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All of this is so silly to me. The answer is women's education reduces women's fertility, and there's no real way around this problem. Women, when given the choice, do not choose children, and so by allowing them to support themselves and choose whether to have kids, they choose not to.
Everywhere education of women has increased has seen a precipitous drop in fertility. Women's education is genocide:
Have we tried every possible way around it?
I can't recall precisely where I read it (I think it might have been on the Artist Formerly Known As Twitter?), but someone suggested that, if the educational environment were more accommodating of studentesses with babies, women would be less likely to postpone or forego reproduction for the sake of their education, and other women, upon seeing a classmate or three carrying a baby in her arms, might activate the wiring inside her that makes her want a baby of her own. (Cf. the attempts to deter teenage pregnancies by issuing realistic infant dolls to girls in secondary school, which had the exact opposite effect.)
(Also, even if one ignores the cost to women, increasing fertility by steering women away from education would still not be an un-alloyed victory, as the children thus produced would be growing up with less knowledgeable mothers.)
One, the education of women was not intended to prevent births; two, the people promoting women's education typically promote it for women of all ethnic backgrounds; three, the usual examples of genocide-by-preventing-births involve stopping women of the targeted group who wish to reproduce from doing so.
No, I don't think we have tried all the possible ways around it, but having identified the main problem, perhaps we could simply address the problem instead of trying out one farfetched kludge after another.
OK, but what about the men who are denied admission to those programs, and therefore are less able to provide for a wife and child? What, in other words, about the male doctors who never were, who were denied so females could go to medical school and quit working by 35?
The stated goal of many of these programs, and the way they measure success, is by reducing fertility. This is a holdover of the overpopulation, population bomb, thinking that was coincident with the push to promote women's equality worldwide.
Keeping women from being educated, even if it solves the problem of declining fertility, introduces two new problems:
I. A mother whose husband becomes abusive to her or her children will, if she has been denied education, be less able to provide for herself and her children without her husband's coöperation; this makes it much harder to stop domestic abuse.
II. A mother without a solid understanding of the world will be much more vulnerable to claims of "Your children are in grave danger from everything I don't like!" or "My magic beans will guarantee that your children enjoy perfect health!"
(At two he knew/the Bible through,/An infant prodigy;/His parents cried,/'Our joy and pride/we've raised on Q. R. V.' --Edward Gorey, The Universal Solvent)
Thus, if we are concerned about falling fertility rates, it would behoove us to figure out how to make women's education not reduce women's fertility.
The state already pays for this or it gets the ex-husband to pay?
Does education even help here? Are women, or men for that matter, taught about what supplements might or might not have any benefit? Does the teaching sink in? Are the teachings actually correct? Everyone was taught a lot of nonsense about the food pyramid, saturated fat vs sugar vs whatever...
Some people are just stupid/unwise that can't be changed. Send a stupid, unwise person to school and they'll come out just as they went in.
Basic financial competence is not taught, nor is it required even for teaching or providing information to others. I know it's just an anecdote but apparently nobody thought that this woman is unsuitable for giving financial advice even after coming to worldwide prominence for spectacular financial incompetence. It's systemic, like how educators decide to teach their students badly (re phonics) because it's a fashionable fun fad in the education world.
Education can teach skills like engineering or mathematics but it doesn't seem to teach anything like these general life heuristics you're gesturing at. You'd think people would learn about compound interest and credit cards, the concept is pretty simple... But they don't!
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What is "the group" here? I am going to presume you would say "white people," to which I would say that nobody is "imposing" college attendance on white women, to which you will likely bring up DEI, to which I will bring up that DEI is used to juice black university attendance as well. Is "the group" simply "humanity"?
The group is the gens, of course.
It works on everyone regardless of their race, but I will say that the stated goal of many of these programs, and one of the ways they measure success, is by reducing fertility and getting those women who have 5-10 kids to have 3-5, the 2-5 to stop at 2, and the 2 to only have 1.
Women's education is just as much genocide in Africa and India as it is everywhere else in the world, by the definition above.
Which gens?
Whichever one is having their girls educated, of course. The method works the same regardless of race or gens.
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It's not a hard and fast rule though. I have a BS, MBA, and have four kids. There are others like me. Do we have a gene or cultural meme that helps us choose to reproduce when given other options? If so, and it's inheritable, the world will eventually be filled with highly educated, fecund women.
You have four kids, but why not nine? I assert that you would always have been among the higher-fertility in your population, but the difference is that you think 4 is a lot and not the median.
Well, if it's the societal norm to have that many, you run out of space for all those people quite quickly. That's not a problem if a lot of them die in infancy and/or you're conquering a continent or two in the meantime, but the former condition is quite unpleasant and the latter is frowned upon nowadays (unless...?) Nevertheless, at some point the median* woman needs to be content with having just about 2.1 children, and neither rad trads nor radfems seem to be able to achieve that.
*Technically it'd be the modal woman, but if that's too far off from the median then you get a constant churn of intra-group population replacement, which doesn't seem like a basis for a particularly stable society.
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The number is set largely because I married 9 years ago, had a kid close to every other year, and now we're getting older. If we had more time, maybe we could wait a couple more years until the oldest two can go without car seats, then have room in a minivan/suv for a 5th-6th. Don't really want to go full-minibus but there are a few families at my parish who have them.
The point is, 4 is over replacement, and I did 4 even with education, starting late (by historical comparisons), and modernity. If 3/4 of my kids marry and reproduce 2-5 kids each (with other children of large families), over time my great-grand children will inherit the Earth.
My Maternal Grandma had 12, but that was a modern miracle of formula and sudden access to antibiotics and vaccines. My Paternal Grandma had 5. My mom had 3 (but 2 miscarriages). My aunts and uncles save a couple all have 2-6 kids. (and the couple who don't seem to have health issues)
My husband is one of five. His siblings have all had 2-4 kids. While dating, one thing that drew us to each other was the idealization of having grown up in a family with "the right amount" of kids. Which to us was at least 3 or more.
If there is a "have kids despite modernity" gene, I have a high likelihood of it and have a good chance of passing it along. If this gene also encourages such people to be drawn to each other, all the better.
My daughter is an only, my spouse and I were from families w/two kids.
My daughter used to say she wanted a big family, like half a dozen kids. But she's changed her mind having dated. By the time she views her male peers as mature enough to marry, she'll likely be in your position and be limited by age/decreased fertility due to age. She's entering her mid-20s and isn't sure it's worth wasting her time on dating. I tell her there are guys out there who don't spend all their time gaming, but have no idea where to point my daughter to find them (church is out, she's an atheist; work is challenging, young men in stem are... spending all their time gaming).
And you don't tell your son with money problems to get a job, because he just doesn't believe in working?
I'm not sure if I understand your point but, yes, it is very common for American fathers to tell their sons they're sure there are jobs out there that will hire them, but not have any actually useful information about looking for them.
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I lucked out by meeting my husband at work. I also am more naturally prone to end up in male-dominiated spaces, so I basically was the only women in a department of 20+ men. I had multiple options and picked the best of the bunch. Not sure how I'd have done it if I was more attractive than autistic.
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Nine kids is historically almost unheard of outside of high infant mortality areas.
My father was one of ten, he had seven, my siblings have from three to eight kids. Neighbor in high school had 23, seventeen with the first wife, who subsequently expired as one does. Nearly everyone in their social circle has 6-12 kids. It's not nearly unheard of, you just gotta live in the sticks with the plain folk.
It is indeed practically unheard of at the country level.
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My grandmother had seven; my grandfather had eight (the seven he had with my grandma and one illegitimate daughter that was raised alongside her half-siblings). I'm a millennial. These sorts of numbers were common a few generations ago.
From "Dégénération" by Mes Aïeux:
Or, as the English version puts it:
I wasn't an accident, but my sister was.
Seven, much less fourteen children, surviving to adulthood on a regular basis has never been the case. Here is a time series for "effective" fertility rate. For the UK and the US it only goes back to the early 20th century, but for Sweden it goes back to 1751. This has never exceeded 3.5 children in any of these countries.
Obviously there are families that buck the trend, but that doesn't take away from what's normal and what isn't.
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One might posit that it is not education in general that makes women not want children, but rather what specific lessons they are taught at institutions for higher learning. If I were a social scientist not worried about career suicide, I would look into whether there is a causative relationship between exposure to feminist ideology and not wanting a family. It would certainly make sense that an ideology whose prime thinkers take pride in criticizing motherhood, degrading men, and advising women to sleep around and postpone marriage would result in fewer marriages and children.
True! I went in for Mechanical Engineering, ended up in Information Science because I couldn't handle fluid dynamics. Even Information Science had a bit of woo in it, but I mostly avoided the real mind-killing stuff.
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I've gotten sucked into the mommy wars section of Substack lately, and my impression is that it does go a layer deeper than that. College educated women want status for their ability to do things like write, reference interesting authors, articulate cultural and educational opinions, and so on. In the past, women educated in that fashion had nursemaids. Now, they drive their baby to daycare at four weeks old, and work. Their work does not produce much status, and neither do their children. But with everything going online, it's increasingly difficult to gain status from the things they go to college for either, so the popular ones are happy because they're popular, and bully the less popular ones, for saying unpopular things. This is not a good state of affairs, middle class women should be able to do a bit of cultural generation while their children are in daycare or school, and generate positive feelings about their lives. Feminists did not help with that, merely chaining them to fake desk jobs and bloated school systems instead of their kitchens. And the ones at home don't sound happy either, because they never get a break at all.
I, again, don't have a solution, but giving up on women doing classic feminine things like writing essays to each other, and making everyone nursemaids again seems like the wrong direction to be pushing in.
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The women in my family were also teachers with university degrees and 3-4 children, at least three generations back. Which is what stability looks like in an era of low infant mortality; it's not like society even wants a bunch of 15 child underclass families anyway.
I don't have a theory for this. None of them moved to IQ shredder places like San Francisco or New York, and when two of my cousins did, they have in fact not had any children.
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