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>people are choosing not to have kids because life is so expensive.

Finally a positive outcome of capitalism!

Having children is subsidized where I come from. To a point where getting pregnant is a strategy to secure a form of UBI for certain low-income people. I think the reasons for lowered birth rates are much more hedonistic and less related to costs.

Not wanting to bring children into an overpopulated polluted overheating stormy flooding jobless fascist warring world of burning bombed out cities and ICE concentration camps run by heath care and science denying oligarchs and religious zealots is hardly hedonism.

That is hardly a reason. People used to starve and had tens of children. Why dont we just accept that is cultural?

Culture meaning women having economic freedom, physical security, and access to birth control?

Women don't have "tens" of children due to culture, they have them due to not having an option. The data says they (as a global group) barely want 2 or 3 (which makes sense to those that have seen the risks and tribulations).

Since then we have invented much more reliable methods of birth control and have managed to bring infant mortality way down.

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