To tell you that if a UK woman has not had her first child by 28, there is a 50% probability she will never have children.

[RetiredMan]

I just watched the documentary linked below, about falling birth-rates, released on Youtube yesterday, by the guy who did the research.

(The fact in the subject is from an interview, the documentary itself only give the statistic for Japan, where the equivalent age is 26.)

Some factoids for those who won't watch the video (some are from the documentary, some are from two interviews with the maker that I've also watched.)

Birth-rates are below the level needed to keep population stable everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa. (It looks like only a matter of time until it's true there as well.)

That the invention of the pill is causing this is disproved by the fact that rates fell suddenly in Japan 20 years before the pill became legal there. They fell at the same time as birth-rates in multiple other countries, so it's not that Japan has a different cause.

Women who do become mothers are not having fewer children than before, the issue is that suddenly a large chunk of women are having no children at all. In other words, the problem is not smaller families, the problem is fewer families. (If I remember rightly, Japan went from 1 in 30 women childless to 1 in 5, in the space of three years. It's now 1 in 3.)

I think I caught a statistic somewhere that 40% of US women are now destined to be childless. (Presumably that is among those becoming adult now. But I might be wrong about this statistic, may have misheard/misunderstood.)

One reason childlessness is a problem is that 4 out of 5 women who never have children are biologically fertile and would have liked to have had children, but just never made it happen. Obviously there will also be economic issues, if each 20-year-old entering the job market has to generate enough economic output to support multiple 70-year-olds.

Even though birth-rates are falling. generations already born before births peaked will caused older age brackets to have increasing numbers of people, so for a few decades, overall population will still increase despite births decreasing.

The birth-rate of a population can be 90% predicted by the average age at which a women has her first child. The exact figure has not yet been researched, but it appears to be the case that population will inevitably decline if women who want children do not have their first child by their mid-twenties.

Immigration will not be able to solve the economic problems caused by falling population. There will be nowhere with a people surplus for them to come from. (There was a jokey interview claim that India already has ghost villages, they need immigrants!)

The cause of the decline seems to be a failure of couples to get together in time to have children. The data shows a big drop in birth-rates every time there is a major economic crisis. In response to the crisis, people postpone having children, but once society has shifted to aiming to have children at an older age, it never shifts back to having them at the original age.

A metaphor that explains why couple-formation is down. Imagine you live in a village with a dance-hall that is open for three hours on a Saturday evening. Every young person is there for the whole three hours, and gets to see every other person they could potentially marry had have children with. Now imagine the opening hours are changed to six hours, but most people still only have the energy to go for three hours. Some people leave before the person they should have met and married arrives. Some people are half-way through getting to know one person when another person enters and catches there eye, one courtship is interrupted by a new possibility. Perhaps this disruption kills one potential relationship. If the time-period during which most men and women think they need to mate has changed from maybe as little as five years to as long as 20 years, the likelihood that any potential pair will be on the same page at the same time goes down.

Part of the reason why many women are deciding men aren't worth it.

The world is overpopulated with humans.

I had no impulse /desire whatever to have children. I always felt the world is a horrid place to bring a child into… & really still do.
My 1st was born when I was 29 & then had 2 more, (the 2nd only because I was worried that 1 child would be lonely without a sibling.)

I’m not disagreeing with you. Infantalisation is a negative word. Both men and women are delaying adulthood for whatever reason.

The survival of the human race isn't important. We have fucked the planet up, and now we are in decline. AI is going to make most of us redundant in time, so fewer people needing work will be good.

I think marriage used to be the only career option available to many women until recently. Having kids became part of that.

now women have much better options and also higher standards. A lot of men expect a lot from women while giving little in return.

But it won't get them to commit.
As the old saying goes, why buy the cow if the milk is free?

Part of the issue is women not wanting to have babies with inadequate men who won't commit.
The other part is affordability and housing.

Childfree millenial here. We were teenagers in the noughties when teenage pregnancy was rife. In order to tackle this, the media constantly fed us the narrative that pregnancy is a life ruining event. I remember watching tv shows such as Teen Mom, Underage and pregnant etc that depicted young mothers in hardship who were often perpetuating generational cycles of poverty. They showed life as a parent unfavourably with many scenes of screaming babies in cluttered homes in states of disarray. I truly believed that my life would be over if I became pregnant; I ensured that I had long-term, foolproof contraception in place.

The mission to reduce teenage pregnancy rates was effective as there has been a 50% drop. I believe that the narrative enforced on us in our formative years has been sufficient to put many of us off for life. To this day, child rearing remains an unattractive option for so many reasons, we know the financial and career implications and that most households need two good incomes to stay afloat, let alone bring a child into the mix.

We also often see unruly children running riot in public with parents doing very little to stop the behaviour and actually discipline their kids. This is partially due to the rise in screen time and lack of discipline/prevalence of gentle parenting. Yesterday, my quiet swim after the gym was ruined by children screaming and bombing in the pool. I popped to Tesco after this and was surrounded by children screaming at the top of their lungs running around. If I had DARED to scream in the 90's in a public place, my mother would have removed me from the situation immediately and I would have been disciplined.

You are reading the rambling of a porn addicted male who spends his life listening to single men spouting nasty shit about women on podcasts. He’s now come on a primarily female site to dress his misogyny as ‘discussion’ to tell us everything is our fault.

I did all the right things. Got a university degree, travelled, pursued a career in another country, dated on and off and always ensured I took birth control seriously as I didn’t want an accident. I somehow just assumed that children were a part of my future but put no active thought into finding the right partner, I just thought it would happen when the time was right. When I met my now DH he had been married previously with 2 kids and a vasectomy. We tried to have kids through ivf but I was already 40 by then making it tricky.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I wasn’t so responsible in my youth? It wasn’t for lack of sex that I didn’t have children.

Threads like this, along with those romanticised, rose-tinted tradwife posts, really creep me out.

It’s well known that in countries where women don’t have access to education or contraception, are expected by society to have lots of children, and basically don’t have many rights, the birth rate shoots up — often 5+ kids per woman on average.

Are we being slowly prepped here in the UK for women to have our rights stripped away “for the good of mankind”?

It’s fucking scary for anyone with daughters

I posted after you but I too was taught that an unwanted pregnancy was life ruining… and I became hyper responsible in preventing that from happening.

That's not how probability works. There's not a 50% probability we'll all murder someone or win the lottery just because there are two outcomes, "will" or "won't".

They creep me out too and I’m childfree. I don’t see it as a problem if population is dropping and it’s certainly not MY problem. If someone didn’t want to do a certain job, you wouldn’t force them to. Same with motherhood.

One idea was that the government needs to step in and help? Hmm, where is all this extra money going to come from then?
A lot of the problem comes down to financal but more than that feckless fathers who don't 'forget' they have a child and go on to father others with other women.
Men in relationships who are generally useless and don't support with childcare and looking after the home where they live, because they are too lazy to learn ans would rather be gawping at their phones, gaming or out spending hours a week on hobbies.
Many women aren't, thankfully stupid enough to have kids with idiots like this and the ones they do have cost a lot to raise properly.
I read the only post and some of the remarks from this read like a political agenda from Germany at a certain time with it being a womans place to have children and be the perfect Aryan mother.

Are we being slowly prepped here in the UK for women to have our rights stripped away “for the good of mankind”?
It’s fucking scary for anyone with daughters

It really is scary, I always thought if I have kids I leaned towards wanting daughters, now a part of me thinks hmm do I really want daughters ( or any kids)

The mere suggestion that in 2025 with all we know about the systemically unfair way the world operates, how the rich are getting richer off the backs of most of us , climate change and how male violence and misogyny is rampant that woman should be risking their bodies and bringing kids into the world for the “good of a society” that increasingly dehumanises all of us is bonkers and highly distasteful.

There are good reasons (for those capable of doing it well) to have and raise kids, and I’m not anti-kids but “future taxpayers” aren’t good reasons for individuals to decide to have kids.

As David Attenburgh (I think) said the best contraceptive for women is education. the birth rate is falling as women in education is rising - no longer looking to be a SAHM women now want (need) their own jobs, money, careers etc and realised men have been taking the p*ss for years.

Having a child now is a choice, not an expectation. And women are making other life choices. Add on the substandard medical service for women, lack of support and work inflexibility is it any wonder this is happening.

Sub standard medical support may be a factor here but in developing countries where medical support is non existent women still have many children.
I think it’s more about education and opportunity’s for an alternative for women than anything else.

Another more minor factor is men. Men also face the same standards of living issues. And on top of that they see in the media multiple famous men becoming fathers (albeit usually not for the first time) right into their 60s. Why struggle financially being a dad in your 20s when you can do same in your 40s-50s (and in the meantime have fun with OLD)

Perhaps they should hand out awards for good breeders, OP. What do you think?

I completely agree. There’s been a sharp increase in these sort of threads recently, too. I think they should be pushed back against, firmly, every time.

I asked earlier and nobody responded. What do you think the impact of a male birth control pill would be on this problem?

I don't think it's a bad thing that birth rates are falling. The world is overpopulated, natural resources are diminished and societies are crumbling.

Plus, the original poster put all the nuance on women, but men and their behaviour towards women are also a factor.

yes but developing countries rarely educate their women population and it is still a very traditional society where women are the home makers.

Compare it to the US which has the highest maternal mortality rates in a developed nation, add on the costs for medical care, and the 10-12 weeks unpaid maternity leave they get it really does not encourage women to have babies (despite Elon Musks objections!)

I reckon within a few years the problem of low birth rates will be solved with artificial births anyway which will solve all economic/age imbalance issues.

The trade off however being that it will begin the slide into a dystopian hellhole where the creation of humans is outsourced by governments to big tech in order to serve economic demand… our genetic makeup will be molded to serve the job market, and then the stage after that will likely be experimentation with direct insertion of nano technology so that humans can be controlled at will throughout their lives. Yay!

Exactly, it’s education. The more educated women are the less children they have medical support aside. Even in countries where medical support is top tier, birth rates are falling and probably faster than elsewhere because usually top tier medical support comes from a better educated society.