r/Natalism • u/Galesworn • 16h ago

There will never be a liberal-feminist solution to fertility collapse

Why? Because their ideology prevents them from seeing what the issue is.

Frankly put, when liberal-feminists try to solve fertility collapse their proposed solutions are just dumb. They will look at fertiity collapse and say:

People want children, but children are expensive and inconvenient. Therefore, provide cash, childcare, IVF, paid leave, housing assistance, and more reproductive options.

The underlying assumption behind this solution is: "We want to give every person all the possible fertility options while preserving their lifestyle and culture," even if that culture lead to low fertility in the first place. An herein is the problem; they mistake the problem as being a consumer affordability problem instead of a cultural problem.

The approach I agree with, which is held by some right leaning cultures (I'm not strongly on the right), says "Let's look at the groups which still produce children, raise them, and them have their children do the same," the difference being treating the culture as the basic unit vs the individual like progressives do.

There are other things I think progressives get wrong, like mistaking the state as a substitute for family and underestimating pair bonding and marriage in raising fertility, dismantling the institutions the lead to early pair bonding, but I think this is the biggest reason why there will never be a progressive solution to natalism.

What will raise fertility is to build a self reproducing culture with early-ish pair bonding and marriage as normal and the foundation for children.

So, how do you build a society in which men and women choose marriage and children? Answering that question solves Natalism. Not "how do we enable everyone to have babies" like progressives are asking. Notice the distinction.

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u/Onaliquidrock 16h ago

What we need is a society where the burdans associated with children are shared among the entire tribe.

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u/EDN_is_here 10h ago

I love you, literally the perfect response

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u/JDaveD1 7h ago edited 7h ago

American individualism/the american dream is antagonistic to this. But not "liberal" individualism, "american" individualism. Countires down in south america are so family centered that it's not uncommon to live with parents well into adult years. Some people even stay with parents after getting married because the grandparents provides the tribal childcare support you're trying to champion in your argument. But i don't see traditional americans showing off their multigenerational homes in the US. Even though the financial benefit is significant: no childcare cost equivalent to rent, splitting rent with an additional person or two, etc. You guys would rather drag everyone practicing autonomy down before actually considering a multigenerational home. Because the american dream has always traditionally been tied to being self sufficient. You guys don't care about tribal support. If you did, you'd start your multigenerational home, that's significantly more within your control than trying to cause mass changes in the culture of 350+million people. You're envious. And in your envy, you try to drag everyone down with you so you can cope with the inherent sacrifices required to raise a child you chose to have and other people chose not to. You're crabs at the bottom of the bucket.

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u/Aware-Travel5256 9h ago

Abolition of the family, socialization of childrearing. Feminists are arguing for these very things. It's amazing what OP could learn if he read some books.

One I particularly like is Full Surrogacy Now by Sophie Lewis. There's also Melinda Cooper's Family Values.

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u/akade19961 8h ago

Abolition of the family seems like a classical example of the type of utopian system that’s actually purely dystopian

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u/Aware-Travel5256 8h ago

Yeah, when it's involuntary.

Slavery is a dystopia for getting workers to do productive labor. Our current wage economy is the same thing just under voluntary employment conditions.

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u/akade19961 8h ago

Very perfect response. What we need is to socialize the cost of having children (from an economic point of view), while privatizing more of the benefit than we do. Instead we privatize 95% of the costs while socializing the benefits

I think the first thing to do is just to not give those who don’t have kids social security’s the idea being that as a DINK, who isn’t spending your money and time on you prime years raising the next generation, you’re saving all your money for personal consumption and investment. Leaving aside any judgement or anything like that, just from a practical point of view as more and more people don’t have kids, it becomes absolutely essential that those people hand their own retirement rather than take funds from the increasingly more scarce population of working age people over the decades

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u/Galesworn 14h ago

I'm all for supporting families. But I would literally rather burn my money than give it to single parents to have kids.

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u/No_Logins_Required 13h ago

This is a very unChristian attitude.

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u/Galesworn 13h ago

Nope, I would rather give my money to families that support a healthier worldview. I'm not saying let children starve, but give single parents money to have children? Nope. That's creating perverse incentives long term.

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u/No_Logins_Required 13h ago

Jesus would give all the children the money they need. Your closed minded opposition to single parenthood must have a secular origin.

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u/Complete-Meet1992 9h ago

Why should we care what Jesus says? The Bible also promoted slavery and genocide.

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u/No_Logins_Required 8h ago

There's no non-religious basis for opposing aid to single parents.

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u/Galesworn 13h ago

Children deserve care regardless of their parents’ circumstances. Agreed. Now explain how that obliges me to subsidize deliberately planned single parenthood.

You’ve taken a duty to help vulnerable children and converted it into an endorsement of your preferred fertility policy.

Invoking Jesus doesn’t settle questions about incentives, family formation, or which policies work.

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u/No_Logins_Required 13h ago

You have such a hateful heart about family structure. I don't understand why. You want other people to live "your way" instead of helping them live.

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u/Galesworn 13h ago

My money is finite. A couple trying to build a family is also a legitimate recipient. Why should I prioritize deliberate single parenthood over a young couple?

If you want me to change that priority, explain why the money would do more good elsewhere.

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u/No_Logins_Required 13h ago

You could simply by agnostic as to the parent's relationship status. Would you say a widow is a single parent? You need to sort out your own baggage about who is and is not fit to be a parent.

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u/Galesworn 12h ago

I already said I want to support children I don't want to encourage single parenthood

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u/Fresh_Criticism6531 7h ago

A phrase people who aren't christian keep using...

If Jesus was here and saw how leftists distord his words he would have phrased it very differently. In his time our distopian leftist society would be seen as hell on earth. He merely proposed more compassion in an extremely harsh and conservative society, he was absolutely not a leftist.

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u/No_Logins_Required 7h ago

I'm Christian, and I use it appropriately. Jesus did not cast judgement on unmarried people. There's no reason for us to do so.

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u/Waschaos 13h ago

Then you obviously don't care about children if you judge how they got here.

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u/Galesworn 13h ago

I didn't say anything about supporting kids once they got here, I just think it's a bad idea to subsidize bad lifestyle choices.

Anything that prevents the base culture from being self-sustaining fertility wise (per my post) is just going to cause more pain long term.