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The liberation of women from the age-old dilemma of "marry this guy and have six of his kids or become a prostitute" is one of the greatest triumphs of human history, on par with the elimination of smallpox and possibly the invention of agriculture. Thank you industrial revolution and twentieth century social democracy.
And most developed countries now are below replacement fertility, great success!
Unless you have a very wide definition of "welfare state", modern countries tend to be below that whether they are welfare states or not, and many of them first dipped below replacement in the interwar period already.
What countries wouldn't you consider as welfare states? For me, maybe China, I'm not 100% sure. US and European countries redistribute a fuckton of money for sure.
Singapore and Korea? They're not welfare states, are amongst the richest places on Earth, and have the lowest fertility in the world.
The problem is the middle road between patriarchy and equiality. Either don't give women access education and work, or equalize social expectations and have husbands to take an equal share of chores, housework, childcare, etc.
The middle ground puts too much stress on women, and pushes the most agentic out of the country.
What country has gotten its fertility above replacement again by equalizing social expectations? Israel, Saudi, and Argentina are the developed countries which have had above replacement tfr recently and neither is especially feminist by developed world standards.
Sweden? The TFR was pushed up above 2.1 in the 80-90s after some reforms.
The swing up started too early to just be due to the boomers and our baby boom was kind of tiny.
There might be other explanations as well such as people who delayed childbirth finally got around to it (maybe due to better conditions?), which then didn't translate to sustained higher rates as the fertility then went down again.
Thanks. Can you go into more depth about how this can be traced to feminism/women’s equality? AFAIK in the 90’s and early 2000’s economic conditions pushed the US TFR above replacement but this was mostly not feminism; social conservatives(including non-white ones) found it easier to do the things they wanted to do anyways because the economy allowed it and progressives got a lot more moderate.
Well, I can't say for sure but it followed, with some lag, a series of extensive reforms in regards to parental leave, equality in the work place, state funded day care and so on, that at least seemed to boost female labour force participation.
It didn't follow immediately after these reforms, to the extent I'm aware, but something did boost Swedish tfr compared to nearby comparable countries.
It should be said that it also somewhat coincided with an economic boom and it's end somewhat coincided with the severe recession that followed. The general boom in the 80s happened in other comparable places as well though and they didn't experience nearly as big a fertility premium, and after the recession ended Swedish fertility largely rebounded to a sustained higher level at ~1.9, which of course is below replacement but still decent and sustainable in the medium term.
All this happened well before any large scale migration of higher fertility groups (that actually aren't that fertile once they get here it turns out).
Lastly, I don't think further efforts to boost equality will have much impact on fertility, I think other issues are far more important.
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