you can’t pay women to have kids. not saying you’re doing this but a lot of the time when this gets brought up on here male leftists love to go on as if material supports will make women go back to being broodmares. it’s a reactionary and essentialist view. when women are afforded more reproductive rights and general freedoms to choose their own way in life, they have less kids. it’s not a purely economic issue.
It is primarily economic issue but not in that sense. Subsistence farmers tend to have a lot of kids, because each kid expands labour power of the family, improving the quality of life of all its members. In industrialized urban society each kid is a drain on family’s resources for the next 20 years and family’s quality of life plummets, and then capitalism makes it even worse. We know that even in medieval times birth rates in cities were atrocious, despite minimal women’s rights.
I bet people would have more children with more equitable ways of actually raising them, instead of the ol’ dumping all reproductive labour - unpaid - on women. Money for domestic housewives was a thing they used to talk about in feminist circles in the 70s, more as a thought exercise, but there really is something there. By that I mean the crying out for justice and equitability and liberation not that we should just pay people with uteruses to pop out babies lol
there’s probably a healthy middle ground between “all women should be permanently pregnant” and “no kids ever”. Like, building a world where we can sustainably support the continuation of humankind, while also leaving room for people wanting to go childless or have a big family, is not the same as wanting to control who gets how many children. We also have to think about the fact that the last few hundred years have been very chaotic and rapidly changing and it’s very hard to determine where the “”“natural”“” ( I know natural is not a thing really) birthrate should be in the context of a normal, non fucked society existing in a cooperative global environment because we haven’t seen one of those yet.
you can’t pay women to have kids. not saying you’re doing this but a lot of the time when this gets brought up on here male leftists love to go on as if material supports will make women go back to being broodmares. it’s a reactionary and essentialist view. when women are afforded more reproductive rights and general freedoms to choose their own way in life, they have less kids. it’s not a purely economic issue.
It is primarily economic issue but not in that sense. Subsistence farmers tend to have a lot of kids, because each kid expands labour power of the family, improving the quality of life of all its members. In industrialized urban society each kid is a drain on family’s resources for the next 20 years and family’s quality of life plummets, and then capitalism makes it even worse. We know that even in medieval times birth rates in cities were atrocious, despite minimal women’s rights.
I bet people would have more children with more equitable ways of actually raising them, instead of the ol’ dumping all reproductive labour - unpaid - on women. Money for domestic housewives was a thing they used to talk about in feminist circles in the 70s, more as a thought exercise, but there really is something there. By that I mean the crying out for justice and equitability and liberation not that we should just pay people with uteruses to pop out babies lol
there’s probably a healthy middle ground between “all women should be permanently pregnant” and “no kids ever”. Like, building a world where we can sustainably support the continuation of humankind, while also leaving room for people wanting to go childless or have a big family, is not the same as wanting to control who gets how many children. We also have to think about the fact that the last few hundred years have been very chaotic and rapidly changing and it’s very hard to determine where the “”“natural”“” ( I know natural is not a thing really) birthrate should be in the context of a normal, non fucked society existing in a cooperative global environment because we haven’t seen one of those yet.