WTF
Edit: I wasn’t sure what I was appalled by at first but now I realize it’s that this fucking medal just encourages women to be treated no better than a prized heifer.
Governments are always offering weird wacky incentives for women to have children, when the solution is usually patently obvious: you can increase fertility by making it easy and affordable to have children. Stipends for food, paid maternity/paternity leave, free childcare services, affordable housing, and a good economy with an abundance of high-paying jobs.
I mean… there’s a reason the baby boom happened in the 50s! But no, that would be socialism!!
These fuckers will do anything to invent a flying machine except the proven model that works because they knoooow it gotta be possible with large square blocks of quarried marble tied to huskies. Just need more dogs. Or maybe more marble. mush! Ok add some more marble see if that works.
I posit that if we add a spoiler with 20" rims and a high flow muffler, this block of marble will surely take flight.
Honestly, we need to reform our economic system and not continually rely on fertility to solve all of our problems.
I’ll add that even those incentives probably won’t help, as fertility declines are strongly associated with education levels and money (and women’s liberation in particular). Give women options and unsurprisingly, some will choose not to have children.
Honestly, we need to reform our economic system and not continually rely on fertility to solve all of our problems.
Fertility and demographic collapse aren’t about supporting an economic system. Even if we were a post-scarcity communist utopia women would need to average 2.1 children/woman to maintain the existing population (2.1 isn’t growth, it’s maintenance - if you wonder why it’s slightly higher than the number of people involved with making new people it’s because you also have to cover for infertility and mortality among those children) or the same population-level result would occur. The nasty thing about demographic collapse is that it’s subtle until it isn’t and by that point it’s really hard to fix. There is no economic system where people don’t need to make more people to have a stable population, at least not unless/until we achieve some kind of immortality.
Ultimately you have three options when it comes to the topic, and they all have downsides:
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Get your people to make more people. Downsides: Those new people aren’t really contributing to society for a couple of decades, which means it’s a long term fix for a problem that might be a big problem in a shorter term than that depending on where we’re talking about. Also, there aren’t a lot of ethical ways to do this, and the ones that are ethical aren’t extremely effective.
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Import people from elsewhere. Downside: If you do this too quickly and/or without pushing for assimilation you will irrevocably change if not destroy your culture. This is why places like Japan and South Korea aren’t allowing unlimited mass immigration from anywhere people are willing to come from despite being on the cusp of the “until it isn’t” part of “subtle until it isn’t.”
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Do nothing, and hope it just fixes itself. Downside: This is essentially a death spiral for your people.
That’s how you create a society of responsible adults capable of critical thinking. They want a society of mindless workers used to hardship and deprivation of their rights.
IIRC. the US is one in two countries in the entire world that does not offer paid maternity leave.
Truth. Although at least FMLA allows us to not get fired during the 12 weeks after having a kid. You just won’t get paid, assuming you haven’t already used your FMLA time in that calendar year. Hopefully, you weren’t stuck on bedrest during the pregnancy because you only get up to 12 weeks. Period. And that’s whether it’s used before or after the kid’s birth. Also, if you’ve been working for your current employer for less than a year, you get nothing.
FREEDOM!!!.. hooray…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#By_continent
National laws vary widely according to the politics of each jurisdiction. As of 2012, only two countries do not mandate paid time off for new parents: Papua New Guinea and the United States.
Somalia 14 [weeks] 50% [pay] Employer liability [source of pay]
I think you’re forgetting the marital rape, financial dependence on men, lack of choice, sexist culture and general helplessness and misery of women involved in creating the ‘baby boom’.
Of course they did. But medical advancements have reduced infant mortality and increased life expectancy.
I think you misunderstood my point. Even with all material comforts and financial stability, what makes the original commenter think women will voluntarily choose to have children? The huge surge in population was not only because of government subsidies, but brutal repression and lack of any real choice women had. It is not natural – it was artificially created by a system of violent repression of women.
You still need 2 working parents, few people want to balance a career and children. We’re not designed for it. And their social help, while good for global standards, amounts to a fraction of the cost of having kids. In prehistory a whole village raised children and people barely worked. Social policies help but we need a global structural change.
In the past, people had several children because most would die before adulthood. The 20th century population boom is because better sanitation and healthcare reduced child mortality but it takes at least one generation for women to adapt and have fewer children.
Also the belief the future will be better and more abundant. People need that as possible parents being scared of the future are not having (more) children.
And the society we live in tells us money, expensive status symbols and varying experiences you can brag about are the most important things. Having many children stands in the way of that
Founding of the Trump youth organization in 3… 2… 1…
Oh, well. Better just start working on the propaganda now in case I need to blend in:
what? no. Trump would never use child soldiers.
He needs them in the factories cranking out more of his cheap-shit product lines like hats, ties and bibles with the constitution in them. If they survive the factories- then they get to become soldiers and die for him. he doesn’t like losers, afterall.
If we ever get a group of MAGAlings running around, I’m going full Anakin Skywalker…
Jesus fuck, if you want people to have kids, it is not that hard. Remove obstacles. On average, people want to have kids. It’s an evolutionary drive. People override that drive when they do not feel secure enough to start a family. Just make that easier. That’s it. Make sure people can afford to have kids, that they can provide them a comfortable and safe upbringing, that they can ready their kids to become adults, and that their kids’ future seems likely to be bright. How?
Decrease inflation. Subsidize child care. Increase wages and benefits (raise the mimimum wage). Mandate maternity/paternity leave. Make coverage for kids on health, dental, and vision insurance less expensive, or provide medicare for all (or at least all children). Make sure young people can afford good homes off of minimum wage. Make sure good schools are available to everyone by improving public education and providing bussing. Make sure kids are safe in schools with gun control laws. Make sure college/trade schools are inexpensive and accessible. Stablize the economy. Promote good middle class jobs. Avoid war. Fight bigotry. Provide comprehensive sex education and family planning resources including abortion rights so that people can start families when they are ready and promote generational wealth and welfare rather than propogating generational poverty.
Notice how damn near all of these things that would increase the birth rate are antithetical to GOP policy though? You want the results, but not the means. You want to offer “medals” for motherhood like a boss offers a pizza party for a record profits last quarter. It’s unserious, unhelpful, condescending, insulting, and still leaves new parents struggling to get by. Be better leaders with sensible policies. Maybe then you will get your wish.
the Trump administration has shown signs of enthusiasm for a pronatalist agenda. DOGE head Elon Musk, a father of 14, posts regularly on social media about the need for Americans to have more babies; he has also promoted NatalCon on X. Vice President JD Vance has proposed the idea of a weighted voting system, in which the votes cast by parents would be valued more highly than those by the childless. US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (a father of nine) signed a memo recommending that his department prioritize “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”
Got to provide a continuous supply of children for the labour camps.
…could he just skip to the part where he feeds himself a bullet just like daddy-Hitler, already?
