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Republicans wanted fewer abortions and more births. They are getting the opposite (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The rate of voluntary sterilization among young women jumped abruptly after Dobbs, and there’s no reason to believe it will drop off

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

You think ‘yeah stuff is weird now but it’ll all work out in the end’

That’s not what’s happening here, we are well past the cusp of catastrophic social collapse, WELL past

I'm kinda glad that somebody else sees it that way too. I've been thinking it for a while now. I (for reasons i can't explain) believe that women can feel the future (somehow) and intuitively don't want to have children anymore. If i look around and ask anybody i know, very few people my age (20 - 30) say that they intend to ever have children.

Now, i agree with you that automation, and more importantly the end of growth will make workers largely superfluous. I suspect that instead of some kind of retirement or subsidy-based living, the rich actively try to kinda "terraform" the whole population by getting rid of the workers and only keeping everybody else, and i suspect that we're gonna see a population decline as steep as we saw an ascent during the last centuries:

Just in reverse, i.e. in 2200, we might have 1 billion people on earth again.

The reason will largely be unemployment (or rather underemployment - not earning enough to make a living) instead of a resource shortage (such as agricultural shortages).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I know this is a really difficult topic to discuss, and i'm trying to be careful while talking about it, but i'm kinda looking for somebody to talk to about this, so here goes some more thoughts:

Contrary to the 19th and 20th century where a labor shortage was a constant theme, in the next 200 years (assuming the population really does go down symmetrically) there'll be a labor excess, i.e. functional underemployment (i.e. wages being too low to sustain a proper living). Social spending like UBI (universal basic income) are really just a patchwork and leave the population at the whims of the government, which is why people don't like it so much, but still recognize its necessity. Long-term, matching labor supply and labor demand is the only meaningful way, i.e. drastically reducing labor supply.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 20 hours ago

I think you're right about women and birth rates, but I don't think it's anything mystical, rather it's just an unconscious perception

Like that eerie feeling you get when you feel a place 'isn't right', it's usually several red flags you don't even consciously know but your brain is saying 'Ok a lot of things here match with a bad thing that happened in the past, be careful'

And I feel our current and coming economic collapse is creating these subconscious red flags that women intuitively feel:

The necessities for life are more and more difficult to acquire, women's rights to healthcare is being attacked, and authoritarianism which is inherently misogynistic is on the rise

Honestly it just makes sense that women don't want to bring babies into this messed up world.