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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.
I don't think there would be a significant difference if hormonal contraceptives were outlawed and made unavailable (for men as well as women, let's be fair here). More births, mostly, as we're not going to stop people from fucking. I would hope more marriages, and at younger ages, because I don't think the stigma of children out of wedlock has completely disintegrated, at least not outside of blacks, where that ship has already sailed. Perhaps changes in attitude around casual sex, and a retreat from many of the rationales of the last half-century.
Limiting formal education would have the greater impact, to my mind, although one much harder to explain or pin down. I'm not sure what the second order effects would be. It wouldn't make women any dumber, but it might make them value something besides the masculine imitation of career success that we currently see.
Of course, the true reaction would be the insane and constant propaganda from our media systems, perpetual doomerism and calls to action and whipping people into a frenzy of outrage. But I don't think that's what you were getting at.
My view is less that we should do those things, but that those are the only true solutions. It's a Gordian knot that cannot be untangled, it can only be cut, or left alone. If you want to raise birthrates, you need to be willing to raise the sword and cut the knot.
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