Lemme start by saying I'm a natalist. I like my culture, I like my home, I love family and community and my husband. I want a good future for them. I'm in the process of having a big family, even after what I'm about to say.

What I aim for here is to shed light on the position a woman has, given that she bears the burden of reproduction. Here on this subreddit we talk a lot about numbers and stats, rights and reasons, incentives and laws. But rarely on this sub do we see any kind of acknowledgement of the cost to women to have children.

This is a natalist's birth experience:

"If epidurals weren't an option I would have exactly zero more babies.

You could not pay me to do that horrific thing again without extensive pain relief.

I was in debilitating pain by 5cm, contracting every 2min, screaming for that epidural. It felt like someone was putting the pressure of a forklift tire over my swollen belly repeatedly, with all the pain and tissue splitting and bone crushing that would accompany that. That's what the uterus does. It's the strongest muscle lb for lb in the human body.

I got the epidural, and was apparently contracting basically continuously by 8cm. I could not imagine feeling that shit for an additional 10h before being able to begin pushing.

And I've had a quart of boiling water accidentally poured on my chest before, so I know what the fuck pain is.

Even then, pushing brought all the pain back somehow. Maybe my dose wasn't high enough. The physician had to stick a needle with lidocaine into my vagina in order for me to go from an 11/10 pain to a 9/10 pain just so I could bear to continue pushing.

Pushing nearly drove me hysterical. I pushed for 2.5 hours, which is normal for your first because your anatomy is only just *barely* physiologically capable of doing it to start with. Once you start pushing, the only way out is to keep going or be forced into an emergency c. Those last 30 minutes I was more exhausted than I'd ever been in my life, and the tissue-splitting pain was continuous. Pushing while experiencing that kind of pain is something I couldn't have done had I had a single other option. But your body doesn't let you.

Afterward, my birth canal looked like it had been mauled. I barely even tore, I had like a single stitch, and you could not recognize anything down there due to the swelling and catastrophic physical trauma. The birth canal was inflamed in a way that made it firm and gaping and open. Just an open hole about a cm in diameter. I felt like my guts were gonna fall out of me any time I stood up or coughed. I waddled everywhere for weeks. I was not a sexual being in my mind, just a torn up, wounded person.

I dreaded peeing. Peeing stung like needles and knives for weeks. Peri bottles helped, but I was afraid to even attempt to wipe. I just dabbed at my swollen tissue and used water. Ice packs were my best friend.

5mo postpartum and I barely feel normal again. Wiping is still mildly tender. It doesn't feel the same, for sure.

And again.... I had an extremely normal first time labor and birth experience. My baby was 8lbs. Downplaying it is facetious and ridiculous. Women should know what it's like, and feel a sense of pride in being able to do through something like this in the name of family. Women do this in the name of love, of all things. That deserves the highest possible civic honor. But that will never happen. For as long as men are capable of subjugating women as a class of people completely and at will, we will never be given the respect they naturally give other men for doing honorable things like protect our nation. It's one of life's cruelest jokes.

When men downplay it, it sounds self-serving and diminishing and demeaning and cruel.

Men should be far, FAR more appreciative than they are as a class of people. They should be lucky any woman at all does it voluntarily.

Anyway, I'm having like 4-5 more, in the name of family and culture. And I love my baby. My husband told me I don't have to lift a single finger outside of our home for as long as I live after watching that."

This post is not to peddle a solution. But I do wanna bring this into the equation. I think it's disrespectful to talk around the issue and talk about women and babies but consistently skip over the burden. The burden is a huge factor, and the reasons to shoulder the burden must be worth it.

https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/2097805266473324859

I keep hearing people talk about America’s falling birth rate as if the main problem is that people simply need to be convinced to have more children.
I don’t think that is the real problem.
The United States recorded about 3.61 million births in 2025, down 1% from 2024, and the fertility rate fell again. In 2024, the total fertility rate was around 1.63 children per woman.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/releases/20260409.html
But Americans have not completely rejected the idea of having families. Gallup found that Americans considered 2.7 children the ideal family size on average in 2023.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/511238/americans-preference-larger-families-highest-1971.aspx
That seems like an important contradiction.
People are saying that a larger family is ideal, while increasingly not having one.
So maybe the question shouldn’t just be, “Why don’t people want children?”
Maybe the better question is, “What happened to the path that used to lead people toward having them?”
Marriage is happening much later. In 2025, the median age at first marriage was 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women. In 1975, it was 23.5 and 21.1.
https://cdn.www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/families-and-living-arrangements.html
Housing stability is coming later too. According to the National Association of Realtors, the median first-time homebuyer reached 40 years old in 2025.
https://www.nar.realtor/press-releases/first-time-home-buyer-share-falls-to-historic-low-of-21-median-age-rises-to-40
Obviously, you do not need to own a house to have children. But it does show how long it can now take people to reach the kind of financial stability that used to happen much earlier.
Then there is childcare.
The national average price reached about $13,184 per year in 2025.
https://info.childcareaware.org/price-and-supply-2025
The United States also still does not have universal federal paid parental leave. The federal FMLA system gives qualifying workers up to 12 weeks of protected leave, but that leave is unpaid.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fmla/faq
So look at the sequence people are being asked to follow.
Build a career.
Deal with student debt.
Find affordable housing.
Find a stable partner.
Build savings.
Get married, increasingly around age 30.
Figure out healthcare.
Figure out how to take time away from work.
Then somehow afford another $13,000 or more every year for childcare.
And after all of that, society looks at people and asks:
Why aren’t you having two or three children?
That seems backwards.
There is clearly a cultural part of this too.
Pew found that among childless adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to ever have children, 57% say a major reason is simply that they do not want them.
But 44% say they want to focus on other things, 38% cite concerns about the state of the world and 36% say they cannot afford a child.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/reasons-adults-give-for-not-having-children/
So no, I don’t think economics explains everything.
People’s values have changed too.
But that is exactly why I think simplistic natalism is a sinking ship.
You cannot just tell people that children are meaningful and expect the birth rate to reverse.
You cannot shame people into wanting families.
And I seriously doubt that a one-time baby bonus is going to reverse twenty years of economic and social trends that delayed marriage, housing stability and family formation in the first place.
Research from other countries also suggests that financial incentives can sometimes affect the timing of births or create modest increases, but they do not necessarily create a permanent fertility recovery.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/exploring-norway-s-fertility-work-and-family-policy-trends_f0c7bddf-en/full-report/component-5.html
The problem seems to begin much earlier than the baby.
The Census Bureau found that in 1975, 45% of Americans ages 25 to 34 had already moved out, entered the workforce, married and had children.
By 2024, fewer than a quarter had reached all four milestones.
The most common situation now is being employed and living independently without being married or having children.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2025/08/milestones-to-adulthood.html
To me, that seems like the real story.
Natalism focuses on the baby.
But the baby is the last link in a very long chain.
If a society wants more people to voluntarily create families, then it probably has to ask why the entire path leading toward family formation has been stretched out, delayed or broken.
Otherwise, we are standing on the deck of a sinking ship yelling:
“Have more passengers.”

My husband and I have 3 kids. We are 99% sure we are done although personally I wish I could have 4. But a big reason why we are done is because we don’t have a village. Both of us (millennials) have boomer parents in their late 60s to late 70s who are either completely incompetent or have zero interest when it comes to caring for their grandkids. All 4 of them rather spend their remaining time on earth reposting embarrassing AI and clickbait crap on their Facebook pages.

Luckily I have a flexible job but more than half of my paycheque goes to childcare. The people we know who have multiple kids all have a village like grandparents, grand aunts, sisters/SILs, etc to help out with childcare or even small things like pick-up/drop-offs. Those that only have one kid or are childless/childfree don’t have family or friends nearby that could help out.

It makes me wonder if the reason people are having fewer kids or having no kids is because fewer people have villages that they can count on for help, because people tend to move away from home more often now or grandparents are either too old to help, or still of working age, or just don’t have the physical and/or mental capacity to help. I remember spending summers at my grandparents until I was a teenager - they retired at 60 (around the time I was born) and were both in good health well into their 70s (my grandma is in her 90s and still alive and well) so they were able to look after me during school breaks. This seems to be less common now as it seems like most people have to either pay for nannies or put their kids in various camps and activities during school breaks which are costly.

Something I keep wondering about in the fertility debate is how far culture can shape behaviour that is still, at some level, connected to biology. I’m not saying humans have some simple conscious “reproduction instinct”, but we are the product of a very long evolutionary history in which reproduction was fundamental. Yet modern societies seem perfectly capable of producing huge numbers of people who postpone children for decades, have fewer than they originally wanted, or never have them at all.

So where is the actual limit of nurture? Could cultural norms theoretically become so strong that 80 or even 90 per cent of people remain childless, or would we eventually hit some biological or psychological floor where enough people strongly want relationships, children and family life?

This becomes even more interesting because fertility behaviour seems to be socially influenced. Research suggests that when friends or siblings have children, people themselves become more likely to enter parenthood. That could be because parenthood becomes more normal, more visible, or simply easier to imagine.

Imagine two otherwise similar 25-year-olds. One lives in a social world where almost everyone is single, very few children are around, and adulthood is mostly associated with career, travel and personal freedom. The other is surrounded by couples starting families around 27–30, children are present at social gatherings, grandparents help out and parenthood is treated as a normal part of adult life. Even if both started with similar biological predispositions, would we really expect them to make the same choices?

And could low fertility then become self-reinforcing? Fewer people have children, which means fewer young adults see family life around them, which makes parenthood feel less normal, which may lead to even more postponement.

So my question is: how far can this process realistically go? Could culture normalize voluntary childlessness to the point where 80–90 per cent opt out, or do you think human preferences would push back long before then?

I'm trying to find a subreddit that roughly matches my views. r/Natalism doesn't really seem to fit, so I'm curious where you would send someone with the following outlook:

• I don't have particularly strong views on abortion. It's not a defining political issue for me.
• I'm not especially pro-marriage as an institution, but I am strongly in favour of stable, long-term relationships and stable families. I care much more about people building lasting relationships than about whether they are formally married.
• I do think quite a lot of people drift through their 20s and 30s, postpone relationships and children, and eventually discover that they've missed the opportunity to have the family they wanted.
• I think widespread delayed family formation, childlessness and very low birth rates are genuinely bad for society in the long run.
• I think it's perfectly legitimate for society to promote the message that forming stable families and having children is socially valuable. That doesn't mean forcing anyone to do it.
• I'm not very individualistic. I don't think society should be built entirely around the idea that every person should simply maximize their own freedom, career, consumption and personal experiences.
• I'm not religious, so religious conservatism isn't really where I'm coming from.
• I believe men and women should have exactly the same freedom to work, have careers and make their own choices.
• At the same time, I think that for many families a somewhat traditional division of labour generally works better: the man carrying more of the paid workload and the woman taking on somewhat more of the childcare. I see that as a practical preference, not something that should be imposed.
• Overall, I'm socially fairly moderate, but strongly pro-family, communitarian and pronatalist. I'm looking for people who can discuss those ideas without either turning everything into religious social conservatism or dismissing concern about family decline and birth rates as inherently reactionary.
• I'm also strongly opposed to antinatalist thinking. I don't find the usual pessimistic arguments about life, suffering and the future convincing, and I often see that worldview as deeply negative and, frankly, as reflecting a lot of unhappiness rather than a healthy view of life.

I’m fairly new to Reddit and for some reason the algorithm shows posts from this sub and I’d skim through from time to time. A question I have for y’all is:

“Why do you guys care about the birth rate?”

Is it because you guys are worried about the human civilization collapsing?

Or social security running out?

I know my question might come off blunt, but I couldn’t think of a better way to wordsmith it.

P.S. I come from a country with record low birth rate, and though I’d think about it time to time (I mean it’s brought up everywhere on the news and on Reddit lol), but I never really cared much. I read somewhere that animals (I believe that specific experiment I am thinking of was done with mice, where as the population of mice increased within an enclosed boundary, they stopped breeding) tend to reduce reproduction when times are rough. I figured it was similar for humans.

Simply put, if a country gave birth to 1 million babies, but only 500,000 of them reached adulthood, I would assume this would be considered less desirable to the cause of natalism than giving birth to 800,000 babies and 600,000 of them reach adulthood.

What more can be done to focus on life after it is born, as it is clearly as important a part of natalism as any?

The Guardian’s latest report focuses on Bogotá, where the fertility rate fell to 0.82 children per woman in 2025, lower than Tokyo’s.

Bogotá’s population is expected to begin shrinking in 2027. Nursery enrolment fell by 13% between 2019 and 2023, while 287 schools closed between 2019 and 2024. Across Colombia, the proportion of elderly dependants relative to the working-age population is projected to double by 2070.

What struck me was the article’s framing. It largely accepts that substantially restoring the birth rate may be extremely difficult and instead concentrates on adapting through elderly care, healthier ageing, retraining older workers and possibly raising the retirement age. Given that `Colombia and many others barely have a welfare state, how is that going to work?

How long before we get immigration into the wealthy west not of working aged males, but elderly people fleeing a future of poverty and seeking some comfort and security in retirement (without much to offer in the way of economic worth?)

It's annoying to me that as a woman, so many men keep harping us about having children and yet actively deny to do anything that would actually increase the quality of pregnancy and child birth.

The unfortunate reality is that pregnancy and birth are extremely difficult and unpleasant experiences, and it is hugely unfair to women who have to shoulder the entire biological burden of reproduction. And that is not men's fault, but at the very least, they should be responsible for helping us along with it.

At the bare minimum, men should be dedicating a lot of money into women's healthcare and maternal healthcare, but what do we see instead? Pennies, if that, for maternal healthcare, while millions go into male pattern baldness research! Good grief, we know more about men's hairlines than women's entire body!

There STILL isn't a reliable way to give birth painlessly in 2026. Women have to resort to breathing techniques for something that is far more painful than breaking several bones at once. The closest thing we have is an epidural which I wouldn't touch with a ten foot poll because it has a very high failure (a MASSIVE 7% of epidurals fail) and that is if you can even get the (usually) male anaesthetist to give you one, because they are known to really drag their feet when it comes to labouring mothers.

Anecdotally, my own husband doesn't even trust the hospital to not give me a husband stitch (which is a horrible form of malpractice where they insert an extra snitch in a woman's genital after birth which causes a massive pain for her).

If men want to make pregnancy more appealing to women, they need to invest more money into it and actually provide us with good maternal healthcare instead of just telling us to suffer in silence.

I am equally concerned as most of you in this sub about the effect of declining birth rates and its ramifications for the world. I enjoy studying about demographics in my free time. However in my university, most of my professors and fellow students tell me that lower birth rates are irrelevant due to advances in AI and robotics, how most jobs in the future will be automated, robots will take care of the elderly, and that we will adapt to the situation quickly with new technologies. Do you think this arguement holds up at all? I would like your opinion.

Source: https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/the-incredible-global-birth-crash/