Do you think the right has a point that there are not enough babies being born?

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It’s a very common prolife trope. The world will collapse if not enough babies are born because the economy will collapse and there won’t be enough people to get work done.

For me, the truth of this statement is location dependent. In a place like Japan, yes, I could see some consequences of population decline. Such as not enough people to take care of the elderly.

On the other hand, there are undoubtedly positive effects such as the fact unemployment would likely plummet for at least a few decades, given that there isn’t a shortage of work today but rather not enough jobs for everyone.

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Almost everyone I see/hear that talks about people not having enough kids are younger men without kids. After having one kid it’s so much fucking work I definitely can say it isn’t for everyone. I love my daughter more than anything but Jesus does she have a lot of energy and is expensive as fuck 🤣

I disagree but let’s take the premise as true that we need more babies.

The GOP thinks the way to get there is to force women to be broodmares and give up bodily autonomy.

If we need to make more babies, support families to do so. Almost every person I know who doesn’t have kids is not doing so because they can’t fucking afford it. Make it affordable. Pay for childcare, pay for maternity leave, pay for healthcare, pay for kids to eat in schools. Do the basics to ensure that families can afford to have kids.

Republicans screech about low birth rates but then do fuck all to support families having kids.

I think the declining birth rate is a good thing. We cannot sustain a forever expanding population eventually we will just overcrowd each other. Even in nature so the animals there’s an ebb and flow. Overpopulated areas will eventually die off due to losing the resources due to overcrowding and become underpopulated, and cycle through again.

A lot of it has to do with profits and rich people needing cogs for their wheels to continue to be born to prop up their massive profits and continue feeding the beasts. Unlimited growth will eventually choke itself out but they don’t care about that now do they?

They are correct that there aren't enough babies being born but not for the market reason they present. Markets adjust.

They are correct because we consistently are seeing in the developed world a lower number of babies being born that one would expect based on the number of children people report wanting to have.

Through a combination of social and cultural changes and multiple large scale disruptions, we've made hitting milestones very difficult for people. The disruptions, the financial collapse and the pandemic and in the US 9/11, were all made worse because of the rise of people like Reagan and Thatcher.

It's not everyone but most people tend to follow the education, then stable career, then stable relationship, then longterm housing and then kids path. When education takes longer, careers take longer to establish, and housing isn't being built - you don't get to kids.

I'm old enough to be on the edge of when this started and anecdotally I know people this happened to. People that wanted two to three kids but didn't start early enough so they ended up with one to two.

I think too few people are talking about adaptation. I think it's true that the more power women have to design their lives,  the fewer children they will have, on average.  It's a beautiful experience for many,  but also physically difficult/risky, and it greatly hinders autonomy. Not to mention unaffordable childcare and uni. 

 While I think measures to make parenthood easier are good,  I still think there are too few efforts being made to adjust economies to a declining population. 

It's white babies that the Right is worried about. We have thousands of black and brown babies trying to enter the USA at our Southern Border, babies that the Right is desperately trying to keep out.

No. The demographic lack of kids should hit about the time AI eliminates their jobs.

Plenty of babies are being born in the world every year. They're just not the color conservatives want them to be.

If our economy relies on continuous population growth, maybe that's a problem we should try solving, or we can just encourage immigration. If people feel that it's a problem that our "lineage" gets diluted, I'm not interested in solving that problem. If people feel that it's a problem that our values or culture get diluted, culture and values have been changing since the country was founded, so, again, I don't see a problem here in need of solving.

But by all means if there's something about the country that people feel like we need to try harder to preserve in the face of immigration, maybe we should be thinking of ways of improving how immigrants assimilate so that we won't be so afraid of immigration anymore.

No.

No. If there's one thing our current situation keeps telling us, it's that the earth is not interested in supporting an unlimited number of people. It's certainly not the worst thing if our population declines some... at least until we figure out how to colonize other planets.

It's not like 6 billion people are substantially more likely to go extinct than 8 billion people in the same shared space.

There are a number of countries that are not producing enough children to keep up with "market needs." For those, like Japan, that heavily restrict immigration, guess what the solution is?

It turns out this entire notion of "need more babies" is an anti-immigrant message.

There are plenty of babies in the world, even if this country or that one is not producing as many as they did before.

Perhaps we just need to come to terms with the fact that a baby born in Ghana or India can be just as valuable to our economy as a baby born in the States.

I think that our current welfare system is built around continual growth, but I also think we could change that

until the costs of raising a child are lower, the argument to have more babies is laughable

There's 8 billion people in the world. We have spares.

When people complain about "not enough babies being born" what they are really complaining about is "not enough of the right kind of babies are being born."

If they mean, by extension that we need paid parental leave, expanded child tax credits, publicly subsidized childcare, free school lunch etc……then yes, they have a point.

How can we simultaneously have a problem of not enough babies- tiny humans with tons of needs and no skills yet- and yet more immigration of people looking to do work is also a terrible thing?

I know there are some precarious mental gymnastics they use to try to square those, but it really comes down to racism. And some of them are mask off about it with their "great replacement theory".

Maybe.

It doesn't change that their policy doesn't encourage reproduction so much as cruelly enforce it at the expense of social cohesion and self-determination.

Forcing birth is how you end up with people like my parents being parents, and they were both horrifically abusive to the point they lost all of their kids.

Personally, they can fuck right off until they do something about how they handle abandoned and removed children.  They aren't, and they never will because, to my own detriment, Carlin was right about.

A declining population is an issue, as we need young people paying into insurance and social security. If there are way more old people than young people that is a problem.

But in the US we can supplement our low birth rate through immigration. We are lucky people want to come here and work.

I don’t know, but even if it was true I don’t think it’s right to force people to have children against their will.

No. Bc if they were serious about babies being born, then they would be very generous about letting immigrants into the country since they have higher birth rates.

They would also be very generous about making it convenient and easy to raise children, even if you're poor and on welfare.

Their concern isn't the lack of babies being born. Their concern is a lack of WHITE babies being born.

The gop isn't making it any easier to afford kids. Housing is crazy. Daycare is crazy. Groceries, car, college, health insurance. Most people can barely keep themselves going.

Not with regards to the US, we have plenty of immigration to fill any gaps

 Do you think the right has a point that there are not enough babies being born?

No, and they don’t have a realistic solution to the problem they outline either. 

We’re at 8 billion. We’ve always had less and it’s usually been too many.

How much is "enough"? Is there a specific growth number we are looking for? How do we attain that exact number?

It's kind of an interesting question, because until last century, the only ways to control the amount of children women had were abstinence, condoms and abortion. Women had ~6 children per woman in 1800 and 5 per woman until around 1965 with a massive drop since then. Child mortality was also a lot higher, so maybe 3-4 of those lived to adulthood. https://www.gapminder.org/topics/babies-per-woman/

Now we have lots of ways to control fertility so now the main drivers of how many kids people have are a) economic - middle class now takes two working parents in most cases, plus a child now means an investment of resources to educate and b) how difficult it is to raise a kid in the modern nuclear family structure.

Many first world countries have tried tweaking a) with child subsidies, to very little effect. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3000017/ - scroll down to table 3 for data on the effect of child subsidies. Tweaking b) is much more difficult, and, I think, the root of the problem. Having kids has become too damn hard in a lot of ways. And as less people have children, the culture becomes less friendly to children, and it becomes a spiral down.

So I am afraid that more authoritarian regimes are going to try more drastic measures to increase birth rates, more repressive policies on women and outlawing abortion. But I think that will only have a limited effect also. Abortions have actually increased since Dobbs, https://www.guttmacher.org/2024/03/despite-bans-number-abortions-united-states-increased-2023 and even if there was a national abortion ban, it would take completely locking down the postal service to eliminate it. Outside of enslaving women and forcing them to reproduce, which most people don't have the stomach for, I don't know what we could change that could reverse this trend other than going back to a pre-industrial society where we need lots of physical human labor.

Also, a lot of people seem to take for granted that we need constant growth of human beings to sustain a capitalist economy, but really we just need increasing productivity. That can be accomplished with a shrinking population. A rapidly shrinking population will be a challenge for sure, but one that lasts a few generations and can be managed.

The planet has over 8 billion people on it. This is not an issue. 

If conservatives were seriously worried about low birth rates, they'd get behind things like cost of living issues, child care and medical coverage

If they can't recognize that those issues are major drivers of the issue, they aren't serious about a solution

I do, but every solution that the right wing proposes ranges from stupid to actively dangerous. Never once does it occur to them to address the reasons that people who want to have children may not be: the high cost of housing, lack of childcare options, inadequate healthcare, and minimal post-partum support. Their every answer is some variation on "restrict women's reproductive freedoms."

I feel like it's always a dog whistle for saying the right "kind" of people aren't having kids.

They were wrong about segregation. They were wrong about "trickle-down economics." They were wrong about marriage equality and feminism.

Of course they're wrong about the number of babies being born. Their opinions are based in magical thinking and hopium, not facts. They're wrong a lot more often than they're right.

We need a growing population to grow the economy and pay for elder care. The US native birthrate is flat. The global birthrate is declining, but still well above replacement rate. Healthcare has drastically improved, fewer babies are required to replace existing humans or grow the population. The US can easily grow its population through immigration. We don't need white babies to grow the economy, any babies will do.

It's Maslov's triangle. You cannot get to level 2 without level 1 being met. People aren't having kids for 2 big reasons (in my experience)

1. Expensive
2. Mom's face all the issues with having a kid (career, physical health, financial as more non traditional family's rise, etc)

Why would I have a kid when we need my income to live, but also need my income for daycare? Can't afford to not work, but also can't afford to work. Why would I sacrifice my physical health when I know it can/will cause problems I will be dealing with for the rest of my life? Why would I put so much of myself out there and risk all the downsides to end up raising the kid alone?

No, no, no.

The economic argument is stupid - this "issue" shows, as clearly and boldly as possible, why our economic system is fatally flawed. Sure, maybe we're not at a point of overpopulation - maybe we're nowhere near that point; but we do live in a physical world, with real and tangible limits on space and resources. Permanent growth is, literally, impossible. At some point, if we don't change things, our physical and philosophical systems will cease to be viable.

So my argument is, why don't we work on changing our economics now? It will need to happen at some point; let's bite the bullet and get ahead of this while it's still an annoying problem, before it becomes an apocalyptic one?

Or I guess we could engineer some kind of baby-farming dystopia. Bank on colonizing other planets at some point. Sure, modifying a baseline of universal growth economics is a heavy lift, but compared to the other long-term options, it seems both easier and less fantastical.

Our population isn’t declining in the U.S., and if the population continues to grow eventually we will reach a point where we overtax the planet and people starve/dehydrate to death and/or start wars over water and food.

I've definitely heard a few conservative say that, but it's not like conservative policies make anyone wanna have kids. Not only that, economists do not think it's nearly as big of a deal as media likes to portray it.

Having less babies only matters if you don’t have enough to feed the beast of capitalism, which is not how we should be thinking about life on our planet.

In the past hundred years, we have created a feeling of false abundance based on the overuse of resources. It can’t continue.

I think it's just the opposite, there are too many babies being born! The world is already grossly overpopulated and we don't have the natural resources to sustain life at the current pace. I think the world is very close to the tipping point in regards to climate and population.

Republicans just want more poor uneducated powerless slave labor to work at their companies and keep themselves sitting pretty.

We’re overpopulated. Less people means There will be less demand for services and less strain on the system. We’ll be ok with a few less candle shops, sports bars, roofing places, car dealerships and offices.

No, but there is a lot of empty space between their glued on ears.

no. I know people who have more than 5. they did it for everyone else. we are GROSSLY overpopulated and should slow tf down.

I'd put the declining birthrate as among the top three problems facing humanity, the other two being climate change and income disparity.

How the right frames this problem is inconsequential. Abortion has nothing to do with it. Abortion rates rise and fall with birth rates, as both depend on pregnancy rates.

The short term solution for the US is to import as many immigrants as we reasonably can. If we don't do this soon, we may have to pay immigrants to move here.

The long term solution is to invest in education and tech research, to accelerate automation. Along with this, we need to rethink the 40-hour work week and consider a soft launch of UBI. We also must prepare for reducing infrastructure: prepare for a future with thousands of square miles of unused roads and vacant buildings.

Declining birth rates could wreck our economy if we don't prepare. If we DO prepare, it will be beneficial.

Most people who are concerned about birth rates do not jump to prolife arguments. Various countries in Europe and Asia have instituted pro-natal policies to try to increase the number of babies, and none of them have resorted to criminalizing abortion.

No. They don’t. Designing our economy to only function if there is a constant growth of the human population is silly. We need changes to our economic system, not chucking more people into the grinder.

For example, right now a system like social security is dependent on having a larger workforce then there are retirees, and that continuing forever. That’s not necessarily a realistic expectation. And things like automation can be the cause and solution to that problem. The wealth created by increasing automation should be used to help society and people, not only benefit corporations.

So what we need to be doing is looking at policies like UBI, etc, and funding it by making corporations cover the gaps they create when they end-run around taxes for things like entitlements by having smaller workforces, etc.

Like, think about this. Our economy is literally a pyramid scheme requiring an endlessly increasing supply of greater fools.

No.

I think that we have set up a lot of things with the assumption that populations were going to grow forever, and that we need to go back and try to alter them so that they function with either a stable or declining population, but I don't think there is a dearth of people on the planet such that we need worry about there being too few of us. I think the environmental destruction that results from too many people with too resource intensive of a lifestyle is a far larger problem/harder problem to solve. People will say we should reduce resource intensity instead, but as that seems unlikely to happen and population growth is slowing anyway I think we should count the latter as a blessing.

That being said, I think the argument that we should make it easier for people to have children who want to do so is something we should pursue, but that should be because we want to make the experience better, not because we need to encourage people to engage in it who otherwise wouldn't.

No. The GOP enforces policies that make it harder for people to want to have kids. They mean they want us to have humans that can grow up and be little indentured servants for whatever corporation. They don’t actually give a rats ass about kids.

I'm vehemently childfree so I might be biased, but I could care less about the birth rate at all, and if anything I wish it would go down. If we need more people, we got thousands trying to hop the fence down south, plus we can focus on skilled immigration. I'm glad people are discovering there's more to life than kids.

Global population is increasing.

Generally when people say "not enough babies" they mean "not enough white babies".

Stop being racist, stop obstructing the free movement of people, the "problem" vanishes like the furphy it is.

If they really gave a shit, then maybe they'd pass legislation that actually helps families and makes raising children easier.

That's why we need immigrants. Our economy is zero sum and requires growth.

I would reframe it differently. It is a problem that many people who want to have children can't because they can't afford it.

As with any conservative position, they show that they actually don't care about this issue because they block any attempt from Democrats to address it. Public childcare, increasing the child tax credit, increasing the allowable FSA contribution, increasing the dependent care credit, etc.

We have 2 daughters. We do pretty well (software engineer, she's a psychologist part time), but it's still very expensive.

Having 2 kids in 2024 is like having 4 in 1980. Nobody should have kids if they don't want them, it's an absolutely awesome but disruptive force. You're jumping in with both feet and no safety.

No, I think the world is overpopulated and it's causing many problems today. We need economies that don't rely on population growth. Japan has been doing it for a while now and recently raised interest rates for the first time in many years, which is believed to be a sign that things are getting better there.

No…that’s as dumb as it can be. The world is overpopulated as it is….we use resources faster than we can replenish them..the global ecosystem is suffering because of it.

We don’t need more babies(especially unwanted babies), we need more immigration.

No. There are already more people than needed to get jobs done. Most people are working BS jobs that are completely non-essential to a functioning society. Less people means also means less work needs to get done.

I genuinely think this is just one of their anti-abortion tactics. Even the word "babies". It's so loaded. Why not just say "people"? They don't give a shit about the birthrate relative to the economy. If they did, they wouldn't be so vehemently anti-immigration.

I am surprised by the amount of "No" here.

The current demographic dynamics of modern world are scary given the aging population or social safety nets in many countries.

On the other hand, it's hard to come up with good policy considering one-time birth rate boost will in turn f-up future generations.

No. Increase immigration and spread wealth around via government policies. Conservatives just don't want to do those things.

No, we have too many people already. Allow more immigration

The us has mitigated the low birth rate with immigration for decades and that’s what we should continue to do. Other nations demographic problems are not really our concern.

Also, if you want more kids to be born you need to prove things like healthcare, childcare, education, etc. all things the right will vote down.

In the US? Sure, I agree with them. We can solve this problem by increasing immigration. What's their solution

No.

From an environmental perspective, continual increasing of the population size ad infinitum is going to create a ton of issues and result in massive resource shortages. Rates of growth are not sustainable long-term.

From an economic perspective, we need to continue growing our population as long as our economy is dependent on debt. We are able to pay off our debt for cheaper in the future because we can rely on the economic growth that becomes inherent simply by increasing the population.

Of course, the GOP offers no answers either way. If we want to in the short term maintain growth, then we need to increase immigration from places where birth rates are still high. Or, we need to incentivize families to have children via extended paid leave for both parents and other benefits that other countries do. We also need to invest in technological development to increase our productivity output so we don’t have to rely on population growth to ensure economic growth.

And from the environmental perspective, we need to invest in green technology to increase our available resources and prevent the destruction of the resources we have, all while learning how to transition our economy away from reliance on population growth to grow the economy.

All of the things that we can do here are things the GOP adamantly opposes in favor of just demanding people have more children

Yes, they do have a point though their solutions are not good solutions

Even without bringing up birthrates, most people have fewer children than they would ideally like to have which I think shows some sort of policy or cultural failure. An aging population is a real issue too, and I dont think that infinite immigration is a good solution to it

It's definitely true that declining birthrates will have consequences, but the way the right (and plenty of liberal or centrist wonks) like to frame it as an earth-shattering crisis or "collapse" is totally bogus.

Within my lifetime (~50 years) the global population has grown from ~4 billion to its current level of ~8 billion. Societies were not in a state of collapse when we had half as many people in the world. Personally, I think if global population stabilizes around 4bn, we'll be in much better shape than we are now. But of course, the short-term issue is the direction of change ... we'll have to make lots of adjustments in policy areas like taxes and immigration. But we can do that if we have the political will, and if we don't get sucked into right-wing fear-mongering, which is really a barely disguised panic about non-white folks out-reproducing those noble white Christians.

So we can largely dismiss the right's white-supremacist take on this issue, but more reputable sources also like to frame birthrate decline as an inherently bad thing. What really drives me nuts when reading these sources is that they tend to completely ignore climate change and the disruptions which are already being felt due to that. Why would people want to churn out big families when their rivers are drying up, their towns are wiped out by wildfires, their houses have been destroyed by floods or hurricanes, etc? (And whether or not they want to -- can they?) It's such a dumb capitalist mentality of growth at any cost. As has been pointed out repeatedly, things like childcare, medical care, and housing are priced out of reach for so many people; and mainstream media keep churning out these pieces exhorting us all to keep cranking out the babies so we'll have plenty of future workers to prop up an unsustainable infinite-growth economy. It's ridiculous. If we want to preserve life on this planet, we need to allow birth rates to gradually come down to a more reasonable, sustainable level and try to exist in balance with the earth, already.

I am fostering 2 little boys and I think I could do 2 more. I want a big family. I am a man and I do have my husband helping me. It is a full-time job that is nonstop. I personally love it, and I do worry about schools closing due to low enrollment and what will happen in the future. I am not super worried, but I am slightly concerned. We can't force people to have children, and if they were really worried they would make sure there are systems to help people that want children have them. Like housing for one. I feel over all it is a good thing because people are being responsible or at least responsible people are being responsible. Still too many people with their kids ending up in the foster system. That is something we need to work on. If you are going to have a kid take care of the kid. They come first always. Be a parent if you are going to have one or please don't have any.

I am fostering 2 little boys and I think I could do 2 more. I want a big family. I am a man and I do have my husband helping me. It is a full-time job that is nonstop. I personally love it, and I do worry about schools closing due to low enrollment and what will happen in the future. I am not super worried, but I am slightly concerned. We can't force people to have children, and if they were really worried they would make sure there are systems to help people that want children have them. Like housing for one. I feel over all it is a good thing because people are being responsible or at least responsible people are being responsible. Still too many people with their kids ending up in the foster system. That is something we need to work on. If you are going to have a kid take care of the kid. They come first always. Be a parent if you are going to have one or please don't have any.

Probably. Watch Korea to get a sneak peak I guess. They already have massive gerontocracy problems that make housing more expensive.

Sure but they offer no solutions

So…Why not accept immigrants and their babies?

They have a point, but it's solvable in ways they don't like such as immigration and higher taxes on the wealthy. It's also important to note that this has suddenly become an important talking point while abortion is a potentially making them unelectable. This is a conversation meant to excuse and validate their unpopular political stance on women's reproductive rights.

yes... population decline is a very real and very serious issue that we'll be facing in the next 50-100 years

im not sure if this is the reason they're arguing the point, but it is a reality

No

I mean, you said it. It's very region specific. Some areas probably need fewer people, and some need more.

If you think the way our economic system is good, then yeah… low birth rates are a problem because of dependent populations.

However, I’d argue that we don’t need more kids, we need a new economic system that isn’t so focused on perpetual growth, financialization and rampant consumption.

A sustainable global economy would probably work better with fewer humans.

i think there’s clearly a growing demographic shift that will become more and more problematic over time if the birth rate doesn’t get up to at least replacement level, yes. not sure exactly how to solve it as european nations that provide much more welcoming environments for having kids than the US are seeing similar demographic issues.

Immigration is a much better solution that imprisoning women in breeding camps or whatever the GOP wants 

This is a very valid point worthy of deep discussion, but why is it appearing in a political type sub? Population decline is a societal issue, not a political one, unless the right is using it to reinforce their anti-abortion positions, which just again results in the elimination of body autonomy.

There is no lack of people in the world, just within certain countries, Japan being the most dire because their population is in rapid decline. If the goal is to increase population, just let more people in, but that's not the goal, is it? The goal is to have more American babies, not more people.

Global migration is happening right now, and it is still in its very early stages. Population growth in some african countries is unsustainable in their curent economies so where will those people go? North to Europe. Same going on in North America, except substitue central and south america with africa and the US with Europe.

We can put our heads in the sand as much as we want, but this migration is absolutely inevitable.

I guess they’d better go have them, then, instead of just whining about it on Twitter 

While I understand the need to grow our popluation and work force, it can be done with immigration too.

I do not see stating that low birthrates are a problem as a right or left issue at all.

Yes. But it's not a reason to ban abortion. The population is graying, it can not recreate itself and it will lead to a population decline if we assume a migration of 0 (The catch of this story !).

For USA: 1,6 babies per woman, while you need 2,1 babies per woman to recreate the population. More will lead to a population rise, less will lead to a decline.

Eventually, the fertility rates decline in every part of the world for many different reasons, but none can be stopped by banning abortions fully. (If the stats I find on google are correct, the last time the US hit the "magical number" was in 1971. That says a lot.)

In 10 years, it’s projected that we are going to have to cut back on social security benefits, because there aren’t enough gen x, millenials, and gen z to pay for the amount of retiring baby boomers.

So yes. There aren’t enough kids being born.

The U.S. has always been a nation of immigrants—that’s our strength. Not great if you’re a blood & soil Christian nationalists, though

Forcing people to have unwanted children, or an unaffordable expense, is not a healthy way to increase births.

Lower the cost of having a child to $0, extend maternity leave to cover all new births, free childcare for mothers that want to go back to work after maternity leave, cover school meals for all children. Each one of these would likely help increase the birth rate, all of them together may get us to the replacement levels (roughly 2.1 children per woman).

Yes and no. Globally, the world population growth is slowing down and is expected to reach an equilibrium of around 10-11 billion people near the end of the century. This is objectively a good thing as lower fertility rates are tied to two important metrics: literacy rates, and overall health outcomes. The baby booms we had in the 20th century were due specifically to those two metrics, particularly the latter in early childhood survival, improving dramatically, while a cultural shift/expectation to have as many kids as possible had not phased out. This idea to have as many kids as possible was because families could have 5-6 kids be born, but only 2 reach adulthood. Suddenly for 2-3 generations it's 3, then 4, then 5 of those kids living to adulthood.

I think what we are seeing in countries with extremely low fertility rates are outlier cases and ones that may have unique cultural blocks. For instance, people don't realize that Bangladesh is right at replacement level after previously having a birth rate of 6.3 children per family just 40 years ago.

Now as it relates to the United States, we do have below-replacement level that is being offset by immigration of young workers. But that may not last. What we need are "carrot" policies that remove obstacles to having and raising kids. The biggest two are having paid family leave, and reasonably priced early childhood daycare. I don't know how to solve the latter, but the former is much more readily achievable.

The right is watching their congregation numbers falling, and they know poor people go to church (tithes, y'all!) and they need butts in seats when the collection plate comes around.

One of the best ways to counteract this population decline is to actually increase immigration.

I haven't delved too much into the statistics but last I heard we are under the replacement rate for our population.

If we want to increase that, then yes I agree with you OP that we should encourage more babies to be born.

That being said, I find it odd that liberal policies seem to be the only ones that empower that goal. Sure there's the topic of abortion (which I largely disagree with the left's view on) but there's also virtually no social programs being pushed by the right that will help children either. I say put your money where your mouth is if you want more children to be born

Our birth rates are declining. We will not have enough people to take care of the glut of old people we are going to continue to face as they live longer. We also don’t have enough workers to keep Social Security solvent.

What I find interesting is that conservatives rail on this fact, yet are so antagonistic towards immigrants…when immigrants are basically our only solution to these issues at the moment.

They are correct about there needing to be population growth, that is not a right wing view. If right wing people use it as a bad faith argument for being pro life sure, just make sure to add that they could also just support more immigrants coming into the country.

AI will help bridge the gap in some places

We're below 1 to 1 currently. Is that good or bad I don't know. I do know it means the country will start shrinking. This will lead to less productivity. Is it good or bad I could not tell you.

I think it's a little bit of drawing the wrong conclusions from a factual statement. Abortion is a distally tangentially related topic, maybe. But there's significantly more germane and salient topics to discuss in the abortion debate, and grasping at this one is off-putting.

The actual statement that babies aren't being born at rates of replacement is an important factual statement that will have great impacts to our society. These aren't insurmountable impacts, and much like I said with abortion, there are plenty more rational and appropriate responses to those impacts than considering abortion (or lack thereof). So:

Do you think the right has a point that there are not enough babies being born?

Yes, just not necessarily the point they are making.

It’s a very common prolife trope.

Just because abortion/prohibiting abortion would affect these numbers, doesn't mean that abortion should be or needs to be a part of the solution to population decline. For nearly everyone, far more meaningful bases emerge for their stance on abortion, and population decline is an incredibly silly rationale when other options are the killing of babies as the right sees it, and women's rights as the left sees it.

There is no shortage of children waiting to be adopted.

No. We have overpopulated the planet. We need to reduce the population significantly.

Just in terms of water. Our aquifers are running out, completely independently of climate change. But you combine that with the droughts we're having in the West, and where are they going to get water from? We're running out of aquifer water everywhere else because of irrigation for urban development and farms needed to feed too many people. We're using the aquifers way faster than they get replenished. California, New Mexico, the stretch from South Dakota down to northern Texas, eastern Arkansas, western Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama, are all in a particularly bad place.

That affects a huge amount of farmland.

Then you factor in pollution, climate change, etc... Yeah, we don't need more people. We need fewer. A lot fewer.

No, and I honestly don't care about the topic in any real way.

Conservatives only seem to bring up birth rates as part of their push to reinforce "traditional family values".

No.

Look at the effect of Millennials and younger simply existing and the housing shortage. Why is it so expensive? Tons of more people and housing that didn't increase as much.

More people means more resources needed. Add hundreds of millions more people and what do you think will happen to the price of food? Think that $15 burger is outrageous now? Just wait.

Maybe the real solution is to convert all the old people into Soylent Green.

Given environmental pressures, i actually think we should reduce global population so that future generations can enjoy a greater quality of life and better natural environment.

Also Japan seems like a perfectly functional society to me.

No, the planet is going to hell fast enough.

No

Yes, and no. The demographic profiles in the U.S. show that the population will stabilize in the next 20 years. Just as the trend of never ending population growth wasn’t going to last forever, neither is population decline. What’s mainly declining is urban populations that only make up for it with influx from other areas. Rural areas tend towards replacement, or above replacement levels. What the right is concerned about is white birth rates. The white population is ahead of everyone else in terms of the industrial/urban birth rate decline because it started earlier. It’s leveling off, and will be among the first ethnic groups to stabilize, especially in the Midwest, and other rural areas. Evangelicals, Mormons, and Catholics, and other rural(ish) white Americans more than make up for the lack of white liberals not having kids(yeah that’s real). All you have to do is take trips to Mormon country, South Louisiana, rural Texas, the Midwest, and the like to realize they’re having more than the needed birth rates to stabilize their populations.

I don't see how this is a "right" issue, its just a simple fact. It's not a big a problem in a place like the US that can attract as many people as it needs through immigration, but other countries are pretty fucked. Of course the solutions are all liberal policies so they are not going to fix anything.

No, as usual, they have no point. And for some of them, the real concern is not enough white babies are being born.

The real issue is the obsession with growth in economics. We need a much lower world population to conserve resources and we need to do this without economic implosion.

I've only ever heard this angle from people who were white supremacists. I'm not saying everyone who says this is one but every time I've heard this was from somebody who was openly racist and wanted more white babies born because they were concerned about being replaced.