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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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Apart from that, I'm also not entirely sure unreservedly making it even easier to postpone getting children is truly the right way to approach this problem. Unpopular though it might be among certain cohorts to point out, the solution to declining fertility reasonably also should somehow involve convincing women to have children while they're still young; not enabling every pregnancy to be geriatric.

Yeah, a similar thought occurred to me. If it becomes possible to delay parenthood further, perhaps a lot of women will do so, and Sweden is back in the same boat except with a higher percentage of people with Schizophrenia, Autism, etc. Israel is pretty good about supporting fertility treatments, but that's combined with a strong pro-natalist zeitgeist.

Sweden actually has an extensive Total Defense Duty (yes, literal translation) technically applicable to all Swedish citizens between the age of 16 and 70

I strongly suspect that in this case "technically" means "we are going to pretend that the duty applies equally to men and women but in reality everyone knows that if there were an actual Russian invasion, women wouldn't seriously be expected to take up arms. Feminism would go right out the window, at least until the invasion was repelled. Then we would insist that women were the unsung heroes of the resistance."

In the case of government policy regarding fertility, I think it's important to keep this in mind. Because it's difficult to solve these issues without imposing burdens on women. And western governments, being intensely gynocentric, don't like to impose burdens on women.

In contrast to the other three reports previously released, this one actually got some major government attention, and shorly after it was made public an extra investment into fertility treatments was announced.

This is consistent with gynocentrism.

Sweden legitimately has a high percentage of women in the military.

Sweden legitimately has a high percentage of women in the military.

According to Wikipedia, 23% of conscripts are female. I wonder how many of those are serving in front line combat roles. And of those, if an actual shooting war broke out, I wonder how many would decide it's a good time to get pregnant.