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The quality contributions roundup has a lot of discussion of fertility. I found it pretty disconcerting to read, since it all seemed to assume that the only way to get women to have kids is to enforce a top down dystopia. This is not my personal experience in my social surroundings★, but of course I live in Israel so I don't count‡.
Anyway, here is my follow-up question:
If you had the ability to set policies that will encourage increased fertility, what policies would you be implement across the board for both men and women simultaneously?
In other words, not "women can't be allowed access to higher education until they've had at least two children", but "people of child-bearing age can't be allowed access to higher education until they've had at least two children". Or "new parents of children are given twenty additional paid vacation days", or whatever. Are there any such policies you think could actually be effective?
★ if anything what I see is women regretting not being able to have more kids
‡ In Israel, fwiw, having kids is simply by default assumed to be a shared responsibility of men, women, and society. It is expected that men take (government paid) sick days to stay home with sick kids. It is not blinked at for the manager to show up to a meeting remotely with a sick kid in his lap. It is expected that men will leave work early several times a week to pick up kids from school — at least in all the places in Israel I have lived I have seen reasonably close sex splits of the parents at pickup/dropoff. I am not clear on whether or not this is equally the case in America — I don't get that impression, but as my knowledge of America is limited to TV and internet discussions, I could be wrong. But I see fathers at the park supervising their kids all the time, and the internet discourse re America is about men getting assumed to be pedophiles for being around kids... So I assume there must be some difference...
Women's education, and contraceptives are the main factors, so the most effective policies are not going to be evenhanded. The former leads to the latter, so I would consider it upstream. It's glib, but educating girls is a form of genocide.
As we know that educating women reduces birthrates (We found that women's attainment of lower secondary education is key to accelerating fertility decline; In a nutshell, data show that the higher the level of a woman’s educational attainment, the fewer children she is likely to bear.), and is in fact intended to decrease birthrates. This is usually seen as a good thing, but I wanted to address the weasel word of 'intended' in advance. There are plenty of people and groups trying to reduce birthrates around the world, and their two primary tools are educating girls and distributing contraceptives. These groups are genocidal by definition.
This explains the suggestions you found distasteful. You can try to incentivize women to have children all you want, but it's more effective to simply not educate them as children and deny contraceptives as adults. It's the rule of holes: if you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, first stop digging.
So in short: you find the premise of the question inherently flawed, and if given the option to implement a policy but with the requirement that it be even-handed, would have absolutely none to suggest?
Yes, the premise is flawed, since treating women and men as equivalent when it comes to reproduction is an aesthetic choice more than a necessary one. They are neither equivalent nor interchangeable when it comes to reproduction, so an even-handed requirement is applying restrictions to preclude the most effective actions. That leaves you with ineffective actions, of course, which seems to be by design. I could have complied with the letter, if not spirit, of your question by simply suggesting we ban contraceptives for women and men, but that would have been dishonest, and I'd rather get to the heart of the matter rather than play word games. "The law, in its majestic equality, equally forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread," as the quote goes.
When men can give birth and women can impregnate them, then equally applied laws will make sense and appropriate. Until then, we are left with the ugly truth that women control reproduction, and that when they control themselves they choose not to reproduce. When they are educated and have the tools available, fertility rates plummet. I don't see a way to untangle this knot, so I say cut it or leave it be and make peace with that decision.
But we see that, eg, religious women who are highly educated still have more kids. So there are clearly some things that can at least ameliorate the trend.
(I'm also not entirely convinced the problem is education qua education and not the incredibly delayed entry into adulthood. What I see a lot of is women feeling like they are finally "ready"/at a socially acceptable stage to have kids, and then starting to have kids - ie, wanting to reproduce - and continuing to want to have kids, but running out of time to have more of them. This is entirely anecdotal, of course, but I see this pattern incredibly frequently, where women describe badly wanting N+1 kids where N is the current number they have, and they'll iterate on this until eventually they have to give up on it because they're too old, their husband is opposed, etc. That's not "women don't want kids", its "women make decisions, especially when young, that aren't conducive to having more kids, and end up bearing the consequence via having fewer kids than they would have otherwise chosen to have")
Anyway. It's not as if we need to get back to fifties level reproduction, nudging things upwards a bit would already help.
(Actually, in that vein, what are the differences between low fertility and extremely low fertility countries? Are there any trends there?)
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