From a pretty early age I decided I didn’t want to get married or have kids cuz both my parents seemed utterly miserable. For a long time I found it weird anyone wanted to do it at all, why would you want to be trapped with someone you hate who you get into screaming arguments all the time?
And it’s not just me, you see a lot of jokes online about people like playing that one scene from Marriage Story while playing old N64 games for nostalgia.
I think the experience of seeing our own parents be so miserable maybe soured a lot of us on starting families.
I’ve seen people here get extremely weird about this issue. Just look at how this post has blown up. And honestly, i’ve seen much, much worse than this, outright entitled incel shit like “a society were women routinely choose not to have kids seems threatening to me.” Any time birthrates and parenthood come up, people crawl out of the woodworks to start this endless litany of how they’d have tons of kids if material conditions were better and … i don’t know how to say this kindly, it’s complete bullshit.
When you look at AES countries, places that had the best childcare in human history, absolute job security, super low costs of living, then no, it doesn’t work like that. The DDR is a perfect example. Everybody who has experienced it misses the childcare and education system of the DDR, they had a lot more women in the workforce than west Germany, raising kids was so much safer and easier and they still had lower birthrates than the west. People made a lot of use of the free and easily accessible abortion clinics and honestly, good on them. It’s not just economic insecurity that keeps people from having children. A lot of people genuinely do not want this. And given how much women in particular get pressured into seeing motherhood as a necessary condition for a happy and fulfilled life, i think it’s still not enough people who choose this.
Hexbears have to get it out of their heads that “anti-natalism” is a rightwing stance. In fact, “anti-natalism” is a nazbol dogwhistle to smear queer liberation and free abortion, people like Haz have used it this way for years and it still just gets thrown around here willy nilly, it’s sickening. The whole “ecofascism” thing people on here get workedup about is obviously abhorrent and eugenicist, but it is also an obscure, irrelevant position, an online oddity that has no real-world impact. Coercive pro-natalism is much more prevelant among reactionaries and is actually driving policies in imperial core and post-soviet countries. It’s time we course correct on these takes.
there’s a few things that get smushed together and hexbear usually isn’t always interested in disentangling them
ideological anti-natalism isn’t necessarily malthusian
not wanting to have kids usually isn’t grandly ideological
having a “normal” amount of kids usually isn’t grandly ideological (whatever normal means)
pronatalism is quiverfull shit and elon mailing his cum to people
there’s no moral imperative toward a certain human population number (unless you’re a voluntary extinctionist, 0, or a capitalist, infinity)
i could continue but my food is ready
Makes sense. I would bet the influence of religious and other societal pressures to have a kid are far more influential than economic stability. Personally I can’t imagine having any kids before 30, I didn’t, and it’s still considered very late. How any of these 20-something parents I meet manage I’ll never know.
I personally think the blanket ban on the topic is a relic of when it and childfree were subreddits that, in typical reddit fashion, became cesspits that used the term ‘crotch-goblin’ and such. I wasn’t aware of the nazbol connection as I don’t interact with that stuff at all but it is a troubling connection to consider.
If I had a kid I’d call them my “crotch goblin”.
Late GDR actually had higher birthrates than West Germany.