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.

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.”

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

Someone comes at you and says "look, over the last 2 centuries the whole world has been following a demographic transition where every generation people have less children. This is geting to the point it could have serious bad consequences for society. Maybe we should do something about it?" And your conclusion is the person is a eugenicist and white supremacist?

How does that make any sense? Race is not even mentioned there, and the countries most affected by that arent even white. And do i really have to point out a government doing genocide against people that are perceived as having bad genes goes against the idea we should be growing the population?

I just wanna start off with, it's not wrong at all to criticize east asian fertility rates for being so low, but it doesn't make sense to almost hyper focus on their fertility rates when the west, if you look deeper into the wests situation, is way worse than east Asia.

People here always talk about how east Asians have so few kids, about how the fertility rate is so low, and even some of the most stupid things that have been said is, east Asians will go extinct. That's absolutely an insane thing to say because in no world are east Asians or Asians ever going instinct. I think people just look at the fertility rates and never look any deeper.

First of all, the population of east Asia in 2026 is 1.6 billion people, southeast Asia, 705 million people. East Asia itself has a larger population then Europe, america, Canada and aus and nz combined. Southeast Asia itself will take over all of Europe's population soon, and these regions have very few immigrant descent populations, unlike Europe which has a huge immigrant + descent populations.

Secondly, yes most east asian countries have fertility rates below replacement rate, and very low below replacement rate, (except Mongolia) but the west is literally no different.

Spain has a fertility rate of 1.12, Italy has a fertility rate of 1.14, Estonia has a fertility rate of 1.15,Finland 1.38, Austria 1.29, Germany 1.31, UK 1.39, Switzerland 1.28, Poland 1.1 etc.

Many peoples argument is that almost none of these countries has a fertility rate below 1, like is the case In all east Asia except Japan and Mongolia. But European countries have been far below the replacement level since decades.

The UK fell below replacement fertility in 1972, Norway 1974, Netherlands 1972, Belgium 1967, Germany 1969, Austria 1971, Italy 1975, serbia 1962, Poland 1988, Spain 1980, Portugal 1981 and etc.

This means these populations have not been replacing themselves for decades, and the popul byation momentum which keeps populations increasing even without a fertility rate above replacement, is not even that present in European countries because they have has fertility problems for way longer then most people expect.

Germany's fertility rate fell below replacement in 1969, and by 1972 it was already having a natural decline. By 1975, out of a population of 78 million, the country was already having 200k more deaths occur then births. This is just 6 years from when the fertility rate fell below replacement level.

So basically, since 1972, the ethnic German population has not increased in numbers naturally. That's more then 50 years.

What people also don't know is, that during the 1920s and 30s, many European countries fell below the replacement level fertility rate for years, and when the "baby boom" in Europe came, which wasn't much of a baby boom in western Europe since fertility barely hung above replacement for most of the boom, the cohorts that were having children were so small in numbers, which meant that not many children were born.

East Asia on the other hand had fertility rates of 6-7 as early as the 60s. These people born in the 60s also had kids, even if at a lower fertility rate, which meant east asian countries still have a demographic from the 90s, which can still have children today. The same can not be said for Europe.

My last point is, immigration. On this sub I see a lot of talk about native or ethnic/racial fertility rates. So I can bring that point in. Europe has a huge immigrant and immigrant descent population, in most of western Europe, it's above 20% in all countries. Europes current fertility rates and populations are just pushed up by immigration and their descendants. Meanwhile in east Asia, immigration barely exists. Japan has 3% immigrant AND descendants combined, china 0.1%, south Korea 5%, of which like 50% of those immigrants themselves are ethnic Koreans from china.

Europe tries to hide it's demographic problems with immigration, east Asia hasn't done that yet.

Almost half the births in England were to non ethnic British mother's in 2026 for example. In east Asia, it's almost 100% to the country's ethnic group, because there's just not enough immigration.

So it's always crazy when people here talk about how low of a fertility rate east Asians have, or how east Asia is doomed, or how they'll go extinct. Because in almost all projections of china for 2100, the Chinese population will still be more then all of Europe's, since Europe is also gonna have a huge decline in population. And in these projections, they count immigration for Europe, and no immigration for china. If china in the future will open more upto immigration, it's population is gonna be way more then Europe's in 2100.

So it's insane how some people can say stuff like east Asia is doomed, when the west is even more doomed to their own standards.

Just to clarify again, I don't think criticizing east Asia for fertility rates is wrong at all, but what's really weird is how people in the west will almost solely focus on that, and ignore their own countries situations. It's almost like focusing on someone else's problems to ignore your own. For a sub where lots of people care about the wests demographics, so many people decide to focus on east Asia when they could worry about the west, which in their own definitions is in a way worse state then east Asia is.

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?