What? Declining birth rates have nothing to do with oppressing women. Worker exploitation, poor social safety net, and wealth disparity are squarely to blame.
> Declining birth rates have nothing to do with oppressing women.
I think the point was the opposite: countries with limited respect and opportunities for women have higher birth rates because women have less control over whether they have children and if good careers aren’t an option anyway there’s less opportunity cost to staying home with a child.
Just implement a repartition retirement system and small incentive per child which diminish after the third, boom, 2.1 fertility rate for most of the 21rst century.
At least for now, the destruction of our retirement system and our current trend towards capitalization is already killing our fertility rate, and the idiots pushing this will once again realize this too late, because this is what they do.
The adversarial framing here is a poor way to express the same point. Raising children is hard and has significant risks for the mother. If that cost is primarily paid by the mother many women will choose to have fewer children, space them further apart, etc. unless they aren't given as much control of their own lives. That's the oppressiveness we're talking about and it's not a simple “do women have basic rights?” boolean parameter — for example, Japanese women have many rights but there's a strong social expectation that women have to pick an entire package where getting married means they're expected to stop working as soon as they have a child and will stay home taking care of the child and their husband's parents, which extends to things like whether an employer will give them a job.
France is a good illustration of that point (along with Scandinavia) — there are less rigid expectations around family structures (children don't force you to stay in a bad relationship), women aren't considered bad mothers if they keep working, and especially having state-funded childcare and financial support. I've never lived in the EU but have friends from a number of countries and the contrast is pretty stark — the Germans talked about how much better the U.S. is at not shaming mothers for not giving up their professional careers, the French/Danish/Dutch parents talked about how much you have to pay out of pocket for things which are provided by their taxes. (Everyone talked about how much more healthcare costs & how frustrating the billing is, of course.)
> boom, 2.1 fertility rate for most of the 21rst century.
This has nothing to do with the policies you mention. It has everything to do with the fact that the most popular name for newly born boys is now "Muhammed" (or some other spelling variant of it).
It's not that simple: France appears to have higher birth rates even if you exclude the children of immigrants, which does suggest that other policies factor into it:
I know, I'm saying the original point is wrong. People stopped having children because raising children costs a ton, is a lot of work, and they don't have the financial means to do so while supporting themselves. It has nothing to do with how oppressed women are.
I think your problem is that you’re framing this as a contradiction when it’s actually the same point from another angle: in more egalitarian societies, women say that’s a lot of work and choose not to have as many (or any) children.
