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Fox News doc says not enough ’15 to 19′ year-olds are having kids: ‘The fertility is down’
(www.mediaite.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
449 points (98.5% liked)
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Who the fuck wants to be having kids in this day and age anyway. Also why is it up to the underage teens to push out babies to keep the population up. Yeah let's put pressure on them to ruin their entire lives before they even get to live it. Love the American standards.
The dude was conflating a number of things.
Teen birth rate is down the most, at 7% in 2025. 70% since 2005. Overall births are down slightly last year.
Overall we have a sub replacement birth rate of 1.53 per woman.
The last one is a societal problem. But just saying we need women to have more kids isn't a solution. You need to find out why people don't want to have as many kids. Which I would bet is almost entirely economic. Kids are a large long term expense. And if you're living paycheck to paycheck, with an uncertain financial future, a kid is a scary prospect.
This is not actually a problem, except we want to keep the completely unsustainable economic system unchanged.
So what's the alternative? Everyone's old and nobody produces anything? I kinda like having food and stuff and that's not fully automated yet.
There is still a substantial amount of working age people in that scenario. They just need to be allocated to jobs that matter instead of made up bullshit like for instance the vast majority of medical insurance employees. We have enough labor available that we could live in a straight up utopia but instead much of it is oriented to perpetuating economic serfdom.
Think about it... We used to have a large proportion of people running households instead of working for money, but now we both have more automaton than ever and a higher percentage of people in the labor market, and we don't even work fewer hours.
Well running a household was also more than a full-time job.
If you're even talking about stuff like medical insurance employees, you're talking from one of the wealthiest countries in the world, where such bullshit jobs are more common and easier to justify economically. Everything you use comes from poorer countries which makes it seem like it doesn't take much labor to produce the stuff you use.
I was not disparaging homemaking. Now, many people have to scrape together that labor AND do a paid job, which is obviously a degradation in quality of life.
RE: rich country poor country - we have enough labor globally to make everyone happy and healthy globally. That quality of life is so different in different places is another symptom of the global system of economic serfdom.
Are you implying that everyone globally needs to be unified under one government to dictate which jobs they all do? Because good luck getting that government to represent everyone's needs.
There's still a 1.53 replacement rate. That means if you just reallocate the people that idk, are currently making bombs to throw on other people (or other such things), to producing "food and stuff" instead, we'll definitely have enough food.
Defense indudstry in most countries is under 5% of all employees I'm pretty sure. And we also kinda need weapons to defend ourselves. Maybe you don't, but if Russia sends bombers here, it'd take a whole 5-10 minutes to reach my house from the moment they exit Russian airspace.
If anything, I think we should do away with the entertainment industry, liberal arts, etc. If anyone wants to produce art in their spare time that's fine, but everyone under 75 should be forced to work a real job. We could also mostly get rid of the auto industry since old people shouldn't be allowed to drive anyway so that's a good thing, but then that doesn't exist in most countries either so it's not really a great place for cutbacks in most of them.
I also propose cutting back on doctors and nurses in fields that disproportionately affect older people. Great way to reduce the burden on society.
OR we can just start slashing the social safety nets now. I'm paying into the national pension of the current old people now, but there are going to be no young people to pay my generation's. They're already raising the retirement age, but they'll have to start raising it faster.
NATO is pushing a commitment to a minimum of 5% of GDP on defense.
Which, admittedly even the USA does not do. But in the 60s it was north of 9%.
Most of the cost of things is the embedded cost of labor. Even minerals in a lot of cases. There are a lot of deposits of pretty much everything we could be mining but aren't because of the cost.
One business may only have 25% labor costs, but the suppliers also have labor costs, and their suppliers, all the way down the line. And 25% is on the low side. Even rent has labor costs embedded.
Economy or not, having one person who needs to take care of two elderly parents, themselves, and 0.75 kids isn't great. That's not the goal
Society doesn't have to work that way.
Of course not. That's the point. We don't want it to work that way
Birth rates are down all over the developed world with Japan being the hardest hit
Japan is also contributing to my country's declining birthrate.
I live in poverty and I gotta say, being a single recluse.. between anime, their music, and JRPGs they offer entertaining and cheap ways to get my dopamine hits, but aside from a one off, their media does not help me get laid.
Most of the developed world has the same societal problems that boil down to, no one has the money, time or energy to have kids.
Also health as well. Pregnancy permanently changes a woman’s body.
I agree with the 1st sentence, but you cant expect people to wait until they are 30 to have kids
Its better to marry than to whore around.... regardless of age, thats why "child" marriage should be legal but challenged by the families and test if there is actual love or nut
Live fast die young was most of human history, and I like it
We have way too much order, that it gets in the way
Think about that for a few years.
What reality are you living in? Are you 16?
whoring around is so fun tho
I cant tell if those are rhetorical questions because you're upset...
Or if you genuinely don't understand why the oligarchs are mad kids aren't having babies...
You must be joking if you think "I genuinely don't understand why the oligarchs are mad kids aren't having babies..."
Honestly I'm concerned just why that's the age range the "Oligarchs" are specifically calling out, not having enough babies. All I'm saying is, why is it up to the kids, and not the adults who have JOBS and MENTAL stability.
And I'll go back on my first sentence, WHO in their right mind, in 2026, is like "Yeah, the economy is in such a great place today, that I think I'll raw dog my wife until she becomes pregnant, and in 9 months I'll dish out thousands of dollars just for her to birth a child, and then dish out even more thousands of dollars for doctor bills, diapers, formula, etc. And that's just their infancy. Ok. Not everyone is financially stable to raise a child, even as a full grown adult. And not everyone is mentally stable, to raise a child.
But we're wondering why the kids aren't having kids.