The decline mentioned in the previous post on this thread continues, according to WaPo‘s Pat Dvorak:
The American birthrate is sinking: 3.8 million babies were born last year — the lowest number in three decades and down 2 percent from 2016, according to a new report by the National Center for Health Statistics.
It’s a decline that is alarming demographers and social scientists — many of them men who chart womb activity like the consumer price index or manufactured-goods sales.
If this keeps up, they fret, we may become like Japan, where adult diapers outsell baby diapers.
Babymaking dropped in the 2008 recession and kept sliding. That makes sense to the charts-and-graphs people. But by 2016, the economy was roaring, business was booming and experts kept wondering when, exactly, women were going to crank the baby factories back up.
Pat thinks she knows the answer:
Here’s the answer: choices. For the first time in human history, women truly have them. A lot of women don’t feel pressured to have kids they don’t want.
“I think there is far more permission to choose a child-free life than there ever has been,” Davidman said. “There’s so much out there to help child-free women feel good about themselves, to not feel shamed.”
It’s not childless. It’s #ChildFree.
“The child-free movement is very much linked to women having more choices,” said Amy Blackstone, a sociology professor at the University of Maine who staged a decidedly nontraditional shower (It’s a . . . Blog!) when she launched her journal of her child-free life with her husband.
I wonder, though. How we might measure this in objective terms? Well, we could ask how many women are turning to artificial insemination techniques in order to become pregnant. Actually, the question would have to be more subtle in order to mitigate unrelated factors such as choosing later in life to have childen, but, still, that information would tell us if this is really a result of it being a choice increasingly made in the negative by potential parents, if the artificial insemination approaches are dropping, or if something more biological is happening, if artificial insemination is going up. The latter might indicate the biosphere is becoming less suited to human occupancy, suggesting befoulment by humanity is not conducive to continued existence. Unfortunately, a five minute search yielded little more than this 2014 NPR article which suggested that the number of IVF births is climbing. Hardly a definitive answer.
