth rate" is about access to sex is nonsense. You do realize that pregnancy and higher birth rates gets in the way of sex right? It's one of the reasons why men invented condoms and birth control. Greater access to sex.
Yeah, that's not why we tell girls not to get pregnant.
As for what women wants, since we can both agree that they have agency, we can ask them. Or better yet, look in to the surveys done on just that subject[0], and conclude that women do not get as many kids as they want to, or expect to.