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You want to raise the fertility rate, yes?
You could convince an entire population to have more babies the hard way (social or economic pressure).
Or literally just let the people who are already trying, but can't for some physiological reason, have one. They already want children, if they're pursuing fertility treatment, they're already decently well off, too.
To me it seems like a very obvious, targeted solution!
Religion puts an incredible amount of social pressure on children, marriage and families. This is why most conservatives advocate for traditional gender roles, rally against abortion, etc.
My own personal experience of growing in a conservative Islamic country, then converting to Christianity after moving to the West is a testament of how social pressure has an impact on this.
My wife (from South America) was similarly raised in a conservative family. We have delayed having children but it has reached a boiling point where we have to absolutely discuss having kids now.
Yes, there are other factors like affordability that prevents left leaning people from having kids, but to me those are secondary reasons. This social dynamic is simply not there in Liberal circles.
Of course this is absolutely abhorrent to the left, but the article is discussing the left's lowered birth rates, and giving teenagers, especially women, sex education that works can't be ignored. It's some Handmaiden's Tale shit to dupe teenage women into having kids so they're beholden to a man and their family, so they don't get an opportunity to have their own lives, and are instead merely baby making factories, but this is the future of the human race we're talking about here!
No one would ever admit to this being the plan out loud, but it's pretty obvious if you look at it from a societal standpoint, on the level of Dune or the Foundation series of sci-fi writing. Or Idiocracy.
I think the confusion is that “fertility” means different things in medicine vs demography
In medicine, fertility is about your ability to have biological offspring, not about whether you personally choose to make use of that ability
In demography, fertility is about how many children people actually have. The completed TFR (total fertility rate) of a population is the lifetime average number of children per a woman.
From a demographic perspective, the vast majority of differences in fertility are due to socioeconomic and cultural factors, medical infertility and the availability of treatments for it makes only very small difference to overall birth rates
For example, Israel has universal fertility benefiots and this is predicted to contribute ~0.03 TFR. The US and would need a an effect 2,000% (20x) larger to reach replacment. Many EU countries would need an effect 30X stronger.
The bigger challenge is the people wanting to have children in the first place. This is driven by social values, preceived preconditions, and when in life those conditions are met.
I was just hanging out with some friends for the 4th of July. Their immigrant parents chose to have a child while in college working on their Phds and residing in the US on student visas.
I dont know any of my peers that would intentionally make that choice due to the percarious and unstable position.
We're going to have to adjust to smaller populations, unless we wish to devolve as a society.
The government paying for it also doesn't make it cheaper, it just moves the costs around.
A fairer, more effective strategy would be subsidizing the first year or so of the child's care- diapers, food, clothes, cribs, vaccines and such. That would benefit a lot more people.
Such a program would be a good first step in stating that bearing and raising children is something we value as a society.
Coincidentally, I had a similar suspicion about the free/subsidized fertility treatments- the rate of people not having children due to needing medical intervention is small enough that subsidizing it would not meaningfully affect the birthrate of the country.
Unless, of course, you believe that being on the left politically makes people less fertile...
We know how to raise the birth rates: give money to men, discourage parental co-habitation.
And, there were 1,126,000 abortions were provided by US clinicians in 2025.
Ban abortions.
If the left reproduces via external means (e.g., media), then they've effectively outsourced biological reproduction and all its costs to the right. The right will successfully reproduce their political alignment sometimes, of course, but they also effectively act as the breeder population for the left. The right expends the resources bootstrapping civilization into their biological offspring, Oedipalizing them into the world as linguistic subject, which ends up being the vector for the brood parasitism of their own socio-cultural opponents. So, if you're the right, you're the host of this parasitism, and should be looking for some kind of antiparasitic social solution in the form of impenetrable cultural barriers.
But college is not the be-all and end-all of someone's political evolution. Buying a home and having a family also influences someone's political opinions, broadly in the more conservative direction.
What I think sounds plausible is that the rise of women pursuing post-graduate degrees brings down birth rates. If a woman isn't done with her academic pursuits until she's 30, she'll unquestionably be less likely to have kids as a matter of biology.
Moreover, if it's extremely difficult to buy a house and start a family until you're in your mid-30s, that's going to keep people more liberal for longer.
So I don't think the basic dynamics have changed, but the timelines have. When people have a house and family, they have things to lose and act more self-interested. When they don't, they don't, they're much happier to entertain proposals for vast societal change.
A lot of their kids (my peers) ended up unmarried and childless as per this article. So in a way those parents got punished by evolutionary forces for not being careful enough about their kids. I can guarantee you that those of my generation who "made it" through that filter are vigilant to ensure it doesn't happen to our kids.
I think the right has been evolving higher memetic immunity, which is causing this strategy to become less effective over time.
Increases in homeschooling and private religious schools – school vouchers in the US really help with that. Reduced rates of cross-political friendship, dating and marriage. Increased geographic sorting based on ideology. Social media echo chambers. The "right-wing media ecosystem" (see e.g. Libs of Tiktok) is a lot more engaging than it was 40 years ago. Internet filtering (some religious groups pressure even adults to install it.) Increasing political pressure on universities to moderate their politics reduces their effectiveness at transmitting left-wing politics to students, meanwhile right-leaning alternative tertiary institutions are growing.
Also, odds of political defection is partially determined by personality traits, which are partially genetic. This creates selective pressure to reduce the frequency of defection-promoting alleles in right-leaning populations across generations, which is a genetic rather than memetic factor predicting that conservative retention rates will rise over decades to come. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3125629/ which discusses this with respect to genes for religiosity, which is heavily overlapping with (albeit not quite the same as) political conservatism.
Ahh. Brood parasitism. Very tricky.
That does not mean that it will work against all of them. Some high-fertility groups of today don't seem to be particularly prone to losing their members to left-wing or even just generic secular persuasion: there are very few ex-Amish or ex-Haredi leftists, and some, but not very many, ex-Muslim and ex-Mormon leftists.
Your counterexamples are indeed the succesful defenders, the ones the right could learn from. The Amish (the only successful resisters of brood parasitism I'm directly familiar with), don't have to worry about capital mapping their offspring's desire because they have created an effective cultural barrier from it. No doubt many young Amish would find superhero media alluring, but movies, TV, and phones need electricity, which they have forbidden from their personal lives. More generally, the hierarchy of God, family, work, then finally self is fundamental and encoded into the child's being. To electrify your bedroom is to no longer be Amish, which has a lot more friction than drifting from your parents' mainstream conservatism.
I don’t think this means what you think it means
https://youtu.be/tZCg9HsDntY
It's not difficult to take that to the next logical conclusion, no children means less resources used.
There's something beyond idiotic about a society that frames it's own reproduction as a negative.
I think this is bait because it's the sort of thinking that 'feels right' without thinking too hard about it.
Not true. Right idea of family valuea is not about empathy and does not have much elements of empathy. It is more about establishing hierarchy and punishing you if you step put of it.
It is not even like they would be more emphatic toward disabled close ones. They dont extend empathy toward abused or sexually harassed female familly member or kid. Or to gay familly member.
Inward focus of the right is toward the members of they political and social group.
> left expresses more empathy to those outside their immediate circles (caring for the planet)
Left do cares more about planet, but also toward close ones that need help. A lot of leftist activism is motivated by personal experiences and experiences of close ones.
It's possible this has changed but I would name Catholics and Mormons as topping the large family demographics in the US (although in 2015, Pew disagreed¹ with my assertions about Catholics).
Does this challenge your overall point about conservatives? I'm not sure.
It is my experience that a rise in Evangelicals' political power is eventually followed by returns to their historical disregard/animosity for Catholics² and Mormons³. Being on the receiving end of serial demonization can shove folks away from the ideologies that generate it.
¹ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/americas-cha...
² https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/peter-thiel-antichrist-remarks-pop...
³ https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2026/07/02/how-pete-hegseths...
It's an odd bunch. You have hardcore Jewish rabbis hanging with radical imams and dyed-in-the-wool Chinese communists and everyone in between. It's an issue, like climate change, that effects us all equally.
No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions. It's apartments, it's land use taxes, it's cost of living, it's governmental policy. Sure, some new study like this one, will come along and add in a new wrinkle. But it really seems, to me at least, that the fertility issue is a multi-faceted one with no clear causes nor clear solutions.
Now, once we discover whatever the recipe for fertility decline is, then all those partisans and religious nutters will scatter and then go right back to hating each other. But for now, they play nice. There's a lesson in there, but I'm not sure what it is.
Again, it's a weird little sub domain.
I think if you look at ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Amish, the answer is obvious - the easiest way to maximise fertility is to convince people that God exists, has commanded them to reproduce, and to minimise engagement with cultures that don’t share that commitment; the root cause of low fertility is most people in the current population don’t believe that; the long-term solution is their demographic replacement by people who do.
Any population decline is likely to be temporary; by the 23rd century, I think people will be back to worrying about overpopulation
And I think it's fair to say that in the US non-heterosexual people are overwhelmingly on the left, for fairly obvious reasons.
Many gay people I know have children.
When a bunch of demographic factors are all not just correlated but are linked to challenges in raising kids, it seems like elevating a single one of those factors is selective framing
Look at Amy Coney Barrett - Supreme Court justice, before that a law professor, five biological children plus two adopted, and an ultraconservative Roman Catholic.
I think you’ll find the “women with successful professional careers and >=5 kids” demographic has a strong conservative skew.
If clearing that bar isn’t feasible, starting a family is delayed until it is.
The problem is that many will never achieve that before aging out of the opportunity, due to it becoming increasingly difficult to climb that ladder. Many millennials for example only got to a point where they felt like they could stand on their own two feet in their 30s, which is the starting line for providing the desired quality of life for children.
I don’t think this is a bad thing to desire. People like this tend to be good, thoughtful parents if they manage to endure the marathon and reach the finish line in time. It’s just out of reach for many, and nobody cares to even try to fix that.
Indeed, they also point out that the finding only holds true for US whites but not for blacks. Which is also consistent with this being just a reflection of economic status.
What’s interesting to me is that these groups are very effective at making use of programs we have to help families and subsidize costs. But I feel like Americans generally are less aware of these programs or decide they can’t afford children without considering this help.
As an n of 1, we are surrounded by so many births that we just trade baby gear since we are either a handful of months ahead or behind many other parents. Our assumption was that we were in a stealth baby boom. Truly everyone we know has a minimum of one very young child with a high number of parents with between 2 and 4.
It certainly runs counter to many online discussions but reality often does.
It is an odd time for everyone to be really into kids but perhaps that is a species trigger for all we know
A larger percentage of births are to older women, but total number of births are still dropping accross all ages.
That somehow evaded fertility statistics?
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr74/nvsr74-3.pdf
That said, I think there is a perspective issue at play. It may seem like lots of people are having kids. A lot of our friends are too. However, I dint live through the 70s or 40's to have a comparison for what that seemed like when the fertility rate was higher.
The left has culturally brainwashed itself into believing that having children later is okay, but it's not. Muslims are the only exception.
They thought the risks won't apply to them, that they'll get lucky. Wanting to meet the "right person" is exactly the problem. The more established one becomes, the more picky one gets, and the target is always just out of reach. Well, when one is ready, pregnancy then is a coin toss with a diminishing probability. The brainwashing is exactly what you are denying, that one can always achieve it later.
Meeting a partner in one's teen years, and getting it done by age 20 is best because one is the least picky then among all of one's fertile years. The cultural brainwashing here is that it's way too early an age for it.
What would've been sensible would be to go with the flow in one's teen years of finding a partner, then having one or more children with them by or before the age of 20. I'll leave it at that, as there are ten ways of approaching the goal insensibly, and only one of doing it sensibly. Instead, they've been brainwashed into being told that it's way too young an age to have a child. If you want to win, don't resist evolutionary mate-seeking preferences.