Young liberal women are essentially married to the government. The government provides the financial stability that previously was provided by marriage. It will be interesting to see what happens if that stability disappears. It could be by ideology if conservatives control government but in the end, the unsustainable debt will finish it off.
When there is a Republican "trifecta", they borrow and spend worse than any liberal. It's only when Democrats have power that Republicans pretend to be fiscally responsible. Trump doesn't even do that.
Bingo, so true. Richard, just be careful when you speak the truth. It's a dangerous place to go when one does. When you really speak the truth, watch your back. Stay safe.
Jeff I know from your prior comments that you see no value in higher education. And, many MAGA men like you and Richard clearly find modernity threatening, hence the movement’s call to return to the time of your youth, a time that passed long ago. It’s reflected in your belief that “girls” just can’t manage without their he-men:). Meanwhile, the data shows those “girls” are doin mighty fine compared to today’s boys. I suspect today’s women are nonplussed by the faux masculinity of the MAGA/Epstein class, and find the silly, mindless tough guy routines downright creepy.
I understand you think the data is fake, even though it comes from Don's own government. I can't overcome that. But leaving the data aside, this silly masculinity charade from the right fringe is pretty weird, don't you think? No wonder they can't get a date. Why are they so insecure?
The moniker chosen by the “new” right, MAGA, is backward looking. It reflects the anger and grievance that animates the movement. It fits the movement’s bizarre, backward looking view of masculinity and the role of women in a modern society. As MAGA men hunker down in their parents basements watching porn and cage fights, unable to get jobs or dates, women are awarded more college degrees, outnumber men in graduate and professional programs, have lower incarceration rates, less substance abuse, on and on. No wonder MAGA pines for the past.
Welcome to 2026 Richard. You’re just gonna have to deal with it. Good luck.
Meh. Birthrates are falling worldwide. Too many factors beyond political views. Most people in the US pay no attention to politics or liberal/conservative leanings.
You sound like someone over 45 years old. Kids are on social media, and it is full I mean full of sublime political messaging and misinformation. Social media is crazy and the algo's will feed one what he wants to hear. So, yes, they are indirectly being bombarded with political messaging, and they don't even realize it.
A falling population, perhaps, will lead to lower prices, cheaper housing, less crowding, and less environmental impact.
Also, perhaps the population drop is not by choice: there's rampant hormonal disruption in people from pollution, while costs of living are increasing which relates to resource supplies and other factors.
Yes, the expensiveness of life itself (in addition to all the $$$ it takes to raise kids) is a huge part of it. It's funny how one day we're worrying about machines taking everyone's job away and the next worried there won't be enough people to do the work. It'd be great if a somewhat declining birthrate dovetailed with the need for fewer workers, and not let the Social Security Ponzi scheme be the main driver of these concerns. Let's instead raise the retirement age, restrict access for wealthy individuals, and insist on our basic human rights to end life on our own terms.
the problem is the liberal women have mental issues that warp their view of men and the world. Fix that and problem solved. The more liberal the bigger the problem.
Excellent article. But you have left out any mention of a major factor - the feminist extreme movement that denigrated men and family, glorified the "it-is-all-about-me" attitude where bearing children may take away the fun and potential career prospects of young women and promoted, with the help of a fawning media, the notion that accountability to a societal good does not exist.
1. hundreds of closed hospitals, and shut down OB/GYN services are DECREASING fertility! where I live in rural Virginia young families have said that they are 'not having the next child' because hospital delivery is too far away.
2. disease is impairing and killing babies and children. infant mortality - of unborn and born babies - is high. where I live in rural Virginia a dramatically rising/expanding measles outbreak is sickening many children, and will sicken more. As I walk through our local cemetery it is impossible to miss the very many graves of infants from across the generations. And it does not take many conversations to discover that high proportion of medically-challenged children without local specialty care, when even the local rural hospital is at risk.
3. for 3-4 decades opportunities for individual and family health, stability and prosperity have fled, with 'globalization', 'financialization', and neglecting rural places as 'sacrifice zones'. Trump1 and Trump2 so-called 'golden age' of great new jobs and opportunities lies.
Conservatives' claims to adore precious unborn infants, to uphold 'family values', and to respect 'workers' are obvious deceptive slogans: babies are dying without care, families are being torn apart with lack of support and opportunities, and good jobs to happily and well support a big family are gone.
If Conservatives admire and want higher fertility: PROVE it with excellent health care, thriving economies, and fabulous opportunities for families in rural America.
You may be completely correct about rural America, but less than 15% of American adults live in rural areas and the majority are past reproductive age. I'm not arguing that you're wrong or that what you say shouldn't be fixed, but doing so won't move the fertility needle significantly.
Hoping that rural people will solve the fertility gap is a little like trying to solve the budget deficit by taxing the rich: there just aren't enough of either group.
Somehow, we have to get the mass of Americans to start valuing children again. And no one has any idea how to do that.
AH, but you are wrong. See at https://www.americancommunities.org/understanding-the-u-s-populations-seismic-changes-since-the-bicentennial/ Exurb counties - that may be rural and rural adjacent - had a 137% tick up in population 1976-2024! Military Post counties (81% tick up), LDS Enclave counties (153%) and Hispanic Center counties ( 118%) may also be rural adjacent. Aging Farmland counties (a decline); but rural is not all the same; so your stereotype fails. The American Communities maps helps see that https://www.americancommunities.org/#map See also the map of 'maternity care deserts': https://www.marchofdimes.org/maternity-care-deserts-report These are overwhelmingly rural counties. So practically and morally DEAD BABIES and IMPAIRED BABIES are preventable tragedies. Conservative virtue signaling about fertility and being 'pro life', and their abandonment of so much of America to become 'maternity care deserts', are a hideous hypocrisy. Of course the 'Left' affinity for convenient abortions is another hideous hypocrisy, since abortion becomes a tool to cull unwanted Black, Brown, and multiracial infants. But at least we can see that obviously. Whereas 'the Right' hatefully-hypocritically hides behind a platform of 'pro life' WHILE DEFUNDING HEALTH CARE, FOOD AVAILABILITY, etc for vast regions of rural America, WHILE ALSO LYING about all the great new jobs Trump2 has brought, will bring, into working class rural communities. If that is true, show me the map. The only news out of the White House about rural is about making deals, and regulations, that support VASTLY WEALTHY ag-corporations that MAKE FORTUNES by not hiring many people. Employment of farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers is projected to decline 1 percent from 2024 to 2034 https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/farmers-ranchers-and-other-agricultural-managers.htm#tab-6 Where are the Trump2 policies ensuring great new jobs and growing younger populations in rural areas, including those already with expanding fertility. Rural college towns would be a GREAT PLACE to start: young people are already there; with great jobs opportunities there, they will stay and have families.
Yes, rural population is growing, but total pop is still declining. There just aren't enough rural people to start with. Rural population exceeds urban pop by generation 4, but by then there's only 75M people left overall. Rural population doesn't get back to the 100M starting point until the 9th generation.
Demographics are destiny, but it can take a really long time to get there.
Thank you. Dead babies are dead babies. If Republicans don't want to spend time, effort, policy, law and funding to save the lives of rural babies; and are not interested or committed to ensure economic and social infrastructures that attract young families into rural communities WHERE IT MORE AFFORDABLE and therefore more encouraging TO RAISE LARGER FAMILIES OF KIDS - including infrastructures of accessible, available, affordable health care; thriving education, including life long education in the 'AI-change' era; excellent rural-metro transportation systems, etc - please make that part of the Republican Party platform, or Libertarian, or MAGApublican, et al, platforms. As the data show, that neglect of rural prosperity and fertility if ALREADY THERE, tacitly, but you owe us the heart-felt patriotic honesty of saying it OUT LOUD!
Great comments, farmville! Thank you for this well-researched, vital rural perspective - you're so right that we are still just talking about reviving communities and industries, with so still so very much to do....
Wife and mother used to be a career choice. Now a woman needs a career to live ( divorce can happen without her choosng it) and wife and mother becomes a hobby that only some can afford to engage in. A man without a moral commitment to helping his wife to raise their children, is a mostly useless human being. But without a decent job, it isn't easy.
*Conservative* counties don’t have higher fertility rates, *poorer* counties do. The cause is poverty, or maybe conservatism causes poverty, which data does tend to support.
I beg to differ. People with traditional or conservative personal attributes do have more children than Progressives and radicals. Personal conservative values do not always align with political conservative voting. There are a whole lot of people who have strong traditionsl values and are financial conservatives who also believe in racial equity and vote liberal because of that.
Dig a little deeper, it’s historically been lack of affluence, then religion came along and codified it. There are outliers, but rich people don’t tend to have large families, regardless of their leanings, and when they do, religion is a major influence.
Many rich people have smaller families to keep the land and riches in the family rather than beggar all their children by dividing what the parents have among a large number of children. The same sentiment also predisposes them to wed within a circle of near relatives. Business wealthy are less constrained in this matter than landed wealthy.
Archeology says that large families are necessary when resources (affluence) are scarce or unreliable. Almost universally, a rise in the standard of living in a society is accompanied by a falling birth rate. This trend is old, and repeated.
Some should celebrate declining birthrates: if home ownership is over, if there is no future but forever wars for Israel, if manufacturing is not coming back, if our votes are meaningless, then a decline in birth rates is happy news!
Virtually all of the fertility gap can be explained by LGTBQ+ people being overwhelmingly liberal. Exclude LGTBQ+ people from the analysis and the gap disappears.
One of the biggest ironies of my time was the issue of excess IVF embryos destined for the trash. Around 2010 Republicans saw the hypocrisy in allowing excess embryos to be discarded while arguing life begins at conception. Fast forward to 2020 and gay couples discovered these embryos and started adopting them and hiring surrogates and now the second most powerful man in America, Bessent, is happily married gay man with two gaybies!! In 2004 he could never have held a position in the Bush administration and now in the Trump administration it’s no big deal!
To those who assumed my post was about "all young women". Emphatically no! It was about a group of extreme feminists (and faculty) who have, through intimidation, newly-formed university departments and the media, shaped the narrative to one where "children are an inconvenience" and, therefore, men and women owe nothing to society. Declining birth rates are also the way great civilizations have collapsed. If this is the way the western world is going, well then, that is the march of history. But, let's recognize a contributing factor.
After reading "liberals are more likely to cite mental health concerns when thinking about parenthood" I can't resist saying that at least they recognize that clinging to liberal and progressive beliefs in today's world is a mental health issue. After all, believing that your sex at birth is a choice is a sign of mental derangement.
Recognizing one's actual gendered identity is HARD - no one wants to be a pariah, no one does it for the sheer pleasure of aggravating those of us suffering from Trans Derangement Syndrome. Yes, let's keep trans women out of girls' sports - got it, agreed. Otherwise, this is absolutely nobody's business, and yet it comes up constantly in these comments sections....
Whatever trauma, physical or mental, has caused someone to be seriously uncomfortable in their own body is a tragedy. Compassion and the search for a cure are needed. But the possibility that some child seizes on the idea of being in the wrong body and falsely thinks that hormones and surgery will cure them, and gets hormones and surgery before less radical attempts are made to help them, like psychotherapy, is immoral, not for the child or a parent threatened with child suicide, but for the medical and social services people involved.
Thanks for this kindly reply, but this only works one way - your 3-year-old "girl" is running around the house shouting "I'm a boy, I'm a boy!" and you either do something in response or ignore it. (Or you can tell your kid he's sick and get to work on some kind of cure.) Until this has been your direct experience of parenting, it's not our place to meddle or judge....
It is a parent's right and responsibility to do what they think is right for their child. I just think that when the popular solution is to make a eunuch of your child, some or even several less drastic remedies should be tried first. What, You ask? Well, for a 3 year old, a bit of patronization. "OK, we ( the family) will all pretend you are a boy." A 10 year old or older, there needs to be some serious talk. "Help me to understand. What makes you feel that way?" That is a start, anyway. "What do you think is different about girls and boys that makes you think you are one and not the other?," Keep asking questions and listen to the ideas expressed and think about where those ideas came from. You can't argue a kid out of an emotional reaction, or an adult either, but sometimes the reaction can be softened. If your kid won't talk to you, you need to find some psychological help, perhaps for both of you.
Yes, you bet to all of that - but even at age 3 a family has to make decisions about haircuts and clothing, activities, playmates - by age 10, we're sneaking up on those secondary sex characteristics that are with us for life. Many people hate the idea of taking action "too early," but I know a lot of trans women trapped inside big male bodies, because options were not available at an earlier age. None of this can be only talked about, since a host of other urgent decisions needs making.
And I'm not saying this is your point, but the broader idea of trans-parents just skipping off to the endocrinologist is ludicrous. There is always a lot of shock and confusion when a kid makes this announcement - and no small measure of grief for the version of this child who is taking leave (or never existed, according to the affected kid). None of us likes making a doctor's appointment (how about 20?), and none of us enjoys the prospect of our child having a major, life-changing medical situation. But we all want a happy kid, and that's all this is about.
But are Trans people any happier for the medical care they receive? Both sides of the argument are pushing their agenda and honest data is hard to come by. And in the end, the child is turned into a non-repriductively functioning being. A mistake in THAT direction is more tragic than the alternative mistake. Every individual has one cross or another to bear.
We should be concerned by a shrinking population of working age adults . We need workers to do the many necessary jobs as well as pay taxes. And it seems that there are many forces behind the declining birth rates. And we can attempt to address them or look to inward migration. But absent increasing birth rates, and without inward migration we will simply become a smaller, older, poorer and weaker country. Look no further than Korea and Japan. Korea’s army shrinks with the fall in births. Meanwhile, North Korea remains a problem on their border.
Young liberal women are essentially married to the government. The government provides the financial stability that previously was provided by marriage. It will be interesting to see what happens if that stability disappears. It could be by ideology if conservatives control government but in the end, the unsustainable debt will finish it off.
Remember the Julia ad for Obama? That's the liberal model: kids w/o men.
Yes, from the "do nothing" president. Thanks yes remember, but still trying to forget! lol
When there is a Republican "trifecta", they borrow and spend worse than any liberal. It's only when Democrats have power that Republicans pretend to be fiscally responsible. Trump doesn't even do that.
Bingo, so true. Richard, just be careful when you speak the truth. It's a dangerous place to go when one does. When you really speak the truth, watch your back. Stay safe.
Jeff I know from your prior comments that you see no value in higher education. And, many MAGA men like you and Richard clearly find modernity threatening, hence the movement’s call to return to the time of your youth, a time that passed long ago. It’s reflected in your belief that “girls” just can’t manage without their he-men:). Meanwhile, the data shows those “girls” are doin mighty fine compared to today’s boys. I suspect today’s women are nonplussed by the faux masculinity of the MAGA/Epstein class, and find the silly, mindless tough guy routines downright creepy.
Karl Karl Karl...
I understand you think the data is fake, even though it comes from Don's own government. I can't overcome that. But leaving the data aside, this silly masculinity charade from the right fringe is pretty weird, don't you think? No wonder they can't get a date. Why are they so insecure?
The moniker chosen by the “new” right, MAGA, is backward looking. It reflects the anger and grievance that animates the movement. It fits the movement’s bizarre, backward looking view of masculinity and the role of women in a modern society. As MAGA men hunker down in their parents basements watching porn and cage fights, unable to get jobs or dates, women are awarded more college degrees, outnumber men in graduate and professional programs, have lower incarceration rates, less substance abuse, on and on. No wonder MAGA pines for the past.
Welcome to 2026 Richard. You’re just gonna have to deal with it. Good luck.
Oh Karl Karl Karl... lol you are so funny
Meh. Birthrates are falling worldwide. Too many factors beyond political views. Most people in the US pay no attention to politics or liberal/conservative leanings.
You sound like someone over 45 years old. Kids are on social media, and it is full I mean full of sublime political messaging and misinformation. Social media is crazy and the algo's will feed one what he wants to hear. So, yes, they are indirectly being bombarded with political messaging, and they don't even realize it.
A falling population, perhaps, will lead to lower prices, cheaper housing, less crowding, and less environmental impact.
Also, perhaps the population drop is not by choice: there's rampant hormonal disruption in people from pollution, while costs of living are increasing which relates to resource supplies and other factors.
Yes, the expensiveness of life itself (in addition to all the $$$ it takes to raise kids) is a huge part of it. It's funny how one day we're worrying about machines taking everyone's job away and the next worried there won't be enough people to do the work. It'd be great if a somewhat declining birthrate dovetailed with the need for fewer workers, and not let the Social Security Ponzi scheme be the main driver of these concerns. Let's instead raise the retirement age, restrict access for wealthy individuals, and insist on our basic human rights to end life on our own terms.
the problem is the liberal women have mental issues that warp their view of men and the world. Fix that and problem solved. The more liberal the bigger the problem.
Excellent article. But you have left out any mention of a major factor - the feminist extreme movement that denigrated men and family, glorified the "it-is-all-about-me" attitude where bearing children may take away the fun and potential career prospects of young women and promoted, with the help of a fawning media, the notion that accountability to a societal good does not exist.
I hardly think blaming and shaming women will advance fertility. See my comments above about structural impediments to fertility in rural places.
Ouch, Chris. It’s 2026 dude. See my response to Richard above. It’s time to man up and stop whining about “girls”.
Government by business deters procreation. We need to revisit being a republic.
Here in rural America:
1. hundreds of closed hospitals, and shut down OB/GYN services are DECREASING fertility! where I live in rural Virginia young families have said that they are 'not having the next child' because hospital delivery is too far away.
2. disease is impairing and killing babies and children. infant mortality - of unborn and born babies - is high. where I live in rural Virginia a dramatically rising/expanding measles outbreak is sickening many children, and will sicken more. As I walk through our local cemetery it is impossible to miss the very many graves of infants from across the generations. And it does not take many conversations to discover that high proportion of medically-challenged children without local specialty care, when even the local rural hospital is at risk.
3. for 3-4 decades opportunities for individual and family health, stability and prosperity have fled, with 'globalization', 'financialization', and neglecting rural places as 'sacrifice zones'. Trump1 and Trump2 so-called 'golden age' of great new jobs and opportunities lies.
Conservatives' claims to adore precious unborn infants, to uphold 'family values', and to respect 'workers' are obvious deceptive slogans: babies are dying without care, families are being torn apart with lack of support and opportunities, and good jobs to happily and well support a big family are gone.
If Conservatives admire and want higher fertility: PROVE it with excellent health care, thriving economies, and fabulous opportunities for families in rural America.
You may be completely correct about rural America, but less than 15% of American adults live in rural areas and the majority are past reproductive age. I'm not arguing that you're wrong or that what you say shouldn't be fixed, but doing so won't move the fertility needle significantly.
Hoping that rural people will solve the fertility gap is a little like trying to solve the budget deficit by taxing the rich: there just aren't enough of either group.
Somehow, we have to get the mass of Americans to start valuing children again. And no one has any idea how to do that.
AH, but you are wrong. See at https://www.americancommunities.org/understanding-the-u-s-populations-seismic-changes-since-the-bicentennial/ Exurb counties - that may be rural and rural adjacent - had a 137% tick up in population 1976-2024! Military Post counties (81% tick up), LDS Enclave counties (153%) and Hispanic Center counties ( 118%) may also be rural adjacent. Aging Farmland counties (a decline); but rural is not all the same; so your stereotype fails. The American Communities maps helps see that https://www.americancommunities.org/#map See also the map of 'maternity care deserts': https://www.marchofdimes.org/maternity-care-deserts-report These are overwhelmingly rural counties. So practically and morally DEAD BABIES and IMPAIRED BABIES are preventable tragedies. Conservative virtue signaling about fertility and being 'pro life', and their abandonment of so much of America to become 'maternity care deserts', are a hideous hypocrisy. Of course the 'Left' affinity for convenient abortions is another hideous hypocrisy, since abortion becomes a tool to cull unwanted Black, Brown, and multiracial infants. But at least we can see that obviously. Whereas 'the Right' hatefully-hypocritically hides behind a platform of 'pro life' WHILE DEFUNDING HEALTH CARE, FOOD AVAILABILITY, etc for vast regions of rural America, WHILE ALSO LYING about all the great new jobs Trump2 has brought, will bring, into working class rural communities. If that is true, show me the map. The only news out of the White House about rural is about making deals, and regulations, that support VASTLY WEALTHY ag-corporations that MAKE FORTUNES by not hiring many people. Employment of farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers is projected to decline 1 percent from 2024 to 2034 https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/farmers-ranchers-and-other-agricultural-managers.htm#tab-6 Where are the Trump2 policies ensuring great new jobs and growing younger populations in rural areas, including those already with expanding fertility. Rural college towns would be a GREAT PLACE to start: young people are already there; with great jobs opportunities there, they will stay and have families.
Your stats can't distinguish between migration and birth. Part of that 137% increase in exurb counties is me: I moved to one about 12 year ago.
More fundamentally though, it's a numbers game and rural counties don't have the numbers. Here's a (hypothetical) example:
Rural counties 15M / 2.5% TFR
Urban / suburban: 85M / 1.5% TFR
After 1 generation: Rural: 19M // Urban: 63M
After 2 generation: Rural: 24M // Urban: 47M
Graph showing change/gen: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/rzbtrcq9jd
Yes, rural population is growing, but total pop is still declining. There just aren't enough rural people to start with. Rural population exceeds urban pop by generation 4, but by then there's only 75M people left overall. Rural population doesn't get back to the 100M starting point until the 9th generation.
Demographics are destiny, but it can take a really long time to get there.
Thank you. Dead babies are dead babies. If Republicans don't want to spend time, effort, policy, law and funding to save the lives of rural babies; and are not interested or committed to ensure economic and social infrastructures that attract young families into rural communities WHERE IT MORE AFFORDABLE and therefore more encouraging TO RAISE LARGER FAMILIES OF KIDS - including infrastructures of accessible, available, affordable health care; thriving education, including life long education in the 'AI-change' era; excellent rural-metro transportation systems, etc - please make that part of the Republican Party platform, or Libertarian, or MAGApublican, et al, platforms. As the data show, that neglect of rural prosperity and fertility if ALREADY THERE, tacitly, but you owe us the heart-felt patriotic honesty of saying it OUT LOUD!
Great comments, farmville! Thank you for this well-researched, vital rural perspective - you're so right that we are still just talking about reviving communities and industries, with so still so very much to do....
Funny. Now do the progs
Farmview, that was one heck of a spin! lol wow
Wife and mother used to be a career choice. Now a woman needs a career to live ( divorce can happen without her choosng it) and wife and mother becomes a hobby that only some can afford to engage in. A man without a moral commitment to helping his wife to raise their children, is a mostly useless human being. But without a decent job, it isn't easy.
*Conservative* counties don’t have higher fertility rates, *poorer* counties do. The cause is poverty, or maybe conservatism causes poverty, which data does tend to support.
I beg to differ. People with traditional or conservative personal attributes do have more children than Progressives and radicals. Personal conservative values do not always align with political conservative voting. There are a whole lot of people who have strong traditionsl values and are financial conservatives who also believe in racial equity and vote liberal because of that.
Dig a little deeper, it’s historically been lack of affluence, then religion came along and codified it. There are outliers, but rich people don’t tend to have large families, regardless of their leanings, and when they do, religion is a major influence.
Many rich people have smaller families to keep the land and riches in the family rather than beggar all their children by dividing what the parents have among a large number of children. The same sentiment also predisposes them to wed within a circle of near relatives. Business wealthy are less constrained in this matter than landed wealthy.
Archeology says that large families are necessary when resources (affluence) are scarce or unreliable. Almost universally, a rise in the standard of living in a society is accompanied by a falling birth rate. This trend is old, and repeated.
Some should celebrate declining birthrates: if home ownership is over, if there is no future but forever wars for Israel, if manufacturing is not coming back, if our votes are meaningless, then a decline in birth rates is happy news!
Manufacturing employment along with union membership peaked in 1979…that’s why Vance is attempting to rehabilitate Nixon at Reagan’s expense.
Virtually all of the fertility gap can be explained by LGTBQ+ people being overwhelmingly liberal. Exclude LGTBQ+ people from the analysis and the gap disappears.
One of the biggest ironies of my time was the issue of excess IVF embryos destined for the trash. Around 2010 Republicans saw the hypocrisy in allowing excess embryos to be discarded while arguing life begins at conception. Fast forward to 2020 and gay couples discovered these embryos and started adopting them and hiring surrogates and now the second most powerful man in America, Bessent, is happily married gay man with two gaybies!! In 2004 he could never have held a position in the Bush administration and now in the Trump administration it’s no big deal!
The part where the right cheers on left wing women getting abortions… the schadenfreude on that one… Just wrong.
To those who assumed my post was about "all young women". Emphatically no! It was about a group of extreme feminists (and faculty) who have, through intimidation, newly-formed university departments and the media, shaped the narrative to one where "children are an inconvenience" and, therefore, men and women owe nothing to society. Declining birth rates are also the way great civilizations have collapsed. If this is the way the western world is going, well then, that is the march of history. But, let's recognize a contributing factor.
After reading "liberals are more likely to cite mental health concerns when thinking about parenthood" I can't resist saying that at least they recognize that clinging to liberal and progressive beliefs in today's world is a mental health issue. After all, believing that your sex at birth is a choice is a sign of mental derangement.
Recognizing one's actual gendered identity is HARD - no one wants to be a pariah, no one does it for the sheer pleasure of aggravating those of us suffering from Trans Derangement Syndrome. Yes, let's keep trans women out of girls' sports - got it, agreed. Otherwise, this is absolutely nobody's business, and yet it comes up constantly in these comments sections....
Whatever trauma, physical or mental, has caused someone to be seriously uncomfortable in their own body is a tragedy. Compassion and the search for a cure are needed. But the possibility that some child seizes on the idea of being in the wrong body and falsely thinks that hormones and surgery will cure them, and gets hormones and surgery before less radical attempts are made to help them, like psychotherapy, is immoral, not for the child or a parent threatened with child suicide, but for the medical and social services people involved.
Thanks for this kindly reply, but this only works one way - your 3-year-old "girl" is running around the house shouting "I'm a boy, I'm a boy!" and you either do something in response or ignore it. (Or you can tell your kid he's sick and get to work on some kind of cure.) Until this has been your direct experience of parenting, it's not our place to meddle or judge....
It is a parent's right and responsibility to do what they think is right for their child. I just think that when the popular solution is to make a eunuch of your child, some or even several less drastic remedies should be tried first. What, You ask? Well, for a 3 year old, a bit of patronization. "OK, we ( the family) will all pretend you are a boy." A 10 year old or older, there needs to be some serious talk. "Help me to understand. What makes you feel that way?" That is a start, anyway. "What do you think is different about girls and boys that makes you think you are one and not the other?," Keep asking questions and listen to the ideas expressed and think about where those ideas came from. You can't argue a kid out of an emotional reaction, or an adult either, but sometimes the reaction can be softened. If your kid won't talk to you, you need to find some psychological help, perhaps for both of you.
Yes, you bet to all of that - but even at age 3 a family has to make decisions about haircuts and clothing, activities, playmates - by age 10, we're sneaking up on those secondary sex characteristics that are with us for life. Many people hate the idea of taking action "too early," but I know a lot of trans women trapped inside big male bodies, because options were not available at an earlier age. None of this can be only talked about, since a host of other urgent decisions needs making.
And I'm not saying this is your point, but the broader idea of trans-parents just skipping off to the endocrinologist is ludicrous. There is always a lot of shock and confusion when a kid makes this announcement - and no small measure of grief for the version of this child who is taking leave (or never existed, according to the affected kid). None of us likes making a doctor's appointment (how about 20?), and none of us enjoys the prospect of our child having a major, life-changing medical situation. But we all want a happy kid, and that's all this is about.
But are Trans people any happier for the medical care they receive? Both sides of the argument are pushing their agenda and honest data is hard to come by. And in the end, the child is turned into a non-repriductively functioning being. A mistake in THAT direction is more tragic than the alternative mistake. Every individual has one cross or another to bear.
Liberals actually test higher for neuroticism than Conservatives.
We should be concerned by a shrinking population of working age adults . We need workers to do the many necessary jobs as well as pay taxes. And it seems that there are many forces behind the declining birth rates. And we can attempt to address them or look to inward migration. But absent increasing birth rates, and without inward migration we will simply become a smaller, older, poorer and weaker country. Look no further than Korea and Japan. Korea’s army shrinks with the fall in births. Meanwhile, North Korea remains a problem on their border.