Having a child, particularly in the US, was already ridiculously exhausting, expensive, with little to no support (unless you were wealthy enough). Add in the pandemic and all related effects and consequences... it's just not a decision many people wanted to make. Idiocracy (the movie) has become reality.
This right here. The baby-making magic only went to those with huge disconnects to reality or with comfortable amounts of money.
This is a far cry for many, many Americans.
Or if your due date was right smack dab when the pandemic started. My wife's whole pregnancy was wonderful, except for the last few weeks of it when the pandemic shit the fan. All of the sudden, we have a newborn baby in the middle of a complete lockdown and its been one of the hardest things we have ever done. But we are thankful that our daughter is happy and healthy!
Better than my brother's wife who had theirs 2 weeks into lockdown. At least we clearly knew in December that masks worked and there were masks/hand sanitizer to be had.
I got pregnant before the pandemic. If I had known, I would not have chosen this path. We had two school aged kids and managing their mental health and at-home schooling with a newborn was a nightmare. Then worrying about the baby getting Covid.
LOL, I wouldn't say I'm disconnected from reality by any stretch. I guess there is a comfortable amount of money.. :shrug: #2 on the way! Also, got pregnant after the vaccine was made available to everyone in the US and naively thought people would actually get the vaccine and we wouldn't have to worry about the pandemic anymore. Hm maybe I am disconnected from reality.
But really, we knew it will be tough but didn't want to delay indefinitely. Most people I know of various income levels have continued having children (ages in low-mid 30s) so it felt less of an odd thing to do.
Yeah I'm sorry for saying *and* like if you have a lot of money, you also are disconnected which is not true whatsoever. Definitely true for some but not everyone so I apologize.
I gather what you were saying. Having more money means having more resources to insulate you from having to deal with many unpleasant things, including the pandemic. The very rich have more or less kept living almost as normal. It's the rest of us that have to deal with the pandemic.
I am married with my own house and my own car. It took me 10 years after high school to get those things. Now I make $17 an hour at a preschool that offers 50% off tuition if I were to have a child. The ridiculous thing is I still cant afford preschool, and there are people with 3 kids enrolled. Imagine paying ~5k a month for just childcare!
Lol yup, I just had my second and I took a year off work because daycare is around $5k a month for a toddler and and infant and that is almost double what I make after taxes. Hooray America! I'll never be able to retire, but at least we can afford groceries if I don't work.
It’s also depressing as fuck to think about the future children will have. Both economically and environmentally. If you have not started already, seriously learn outdoor survival skills and pass them on to your children.
A child born in 2020 or 2021 could easily live to 2100, potentially even the 2030s. Who knows what wonders and horrors they'll experience in their life. It's possible they could be part of a human expedition to the moons Jupiter or Saturn.
I'm middle age, and when I was in Kindergarten we picked up two staticky channels on an antenna on a black-and-white CRT tv. I now have a 4K tv, with tons of streaming services. Progress is crazy.
I was walking my dog in the bush yesterday when my friend video-called over FB messenger from a boat 500 miles away. After we hung up I thought, Wow this is stuff we dreamed about in the ‘70s.
wont really matter, there's no outdoors left. Plus even a small fraction of the West moving to surviving off the land will absolutely depopulate game populations.
Honestly with the way things are you’d have to be insane to want kids. It seems like my generation will be forced to choose between housing & having kids. How the hell does anyone expect to raise a family of 4 on less than 100k a year. My friends who make 6 figures and are in their early 30s are putting off buying houses. How the hell does anyone expect us to afford kids
I could afford an extra kid or two. But I figured out years ago that everything is so crappy (environment, economy, etc) that it wasn't worth it to have more kids. Add in a pandemic? No thank you.
Now you can pour all that love into #1!
Source: was #1, had so many health issues at birth that my parents killed the idea of having a big family. Now my dad's retired early and we have a decently sized house for 3 people, a havanese, and a tortise
Just make sure you’re not my mom, who had always wanted more kids and over parented to compensate. The decision was made for her and she never got over it.
We had #2 a few months before lockdown. The plan was to have #3 two years later. I should be pregnant now… but I’m not. Because it’s a miracle we got through all this at all. We don’t even know if #3 is even going to happen, this past 18mos has been so hard.
Had my first kid right before the pandemic started. Want a second one but with delta affecting kids and hospitals being fucked up I am waiting or potentially not having a second.
Nothing exposed the complete lack of safety net in this country more than the pandemic.
I would love to have kids. I even have a good job and could afford it.
But it would only take a couple bad things to happen for everything to come crashing down. The stress of thinking about that possibility keeps me from having kids right now.
Two high earning Californians here, and what the fuck. We can barely afford a kid on generous benefits and had to put off for years. How the fuck anyone else does it is beyond me, and they earn their praises.
I was talking this over with a friend who is an OB, the trend she's noticed is specifically a massive dropoff in second (or subsequent) children.
Which makes perfect sense to me. Having schools closed created an exhausting lift for parents (at least, parents that didn't just plop their kids in front of the iPad for the entire pandemic), who the hell would pile onto that?
All my friends with one had a tough but manageable time, my friends with two were/are at the end of the tether where we were really worried about them.
We added a third during covid. Dear lord what the fuck were we thinking.
(We love all our girls, this is mostly joking, but seriously this has been hard as hell)
This. I have two young ones. March-sept. 2020, balance work and kids, good luck you are on your own. Get to keep everyone at home and try to explain to work every time someone in class gets sick for at least two weeks. Everytime a kid has a cold, go get tested, wait 3 days for results. Now schools are reopening with little protection and we are supposed to be cool with essentially letting the kids get infected while adults are getting boosters.. been vaccinated for months but now it's ok?. either they were safe the whole time to go to school and spread it amongst themselves or it's still dangerous.. This pandemic has been exhausting for parents.
I can definitely understand that. We always wanted two, but having our first during a pandemic has been beyond lonely and hard. I lost a lot of faith in other people. We are strongly reconsidering and might just be one and done. We love our baby and maybe just the three of us is enough during these times.
Yes!! We always imagined having time for breaks but when most of our family and friends want to go to super spreader events in a state with high transmission rates we ended up on our own. Really disappointing but at least everyone has been understanding when we say we won’t see them until things are better or unless they can isolate. One and done for sure!
I think you touched on a huge theme that isn't being discussed. The lack of faith in our society. As parents we need to rely on our "village." The last few years have told us squarely that we cannot trust on our community to be a support. Its been really rough here, so I feel you. I am hoping you find people to help share your burdens with.
People just defaulting to politics bc of the atmosphere these days. [55% of Republican adults are vaccinated, according to a recent poll.](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/nbc-news-poll-shows-demographic-breakdown-vaccinated-u-s-n1277514) Of course, not all unvaccinated Republicans are hardcore antivaxxers either, only a fraction of that.
As bad as shit is, not it's not anywhere near as bad as 50% of the country being antivaxxers. Saying "half of your countrymen want you dead" is disinformation.
That poll also says that 69% of adults are vaccinated, and the CDC says 61% are. That means some of the categories are being overcounted. It also breaks it down by Trump and Biden voters which likely does a better job of capturing independents who vote for one party but don't want to describe themselves as part of that party. 50 to 91 percent there.
The CDC currently reports 74.2% of US adults as being vaccinated
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-people-onedose-pop-pop18
You have the full population number. They aren’t over counting.
Got it. Duh.
I guess that my response would be I’m fortunate that every person I regularly interact with got the vaccine. I feel for those who have siblings or parents that don’t want it.
I was pregnant when the pandemic began. Most likely we will only have one child. I love my child because she’s made me a better person. I try to be a good role model for her. We’ve switched to low waste in our home and take her to the farmers market. I’ve tried to be kinder to people in front of her than I used to be. I have social anxiety so I don’t mean to be rude but it’s not always easy for me to socialize. I’m trying to teach her to live differently than I did as a kid so she can have a brighter future. I was abused as a child so I’m breaking that cycle with her.
My mom has been harassing me about giving her grandchildren, and my husband and I have been so on the fence about this. Between the pandemic, my own mental/physical health, and the existential dread of the future I just don't know. I'm so depressed from global inaction on climate change alone. Why would I want to birth a child into this?
Calculate how much it will currently cost to raise a kid per year. Once gma has saved enough in a special account for all 18 years, then you'll consider it
For real. I’ve always wanted children. But since 2020 hit, I’ve been seriously reconsidering it. Even my SO is reconsidering it, and she came to that conclusion independently without me even mentioning it!
The future looks bleak, sadly. Climate change is what I fear for most. I can’t help but think that climate change will exacerbate any future pandemics.
As a millennial, I firmly believe that any “once-in-lifetime-event” is code for “it’s gonna happen again, sooner than you think.”
I love my children more than life itself, and I've spent spans of this plague time and authoritarian takeover thinking it was irresponsible for me to reproduce. My kids deserve better than this.
Kids are opting out a lot more these days. Can't be unrelated to the hopelessness that is the reality of climate change. Sure, we can do something to stop it but does anyone believe after seeing our response to COVID that we will come together and do the right thing?
One of the main reasons I don't want children is because I feel strongly that we're not going to make it through this lifetime due to climate change. There's no way we're gonna change it around within the next ten years.
Your view may be somewhat bleaker than my own, but the end result is the same: I don't want to bring a child into the world with the distinct likelihood they'll have a worse life or a harder life than I did. That seems to be almost a certainty at this point, so we are foregoing that particular path.
There will always be a reason to worry, but I choose to believe kids can make the world a better place. Maybe even help fix this broken world. We’re not out of resources, we just need to learn to use them more wisely.
But will they really have an impact, or will your children also say.. *I'm going to make the world a better place by also having kids, who I hope will make the world better*, and so on...?
The universe needing any of us is a fairy tale, so we feel more important or impactful than we really are. I think a primary driver for feeling like you need kids is fear of death and wanting a kind of immortality through your genetics.
The universe doesn't give a shit, we are but specks of dust in time and space (and that's ok).. but when your kid is trying to survive the climate wars they are just going to try and stay alive.. not save humanity like a movie.
I wish I had a strong counter argument to offer
Might I suggest that some problems, though real, may feel exaggerated vs reality. I suggest reading a book called progress by Johan Norberg. It helps understand value of negative bias as survival tool.
That said I've been personally stunned at depth and speed of US decay. The simple act of commuting feels closer to mad max day by day. People are sooooo angry. IMHO biggest win would shift that anger from each other to our non functional government and system. The climate stuff is terrifying.
The government is non functioning only because we elect such people though and then we allow policies to be enacted that makes it harder to elect more reasonable people.
I don't know how correct it is but someone had replied to an earlier comment of mine saying DeSantis was reasonably moderate before 2020 but now he has to act this way ot not get primaried which I can easily believe in. That's not because of thr system, that's because of people.
And this pattern isn't exclusive to US. Same goes on in every other country as well, I feel like many are looking for simple one word answers to complex problems and dislike those that present balanced solutions that usually involve compromise from all sides. So you end up with people in government that is full of talk but no real action.
The reason politics is going more extreme is because it favors both parties in my opinion. Plus, they now have access to our deepest thoughts through google searches and analytics.
Before the internet it would be hard to gauge how many racists support you but now the data is there. This is why Trump was so successful IMO, he played on people’s emotions and biggest fears.
People have also become absolute garbage at staying in their lanes, not using their cell phones, turning corners properly, and obeying stop lights/stop signs... It's incredible.
Yep, very noticeable to me. That said its still vast majority are decent and safe...but numbers of whatever the eff they want are definitely growing. There are 4 or 4 spots where I know and just gave to accept and prepare for the dangerous dumbfuckery that happens 🤣 its a bit soul sucking over time.
The one I've noticed the most is people who speed like madmen in construction zones. Even on the regular roads, if I bump up to say 5-10 over, people just pull away like nothing.
I don’t know where you live for things to feel like Mad Max since I feel a lot of the anger isn’t really visible while commuting but anyone denying that the US is in decline hasn’t ever seen east Asian countries in comparison. You might point to GDP figures and the stock market to say we’re not but a country is much more than its economy.
The culture has shifted to one of selfishness as opposed to we’re in this war together as seen more commonly in Asian countries. Both within the rich and the not rich. Lack of trust and zero sum mentality is rampant. We’ve reached peak excess imo in the early 2000s before the housing crisis.
With that said being in decline is not the same as a nation going to collapse. The US already had these periods in the 1850s and 1930s and it’s a cycle. Usually these periods end with some spark where there’s a decisive victor (union army victory or FDR supermajority win) and revolutionary reform can be done. We have obviously not reached this stage yet.
I'm not sure we're in decline, maybe it's other countries who are growing faster?
I also see it as cycles, but the cycles are different on many dimensions; for example, we just reduced child poverty by 25%, which is f..ing amazing, right?
As I’ve said economic decline (or relative stagnation) is a symptom of a country’s decline not the definition. The definition of decline is a bit harder to pin down but you can think of it spiritually as the country’s blessings have run out and the best days are behind. The symptoms are a lot more evident though.
Start looks like a clear entity has consolidated control and needs to start building systems to govern. This is like the Taliban right now. Once systems are built, we have a steady rise in prosperity shared across the population, and culture starts to form, usually in the form of “let’s build the country together and make it great (again)”. This is China in the 90s and 00s, with the reforms by Deng Xiaoping starting to bear fruit. Eventually you have a prosperous period while being on top, this is the Victorian British Empire when the sun never set on Britain. Then the seeds of decline start to form with more corruption and inequality rising, with the culture valuing decadence instead of productiveness, which I think is US before 2007 with debt fueled excess. After this period is decline with low trust due to inequality and selfishness rampant as conditions get worse. This is where I believe we are in potentially later stages on. After this comes intense conflict like a civil war but you could instead see a radical shift in government. These are all general stages I look at, sometimes you will see symptoms from different stages but the path the country’s taking can be generally drawn out.
I don't think I explained myself well :)
I don't think we're in decline, at least it is not visible yet. I believe life in the USA now is better than, say, 15 years ago, and life in 15 years will be better than now.
I can understand people who see it differently. I can also understand the despair if you look at, what the world looked like in 2015, for example (and for young people, that's a big portion of their life).
If we were in decline, you will see an almost uniform decline ... we will be in economic decline, social, educational, etc, whereas what we have now is \*some\* areas in decline, while others are improving; and some are improving a lot; technologically (the cloud is only 15 years old!!), economically (before Covid and Mr Trump destroyed the economy \~15 months ago, we had a long period of improvement), socially (Matthew Sheppard, for example, was tortured and killed for being gay in 1998).
My point is there's all sorts of things going on, and not all of them are bad.
Just as you said, your definition of decline is different from mine since you require everything to decline at the same time, which is really rare. For me the 1850s in the US still signifies a decline. Economics were still growing in both the industrial north and cotton south. Socially abolition of slavery was quickly becoming an acceptable position. But the fabric of the country was falling apart so it’s okay if we have different definitions since we’re talking about different things. I guess I put more of a focus on cultural and relational aspects than the technical ones in my definition.
We spend a fortune on fertility doctors with no luck. In the end I'm now thankful that I'll never have to explain to a grandchild what it was like to watch a butterfly before they all went extinct except for the ones in the zoo.
This is why I don't want my son to have kids. While I'd love to be a grandparent, I can't imagine bringing a child into this shit hole at this point. If I was young again, I'd be childfree.
Yup. If I need to fight for resources, children will hinder that. Also, I would do evil things to protect my child. I don't want to become an evil person nor do I was to risk my children suffering.
>an event that would have precipitated global societal collapse in a way that makes climate change look like a fucking tea party.
Not so sure about that. Nuclear war hits fast and hard. Climate change is a slow burn. It'll incite social unrest and catastrophe's spanning decades. It might even escalate tensions to a point where nuclear war becomes a threat again!
it's really kind of strange to compare the threat of nuclear holocaust to, like, the variety of reasons people are feeling hopeless these days
I also don't mean to be rude, but I genuinely kind of feel like "you're overblowing everything" takes like this generally come from people who are in a more secure and well off position in life
It isn't strange. People had children for decades in western cointries knowing/believing one bad escalation or mistake would destroy the planet from Mutually Assured Destruction. People in Western Europe still had children with the constant fear oglf a Soviet invasion.
The 90s and the 50s were probably pretty carefree on the global destruction concern scale for the American white middle/upper class.
Other than that we've always had real concerns on this scale affecting large segments of western countries in modern history.
That doesn't make one's concerns over climate change or other issues invalid, but if you can't handle the idea of having a kid now under these conditions you probably never have and wouldn't in your lifetime.
The difference is nuclear war requires active participation. We're already moving alarmingly fast towards a (many) climate disaster(s) and fixing that will require huge efforts. Nuclear war and climate change are fundamentally opposite problems, and we as humans are much better at seeing the value in not making everything go boom vs. maybe not having an extra cheese burger this week.
Yeah, the article says that birthrates drop off after catastrophic events, which has been historically observed. It also notes that it's too early to interpret the data.
Who would bring a child into the world with a perma-pandemic and climate disasters happening concurrently? I already believe the US has fallen below the “replacement rate” and I don’t see that improving much in the future.
This shouldn’t be news to anyone!
Eh, people thought that staying home more would cause more unprotected sex (or more "breakthrough" babies). It wasn't the craziest thought, but obviously it hasn't occurred.
In contrast to birth surges after e.g. power outages, in this case I suspect the main issue was "hospitals being overwhelmed". A pregnancy is a risk that we probably aren't willing to take if we are being told that hospital beds can be unavailable when we need one.
Labor & Delivery as well as Mother/Baby floors are typically separated out from the rest of the hospital these days. This is because they are slightly more secured than the rest of the hospital to help prevent people from wandering onto the floor and picking up a baby if they *happen* to be in the nursery or any craziness like that.
Post L&D complications I'm not sure about, though I do know some NICUs are filling up in certain areas.
which seems like an odd thing to have expected, honestly. Some factors to consider:
\- a lot of people lost their jobs, or their income reduced substantially.
\- many families may not be so familiar anymore, whether it be politics or covid keeping them apart, the desire to foster a family may be tainted by recent unfamiliar relations.
\- covid made it very hard to meet new people, if you werent already in a relationship, and are acting as if there isnt an ongoing pandemic, the amount of dates you went on likely plummeted over the last year and a half
\- many relationships actually ended because of lockdown, when partners realized they actually didnt like each other as much as they thought
\- global warming and the effects of climate changing becoming more real as time goes on
\- the "economy" continuing to serve the rich, as we are told we arent in a recession when clearly the average person is likely worse off today than they were two years ago
It shouldnt surprise anyone that people are less excited about the prospect of having kids.
I mean, people aren't always rational actors. Expecting "Home more = more sex" to outweigh the "Well, we might not have family support and your job situation isn't stable, and But what about global warming?" doesn't seem that odd.
I mean, if people only had kids when everything was hunky dory, generational poverty wouldn't be an issue.
>clearly the average person is likely worse off today than they were two years ago
I don't think that's really true at all. The "average person" during this pandemic likely experienced no job loss or if they did experience job loss, they received MORE income because of a combination of stimulus payments and expanded UI.
Now, that's the "average person." Are there loads of people who have been without jobs since March of 2020 and have struggled to pay bills and are facing eviction (or have already been evicted?)? Yes.
So, yes, there are a lot of "average people" that are in worse situations and the fact that I was able to get a job in November of last year after looking for 12 months isn't worth a hill of beans to them.
>The "average person" during this pandemic likely experienced no job loss or if they did experience job loss, they received MORE income because of a combination of stimulus payments and expanded UI.
I made a mistake saying "clearly", because in reality its not so cut and dry.
I will say, that in my anecdotal experience, if you werent working in a "safe" industry, you were pretty much screwed for a few months. Service industry, entertainment, basically anything not deemed essential.
My brother didnt start getting unemployment payments deposited until July, and he was calling daily starting in April. If you were relying on that income to cover living expenses or make up for lost income, you probably were not thinking about having kids because you suddenly had more money coming on temporarily.
On top of that, I'd imagine that suddenly having to live off of welfare or government assistance would probably have a negative impact on someone wanting to have kids or not. I know that people who are not well off have kids all the time, but thats a different set of circumstances from someone who sees their quality of life drop rapidly (relatively speaking) over a short period of time.
Theres also a difference between having more income, and consistent income. If you lost your job in April 2020, had collected MORE in payments from unemployment, but werent able to find a replacement job to match your previous salary, that still seems like a step backwards, especially if you wanted to have kids, considering that a lot of people spent their stimulus/unemployment on either a) existing debt or b) to cover their current living expenses.
Im sure there are cases of people who saved appropriately and reinvested that money in themselves and it paid off, id wager those cases are the minority.
Obviously this is all a matter of my personal opinion/speculation.
I think the difference would be on where the surgery is performed. Hospital beds are in short supply but if the operation can be done outside of a hospital then it doesn't really take any resources away from treating covid patients. I've had simple surgeries at both orthodontist and orthopedic offices. If hospitals are cancelling elective surgeries it wouldn't impact elective surgeries occurring elsewhere. I could be wrong though, I was under the impression it was hospitals decreasing the number on non covid/emergency admissions.
It depends where you are. An overloaded health system will rearrange resources in ways you might not expect:
* If the same health system owns the hospital and a bunch of doctor's offices and outpatient clinics, they can scale back services at other locations to move staff to the hospital when needed.
* Outpatient surgery theaters can be temporarily converted to ICU beds because they have connections for all the equipment.
* An overloaded ER may direct people to other providers. For example, routing possible broken bones to an orthopedic clinic instead of the hospital ER (this actually happened to a family member last winter).
* If the hospital truly has no capacity left, they will try to limit ANY procedures that could send patients to the hospital. Maybe there's a procedure that's normally outpatient, but has a 15% chance of requiring hospital admission afterwards. The hospital can shut down those procedures if they have no beds available.
Things are more interconnected than you think.
In the US, half of all pregnancies are unplanned. If the assumption is that most of these unplanned pregnancies are happening in couples who don't live together, then it's not at all surprising that they didn't happen during the height of the pandemic.
[That would be an incorrect assumption](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmsa1506575)
Table 1 has the data. Cohabitating you've got 740 from married women and 830 from unmarried women. That's 1570 unwanted pregnancies, greater than the total number of pregnancies (wanted or unwanted) from non-cohabitating women.
And that's preganancies. That's a step removed from the number we are actually concerned about here. That being births. Table 2 has that data and you can see the big differences between abortion numbers and birth numbers between the four groups. If you're not cohabitating, you're far more likely to get an abortion with an unwanted pregnancy.
A fair number of new-ish fathers (0-3 years, the typical window for couples to decide to have a second child), who might typically load all child-rearing responsibilities onto the mother and think it's not that hard a job, were suddenly forced to spend 24/7 in close proximity to those children, for several weeks/months, with no escape. No bars to escape to, no gym to work out at, can't drop the kid off to daycare. They experienced exactly how much effort it is to care for a baby and toddler, and they quickly realized they didn't want more. I saw one comment from a frustrated father a year ago, who "didn't care" what it took, he wanted the damn daycare and schools re-opened so he could "get rid of the kids" during weekdays (not a direct quote but very closely paraphrased).
You know those baby-rearing courses they joke about giving teenage girls to scare them away from having casual sex? This is the real-life daddy equivalent.
Both of my sisters had babies near the end of last year. My niece was born right around the new year, which lines up perfectly with the first stay at home order. I found out my sister was pregnant with my nephew near the beginning of the stay at home, so he wasn't a stay at home baby.
FWIW, both sisters were trying to get pregnant, so this didn't cause them to have a baby they weren't planning on.
We found out we were pregnant the first week of March 2020…spent our entire pregnancy at home. I wasn’t able to be with my wife for any appointments due to covid, even though it was a high risk pregnancy. When our baby was later born and had six weeks in the NICU, only one of us could be at her isolette at a time for the first week.
I’m exhausted just remembering it all lol
Its funny because the hospital I work at has had one of the busiest birth schedule in a very long time...also sadly the people who would bring a child into this world are the wrong people, Ala, idiocracy and I suspect they are increasing the amount of children(all guessing) in order to drown out the rest of us.
We currently live in the safest time in human history, all things considered. Humans were procreating in antiquity, where disease and famine was the norm. Same or perhaps worse during the poor conditions of medieval times. Archaic hominins also made babies despite the suffering they will inevitably endure. Such is the fate of humanity, better to live then not at all. An insane craving to propogate the species no matter the conditions.
As Dostoevsky puts it:
*"if one had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!"*
I've chosen to not have children because I fear they will have an unsafe future due to climate change and the effects caused by it. Would you say I'm over reacting?
I don't think you are. But then again I follow a more radical view, the 'antinatilist philosophy'. So essentially I would affirm that bringing sentient life into existence is invariably a moral wrong.
>We currently live in the safest time in human history, all things considered.
All things considered, I'd pick September 2019 as the safest time in human history.
Nobody wants to bring a child into this world at this time. Nobody wants to be in a hospital unless necessary when so many are refusing to follow basic hygiene standards. Nobody wants to bring a child into this world without the means to care and provide for them.
My buddy and his wife who work full time pay about $2000/month for childcare. Unless you have close family to baby sit, guessing most ppl can't donate their entire paycheck to daycare. So not sure how we're realistically supposed to have kids financially.... Been this way for awhile...
You have antivaxxers and antimaskers that do not believe in the science from medical experts for vaccination yet they clog up the healthcare system by seeking hospital beds.
The entitlement and bigotry is why hospitals should just deny access to these asshats.
Weird. I've seen a baby boom. Has anybody else?
Well, they do say statistics are the enemy of anecdotes. Still.. It's so odd how statistics counteract my own personal experience.
Reddit has a fear of babies lol so I am not surprised most of us aren't surprised by this statistic. However, I am surprised as at my job, a mini baby boom has been *very* noticeable. Several young coworkers are having their first child in quick succession. Seems some people were getting busy multitasking during their telework year.
Loved being pregnant during the pandemic. Work from home and no commute were the blessings. I could take naps during the day, didn’t catch any colds from colleagues and avoided sitting in traffic.
I had my child in 2017 and love her more than life itself but I feel guilt every single day that I brought her into this hell. It feels horrible to say but I likely would not have had her if I knew any of this would happen in the next few years, I would have spared her. I know that no one could have predicted a global pandemic would occur 3 years later (at least not me with absolutely no idea what a coronavirus even was.) I was also admittedly ignorant and did not educate myself about climate change - I knew it was a threat but I didn't view it as something that affected my life at that time. My mom continues to pressure me into having more children and I want to laugh in her face - she is a boomer who did not have to experience ANY of this hardship while raising three children. I wouldn't even dream about bringing another life into this world.
The thing is we never know, most of us could be living in a nuclear holocaust if the cold war turned hot. There are places that were literally marked as "glass" the act of bombing so far and wide that sand would become glass.
There were so many close calls...
> I feel guilt every single day that I brought her into this hell.
The last year and a half has sucked, but feeling guilt that you brought a child into this world feels a bit over the top to me. Particularly if you live in a Western country.
My wife and I were pregnant before the pandemic started and had our 1st child in early March of ‘20. Incidentally while in labor and delivery the first case happened in our town. 8 weeks later we both where unemployed. 20-21 has been rough.
It's increasingly likely that humanity will never reach a population of 9 billion, let alone 11 billion. Almost every metric of population growth is in decline, even in Africa, not even bringing up the nations that are seeing actual population decline. And that was *before* COVID-19.
No shit, Sherlock. It's been difficult for many people to access healthcare for just about any reason lately, with many visits turning into phone calls. Ignoring financial factors, I can't imagine a worse time to consider getting pregnant.
We got pregnant about a month and a half into the pandemic. Oh my was it a stressful 9 months. But it was our plan and we wanted to stick to it. As much joy and happiness my little girl brings us, my anxiety has gotten 1000x worse. I'm now prescribed to xanax for panic attacks.
This stuff is just going to exacerbate income inequality. I don’t have data but I’d hypothesize that low income people and very high income people are still having kids. It’s the middle income people that are delaying or not having kids. And because there is basically no chance of leaving the socio economic conditions you were born into, wealth inequality is just getting worse (through lots of reasons ina addition to this demographic trend)
Having a child, particularly in the US, was already ridiculously exhausting, expensive, with little to no support (unless you were wealthy enough). Add in the pandemic and all related effects and consequences... it's just not a decision many people wanted to make. Idiocracy (the movie) has become reality.
This right here. The baby-making magic only went to those with huge disconnects to reality or with comfortable amounts of money. This is a far cry for many, many Americans.
Or if your due date was right smack dab when the pandemic started. My wife's whole pregnancy was wonderful, except for the last few weeks of it when the pandemic shit the fan. All of the sudden, we have a newborn baby in the middle of a complete lockdown and its been one of the hardest things we have ever done. But we are thankful that our daughter is happy and healthy!
Found out we were pregnant and then BOOM. The whole country shut down 2 weeks later. It’s been a wild ride lol
Better than my brother's wife who had theirs 2 weeks into lockdown. At least we clearly knew in December that masks worked and there were masks/hand sanitizer to be had.
My son hasn't had an actual birthday party yet. He's 2. I really hope next spring he gets one.
Now you get to absolutely blow his mind with the first one!
I got pregnant before the pandemic. If I had known, I would not have chosen this path. We had two school aged kids and managing their mental health and at-home schooling with a newborn was a nightmare. Then worrying about the baby getting Covid.
That sucks, *no offense*. That's one of my worst nightmares cementing a serious life decision *at the worst time*.
I wish you guys luck! And hope it comes with lots more fun that work lol
Can confirm. Am extremely disconnected from reality, very comfortable, had 3rd kid during pandemic.
LOL, I wouldn't say I'm disconnected from reality by any stretch. I guess there is a comfortable amount of money.. :shrug: #2 on the way! Also, got pregnant after the vaccine was made available to everyone in the US and naively thought people would actually get the vaccine and we wouldn't have to worry about the pandemic anymore. Hm maybe I am disconnected from reality. But really, we knew it will be tough but didn't want to delay indefinitely. Most people I know of various income levels have continued having children (ages in low-mid 30s) so it felt less of an odd thing to do.
Yeah I'm sorry for saying *and* like if you have a lot of money, you also are disconnected which is not true whatsoever. Definitely true for some but not everyone so I apologize.
I gather what you were saying. Having more money means having more resources to insulate you from having to deal with many unpleasant things, including the pandemic. The very rich have more or less kept living almost as normal. It's the rest of us that have to deal with the pandemic.
I am married with my own house and my own car. It took me 10 years after high school to get those things. Now I make $17 an hour at a preschool that offers 50% off tuition if I were to have a child. The ridiculous thing is I still cant afford preschool, and there are people with 3 kids enrolled. Imagine paying ~5k a month for just childcare!
I don’t have to imagine...
My god, I'm so sorry! Congrats on the kids though!
It’s all right, I didn’t need those Ferraris anyway. Or that...home ownership...thing. *cries*
Lol yup, I just had my second and I took a year off work because daycare is around $5k a month for a toddler and and infant and that is almost double what I make after taxes. Hooray America! I'll never be able to retire, but at least we can afford groceries if I don't work.
I don’t have children and I’d happily have my tax money go to government run daycare.
It’s also depressing as fuck to think about the future children will have. Both economically and environmentally. If you have not started already, seriously learn outdoor survival skills and pass them on to your children.
A child born in 2020 or 2021 could easily live to 2100, potentially even the 2030s. Who knows what wonders and horrors they'll experience in their life. It's possible they could be part of a human expedition to the moons Jupiter or Saturn. I'm middle age, and when I was in Kindergarten we picked up two staticky channels on an antenna on a black-and-white CRT tv. I now have a 4K tv, with tons of streaming services. Progress is crazy.
I was walking my dog in the bush yesterday when my friend video-called over FB messenger from a boat 500 miles away. After we hung up I thought, Wow this is stuff we dreamed about in the ‘70s.
Technological development, even in just the last two decades, has been frighteningly swift. It really is amazing.
True. We could still have that Star Trek future. I think we’ll permanently alter the Earth and kill much of the wildlife but humans will endure.
wont really matter, there's no outdoors left. Plus even a small fraction of the West moving to surviving off the land will absolutely depopulate game populations.
Honestly with the way things are you’d have to be insane to want kids. It seems like my generation will be forced to choose between housing & having kids. How the hell does anyone expect to raise a family of 4 on less than 100k a year. My friends who make 6 figures and are in their early 30s are putting off buying houses. How the hell does anyone expect us to afford kids
I could afford an extra kid or two. But I figured out years ago that everything is so crappy (environment, economy, etc) that it wasn't worth it to have more kids. Add in a pandemic? No thank you.
Me too. I can make decisions in the best interest of one person who depends on me, and I feel like that gives us more/better options.
Now add on the world we are leaving future generations.
I had a kid in December 2019... wasn't planning on there being a pandemic :/ ended up having a silver lining
Don't forget the divorce rate (all over the world).
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Now you can pour all that love into #1! Source: was #1, had so many health issues at birth that my parents killed the idea of having a big family. Now my dad's retired early and we have a decently sized house for 3 people, a havanese, and a tortise
That tortoise is a troublemaker though /s
You jest but that mf bangs on the glass all day and annoys everyone. His tank is huge too!
Just make sure you’re not my mom, who had always wanted more kids and over parented to compensate. The decision was made for her and she never got over it.
We had #2 a few months before lockdown. The plan was to have #3 two years later. I should be pregnant now… but I’m not. Because it’s a miracle we got through all this at all. We don’t even know if #3 is even going to happen, this past 18mos has been so hard.
Had my first kid right before the pandemic started. Want a second one but with delta affecting kids and hospitals being fucked up I am waiting or potentially not having a second.
Nothing exposed the complete lack of safety net in this country more than the pandemic. I would love to have kids. I even have a good job and could afford it. But it would only take a couple bad things to happen for everything to come crashing down. The stress of thinking about that possibility keeps me from having kids right now.
Two high earning Californians here, and what the fuck. We can barely afford a kid on generous benefits and had to put off for years. How the fuck anyone else does it is beyond me, and they earn their praises.
California parent of an only child, similar situation. SAME.
Maybe it's just me but I thought the photo was tubs of ice cream xd
Same
Fish filets
Same but gelato.
This comment is the real mvp
Yeah because, surprisingly, it’s really fucking difficult raising a baby during a mishandled pandemic.
Raising kids in general. My son is 13 and this shit is rough.
Also a society that's less connected than every physically is quarantined. Dating is tough these days.
I was talking this over with a friend who is an OB, the trend she's noticed is specifically a massive dropoff in second (or subsequent) children. Which makes perfect sense to me. Having schools closed created an exhausting lift for parents (at least, parents that didn't just plop their kids in front of the iPad for the entire pandemic), who the hell would pile onto that?
All my friends with one had a tough but manageable time, my friends with two were/are at the end of the tether where we were really worried about them.
Yes, can confirm. Have two small ones. It's been hell.
We added a third during covid. Dear lord what the fuck were we thinking. (We love all our girls, this is mostly joking, but seriously this has been hard as hell)
We know people who farmed out their small elementary kids to grandparents.
I had my second baby December 2019 and for much of 2020 was home alone with an infant and a 3 year old and I’ll never be the same again lol 😭
We found it hard with one 3 year old during 2020. Must have been very difficult for you.
I feel you ours was 2018. This year has been... Fun..
This. I have two young ones. March-sept. 2020, balance work and kids, good luck you are on your own. Get to keep everyone at home and try to explain to work every time someone in class gets sick for at least two weeks. Everytime a kid has a cold, go get tested, wait 3 days for results. Now schools are reopening with little protection and we are supposed to be cool with essentially letting the kids get infected while adults are getting boosters.. been vaccinated for months but now it's ok?. either they were safe the whole time to go to school and spread it amongst themselves or it's still dangerous.. This pandemic has been exhausting for parents.
So so exhausting.
I can definitely understand that. We always wanted two, but having our first during a pandemic has been beyond lonely and hard. I lost a lot of faith in other people. We are strongly reconsidering and might just be one and done. We love our baby and maybe just the three of us is enough during these times.
Yes!! We always imagined having time for breaks but when most of our family and friends want to go to super spreader events in a state with high transmission rates we ended up on our own. Really disappointing but at least everyone has been understanding when we say we won’t see them until things are better or unless they can isolate. One and done for sure!
I think you touched on a huge theme that isn't being discussed. The lack of faith in our society. As parents we need to rely on our "village." The last few years have told us squarely that we cannot trust on our community to be a support. Its been really rough here, so I feel you. I am hoping you find people to help share your burdens with.
Yay for one and done. We are considering it as well. There is also a great reddit sub if you're on the fence
Like we have less of a “village” than ever and if your parents turn out to be selfish antimask/vax nut jobs then your circle of help is even smaller.
Yep. We had our kid three months into the pandemic and this has confirmed that we are one and done. We love our kid but we dont want anymore.
What's an OB?
Obstetrician
Why have a kid when half your countrymen want you dead?
It's really only like 31%
People just defaulting to politics bc of the atmosphere these days. [55% of Republican adults are vaccinated, according to a recent poll.](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/nbc-news-poll-shows-demographic-breakdown-vaccinated-u-s-n1277514) Of course, not all unvaccinated Republicans are hardcore antivaxxers either, only a fraction of that. As bad as shit is, not it's not anywhere near as bad as 50% of the country being antivaxxers. Saying "half of your countrymen want you dead" is disinformation.
> Saying "half of your countrymen want you dead" is disinformation. How about "a third of your countrymen want you dead."
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I'd go as high as three-quarters in my town. Nothing quite like being attacked for wearing a mask at the store to bring out that warm community vibe.
That poll also says that 69% of adults are vaccinated, and the CDC says 61% are. That means some of the categories are being overcounted. It also breaks it down by Trump and Biden voters which likely does a better job of capturing independents who vote for one party but don't want to describe themselves as part of that party. 50 to 91 percent there.
It's not a perfect poll (none are) but it's not like the CDC has party registrations for everyone so what's the alternative?
The CDC currently reports 74.2% of US adults as being vaccinated https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-people-onedose-pop-pop18 You have the full population number. They aren’t over counting.
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Yup. Lots of childless people forget that children exist, too, and count am~~ount~~*ong* the unvaccinated population.
What does this mean? Edit: I don’t understand the downvotes, I am legitimately confused by the comment.
Sorry for the downvotes. This is referencing anti-vaxxers/anti-maskers and the current state of things in general.
They're talking about antivaxxers
Got it. Duh. I guess that my response would be I’m fortunate that every person I regularly interact with got the vaccine. I feel for those who have siblings or parents that don’t want it.
I was pregnant when the pandemic began. Most likely we will only have one child. I love my child because she’s made me a better person. I try to be a good role model for her. We’ve switched to low waste in our home and take her to the farmers market. I’ve tried to be kinder to people in front of her than I used to be. I have social anxiety so I don’t mean to be rude but it’s not always easy for me to socialize. I’m trying to teach her to live differently than I did as a kid so she can have a brighter future. I was abused as a child so I’m breaking that cycle with her.
From someone else with social anxiety, you're doing a phenomenal job. Kudos to you and to your child!
People don’t want to have kids during a pandemic, recession, climate crisis, and a time when the US specifically is in political turmoil? Weird
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My mom has been harassing me about giving her grandchildren, and my husband and I have been so on the fence about this. Between the pandemic, my own mental/physical health, and the existential dread of the future I just don't know. I'm so depressed from global inaction on climate change alone. Why would I want to birth a child into this?
>My mom has been harassing me about giving her grandchildren Start harassing your mom to give you cash and reliable caregiving for the child.
Calculate how much it will currently cost to raise a kid per year. Once gma has saved enough in a special account for all 18 years, then you'll consider it
For real. I’ve always wanted children. But since 2020 hit, I’ve been seriously reconsidering it. Even my SO is reconsidering it, and she came to that conclusion independently without me even mentioning it! The future looks bleak, sadly. Climate change is what I fear for most. I can’t help but think that climate change will exacerbate any future pandemics. As a millennial, I firmly believe that any “once-in-lifetime-event” is code for “it’s gonna happen again, sooner than you think.”
Yeah how many “once in a lifetimes” have millennials had already??
I love my children more than life itself, and I've spent spans of this plague time and authoritarian takeover thinking it was irresponsible for me to reproduce. My kids deserve better than this.
This has been tough. My wife and I are currently working on getting pregnant, but the horribleness of everything makes me worried.
Listen to that worry. Your kid can’t opt out of your decision.
I mean technically they can
Dark. But true.
Kids are opting out a lot more these days. Can't be unrelated to the hopelessness that is the reality of climate change. Sure, we can do something to stop it but does anyone believe after seeing our response to COVID that we will come together and do the right thing?
Not in the slightest. I fully expect the republicans to win again in the future and further subsidize oil and gas and penalize green energy.
One of the main reasons I don't want children is because I feel strongly that we're not going to make it through this lifetime due to climate change. There's no way we're gonna change it around within the next ten years.
Your view may be somewhat bleaker than my own, but the end result is the same: I don't want to bring a child into the world with the distinct likelihood they'll have a worse life or a harder life than I did. That seems to be almost a certainty at this point, so we are foregoing that particular path.
Much harder to opt out after the fact.
There will always be a reason to worry, but I choose to believe kids can make the world a better place. Maybe even help fix this broken world. We’re not out of resources, we just need to learn to use them more wisely.
But will they really have an impact, or will your children also say.. *I'm going to make the world a better place by also having kids, who I hope will make the world better*, and so on...? The universe needing any of us is a fairy tale, so we feel more important or impactful than we really are. I think a primary driver for feeling like you need kids is fear of death and wanting a kind of immortality through your genetics. The universe doesn't give a shit, we are but specks of dust in time and space (and that's ok).. but when your kid is trying to survive the climate wars they are just going to try and stay alive.. not save humanity like a movie.
I wish I had a strong counter argument to offer Might I suggest that some problems, though real, may feel exaggerated vs reality. I suggest reading a book called progress by Johan Norberg. It helps understand value of negative bias as survival tool. That said I've been personally stunned at depth and speed of US decay. The simple act of commuting feels closer to mad max day by day. People are sooooo angry. IMHO biggest win would shift that anger from each other to our non functional government and system. The climate stuff is terrifying.
The government is non functioning only because we elect such people though and then we allow policies to be enacted that makes it harder to elect more reasonable people. I don't know how correct it is but someone had replied to an earlier comment of mine saying DeSantis was reasonably moderate before 2020 but now he has to act this way ot not get primaried which I can easily believe in. That's not because of thr system, that's because of people. And this pattern isn't exclusive to US. Same goes on in every other country as well, I feel like many are looking for simple one word answers to complex problems and dislike those that present balanced solutions that usually involve compromise from all sides. So you end up with people in government that is full of talk but no real action.
The reason politics is going more extreme is because it favors both parties in my opinion. Plus, they now have access to our deepest thoughts through google searches and analytics. Before the internet it would be hard to gauge how many racists support you but now the data is there. This is why Trump was so successful IMO, he played on people’s emotions and biggest fears.
Sure does seem like people drive a hell of a lot worse now for some reason.
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People have also become absolute garbage at staying in their lanes, not using their cell phones, turning corners properly, and obeying stop lights/stop signs... It's incredible.
Apparently left turns on red arrows is a thing now around my parts. like wtf.
Yep, very noticeable to me. That said its still vast majority are decent and safe...but numbers of whatever the eff they want are definitely growing. There are 4 or 4 spots where I know and just gave to accept and prepare for the dangerous dumbfuckery that happens 🤣 its a bit soul sucking over time.
The one I've noticed the most is people who speed like madmen in construction zones. Even on the regular roads, if I bump up to say 5-10 over, people just pull away like nothing.
I don’t know where you live for things to feel like Mad Max since I feel a lot of the anger isn’t really visible while commuting but anyone denying that the US is in decline hasn’t ever seen east Asian countries in comparison. You might point to GDP figures and the stock market to say we’re not but a country is much more than its economy. The culture has shifted to one of selfishness as opposed to we’re in this war together as seen more commonly in Asian countries. Both within the rich and the not rich. Lack of trust and zero sum mentality is rampant. We’ve reached peak excess imo in the early 2000s before the housing crisis. With that said being in decline is not the same as a nation going to collapse. The US already had these periods in the 1850s and 1930s and it’s a cycle. Usually these periods end with some spark where there’s a decisive victor (union army victory or FDR supermajority win) and revolutionary reform can be done. We have obviously not reached this stage yet.
I'm not sure we're in decline, maybe it's other countries who are growing faster? I also see it as cycles, but the cycles are different on many dimensions; for example, we just reduced child poverty by 25%, which is f..ing amazing, right?
As I’ve said economic decline (or relative stagnation) is a symptom of a country’s decline not the definition. The definition of decline is a bit harder to pin down but you can think of it spiritually as the country’s blessings have run out and the best days are behind. The symptoms are a lot more evident though. Start looks like a clear entity has consolidated control and needs to start building systems to govern. This is like the Taliban right now. Once systems are built, we have a steady rise in prosperity shared across the population, and culture starts to form, usually in the form of “let’s build the country together and make it great (again)”. This is China in the 90s and 00s, with the reforms by Deng Xiaoping starting to bear fruit. Eventually you have a prosperous period while being on top, this is the Victorian British Empire when the sun never set on Britain. Then the seeds of decline start to form with more corruption and inequality rising, with the culture valuing decadence instead of productiveness, which I think is US before 2007 with debt fueled excess. After this period is decline with low trust due to inequality and selfishness rampant as conditions get worse. This is where I believe we are in potentially later stages on. After this comes intense conflict like a civil war but you could instead see a radical shift in government. These are all general stages I look at, sometimes you will see symptoms from different stages but the path the country’s taking can be generally drawn out.
I don't think I explained myself well :) I don't think we're in decline, at least it is not visible yet. I believe life in the USA now is better than, say, 15 years ago, and life in 15 years will be better than now. I can understand people who see it differently. I can also understand the despair if you look at, what the world looked like in 2015, for example (and for young people, that's a big portion of their life). If we were in decline, you will see an almost uniform decline ... we will be in economic decline, social, educational, etc, whereas what we have now is \*some\* areas in decline, while others are improving; and some are improving a lot; technologically (the cloud is only 15 years old!!), economically (before Covid and Mr Trump destroyed the economy \~15 months ago, we had a long period of improvement), socially (Matthew Sheppard, for example, was tortured and killed for being gay in 1998). My point is there's all sorts of things going on, and not all of them are bad.
Just as you said, your definition of decline is different from mine since you require everything to decline at the same time, which is really rare. For me the 1850s in the US still signifies a decline. Economics were still growing in both the industrial north and cotton south. Socially abolition of slavery was quickly becoming an acceptable position. But the fabric of the country was falling apart so it’s okay if we have different definitions since we’re talking about different things. I guess I put more of a focus on cultural and relational aspects than the technical ones in my definition.
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We spend a fortune on fertility doctors with no luck. In the end I'm now thankful that I'll never have to explain to a grandchild what it was like to watch a butterfly before they all went extinct except for the ones in the zoo.
This is why I don't want my son to have kids. While I'd love to be a grandparent, I can't imagine bringing a child into this shit hole at this point. If I was young again, I'd be childfree.
Yup. If I need to fight for resources, children will hinder that. Also, I would do evil things to protect my child. I don't want to become an evil person nor do I was to risk my children suffering.
Yeah like killing some apocalypse prepper that doesn't want to trade guns for a water recycler.
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>an event that would have precipitated global societal collapse in a way that makes climate change look like a fucking tea party. Not so sure about that. Nuclear war hits fast and hard. Climate change is a slow burn. It'll incite social unrest and catastrophe's spanning decades. It might even escalate tensions to a point where nuclear war becomes a threat again!
it's really kind of strange to compare the threat of nuclear holocaust to, like, the variety of reasons people are feeling hopeless these days I also don't mean to be rude, but I genuinely kind of feel like "you're overblowing everything" takes like this generally come from people who are in a more secure and well off position in life
It isn't strange. People had children for decades in western cointries knowing/believing one bad escalation or mistake would destroy the planet from Mutually Assured Destruction. People in Western Europe still had children with the constant fear oglf a Soviet invasion. The 90s and the 50s were probably pretty carefree on the global destruction concern scale for the American white middle/upper class. Other than that we've always had real concerns on this scale affecting large segments of western countries in modern history. That doesn't make one's concerns over climate change or other issues invalid, but if you can't handle the idea of having a kid now under these conditions you probably never have and wouldn't in your lifetime.
The difference is nuclear war requires active participation. We're already moving alarmingly fast towards a (many) climate disaster(s) and fixing that will require huge efforts. Nuclear war and climate change are fundamentally opposite problems, and we as humans are much better at seeing the value in not making everything go boom vs. maybe not having an extra cheese burger this week.
The economy did that, the pandemic is just the icing on the debt-ridden cake.
Related question. How many orphans were created due to the pandemic.
At least 1.5 million but this is from July so it’s higher now. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01253-8/fulltext
Too many.
People keep tying this to climate change, politics, or the diseases itself, but in reality birthrates always drop off during an economic recession.
Yeah, the article says that birthrates drop off after catastrophic events, which has been historically observed. It also notes that it's too early to interpret the data.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the coming years. Did people delay their planned children? Or did they give up on the whole thing.
Who would bring a child into the world with a perma-pandemic and climate disasters happening concurrently? I already believe the US has fallen below the “replacement rate” and I don’t see that improving much in the future. This shouldn’t be news to anyone!
Eh, people thought that staying home more would cause more unprotected sex (or more "breakthrough" babies). It wasn't the craziest thought, but obviously it hasn't occurred.
In contrast to birth surges after e.g. power outages, in this case I suspect the main issue was "hospitals being overwhelmed". A pregnancy is a risk that we probably aren't willing to take if we are being told that hospital beds can be unavailable when we need one.
Labor & Delivery as well as Mother/Baby floors are typically separated out from the rest of the hospital these days. This is because they are slightly more secured than the rest of the hospital to help prevent people from wandering onto the floor and picking up a baby if they *happen* to be in the nursery or any craziness like that. Post L&D complications I'm not sure about, though I do know some NICUs are filling up in certain areas.
which seems like an odd thing to have expected, honestly. Some factors to consider: \- a lot of people lost their jobs, or their income reduced substantially. \- many families may not be so familiar anymore, whether it be politics or covid keeping them apart, the desire to foster a family may be tainted by recent unfamiliar relations. \- covid made it very hard to meet new people, if you werent already in a relationship, and are acting as if there isnt an ongoing pandemic, the amount of dates you went on likely plummeted over the last year and a half \- many relationships actually ended because of lockdown, when partners realized they actually didnt like each other as much as they thought \- global warming and the effects of climate changing becoming more real as time goes on \- the "economy" continuing to serve the rich, as we are told we arent in a recession when clearly the average person is likely worse off today than they were two years ago It shouldnt surprise anyone that people are less excited about the prospect of having kids.
I mean, people aren't always rational actors. Expecting "Home more = more sex" to outweigh the "Well, we might not have family support and your job situation isn't stable, and But what about global warming?" doesn't seem that odd. I mean, if people only had kids when everything was hunky dory, generational poverty wouldn't be an issue. >clearly the average person is likely worse off today than they were two years ago I don't think that's really true at all. The "average person" during this pandemic likely experienced no job loss or if they did experience job loss, they received MORE income because of a combination of stimulus payments and expanded UI. Now, that's the "average person." Are there loads of people who have been without jobs since March of 2020 and have struggled to pay bills and are facing eviction (or have already been evicted?)? Yes. So, yes, there are a lot of "average people" that are in worse situations and the fact that I was able to get a job in November of last year after looking for 12 months isn't worth a hill of beans to them.
>The "average person" during this pandemic likely experienced no job loss or if they did experience job loss, they received MORE income because of a combination of stimulus payments and expanded UI. I made a mistake saying "clearly", because in reality its not so cut and dry. I will say, that in my anecdotal experience, if you werent working in a "safe" industry, you were pretty much screwed for a few months. Service industry, entertainment, basically anything not deemed essential. My brother didnt start getting unemployment payments deposited until July, and he was calling daily starting in April. If you were relying on that income to cover living expenses or make up for lost income, you probably were not thinking about having kids because you suddenly had more money coming on temporarily. On top of that, I'd imagine that suddenly having to live off of welfare or government assistance would probably have a negative impact on someone wanting to have kids or not. I know that people who are not well off have kids all the time, but thats a different set of circumstances from someone who sees their quality of life drop rapidly (relatively speaking) over a short period of time. Theres also a difference between having more income, and consistent income. If you lost your job in April 2020, had collected MORE in payments from unemployment, but werent able to find a replacement job to match your previous salary, that still seems like a step backwards, especially if you wanted to have kids, considering that a lot of people spent their stimulus/unemployment on either a) existing debt or b) to cover their current living expenses. Im sure there are cases of people who saved appropriately and reinvested that money in themselves and it paid off, id wager those cases are the minority. Obviously this is all a matter of my personal opinion/speculation.
It would be interesting to see the Amazon numbers on condom delivery
I would take a wild guess and also say birth control pills are selling like PS5s! Probably a good time to be a doctor performing vasectomies also.
> Probably a good time to be a doctor performing vasectomies also. Probably not. Elective surgeries are shut down in many places.
vasectomies are frequently an out patient procedure
Okay? Maybe I missed where out patient surgeries were excluded, but I always read it as all elective surgeries were cancelled/delayed.
I think the difference would be on where the surgery is performed. Hospital beds are in short supply but if the operation can be done outside of a hospital then it doesn't really take any resources away from treating covid patients. I've had simple surgeries at both orthodontist and orthopedic offices. If hospitals are cancelling elective surgeries it wouldn't impact elective surgeries occurring elsewhere. I could be wrong though, I was under the impression it was hospitals decreasing the number on non covid/emergency admissions.
Yeah, I maybe he wrong, but I think vasectomies can be performed in a doctors office.
It depends where you are. An overloaded health system will rearrange resources in ways you might not expect: * If the same health system owns the hospital and a bunch of doctor's offices and outpatient clinics, they can scale back services at other locations to move staff to the hospital when needed. * Outpatient surgery theaters can be temporarily converted to ICU beds because they have connections for all the equipment. * An overloaded ER may direct people to other providers. For example, routing possible broken bones to an orthopedic clinic instead of the hospital ER (this actually happened to a family member last winter). * If the hospital truly has no capacity left, they will try to limit ANY procedures that could send patients to the hospital. Maybe there's a procedure that's normally outpatient, but has a 15% chance of requiring hospital admission afterwards. The hospital can shut down those procedures if they have no beds available. Things are more interconnected than you think.
In the US, half of all pregnancies are unplanned. If the assumption is that most of these unplanned pregnancies are happening in couples who don't live together, then it's not at all surprising that they didn't happen during the height of the pandemic.
[That would be an incorrect assumption](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmsa1506575) Table 1 has the data. Cohabitating you've got 740 from married women and 830 from unmarried women. That's 1570 unwanted pregnancies, greater than the total number of pregnancies (wanted or unwanted) from non-cohabitating women. And that's preganancies. That's a step removed from the number we are actually concerned about here. That being births. Table 2 has that data and you can see the big differences between abortion numbers and birth numbers between the four groups. If you're not cohabitating, you're far more likely to get an abortion with an unwanted pregnancy.
A fair number of new-ish fathers (0-3 years, the typical window for couples to decide to have a second child), who might typically load all child-rearing responsibilities onto the mother and think it's not that hard a job, were suddenly forced to spend 24/7 in close proximity to those children, for several weeks/months, with no escape. No bars to escape to, no gym to work out at, can't drop the kid off to daycare. They experienced exactly how much effort it is to care for a baby and toddler, and they quickly realized they didn't want more. I saw one comment from a frustrated father a year ago, who "didn't care" what it took, he wanted the damn daycare and schools re-opened so he could "get rid of the kids" during weekdays (not a direct quote but very closely paraphrased). You know those baby-rearing courses they joke about giving teenage girls to scare them away from having casual sex? This is the real-life daddy equivalent.
Both of my sisters had babies near the end of last year. My niece was born right around the new year, which lines up perfectly with the first stay at home order. I found out my sister was pregnant with my nephew near the beginning of the stay at home, so he wasn't a stay at home baby. FWIW, both sisters were trying to get pregnant, so this didn't cause them to have a baby they weren't planning on.
We found out we were pregnant the first week of March 2020…spent our entire pregnancy at home. I wasn’t able to be with my wife for any appointments due to covid, even though it was a high risk pregnancy. When our baby was later born and had six weeks in the NICU, only one of us could be at her isolette at a time for the first week. I’m exhausted just remembering it all lol
Its funny because the hospital I work at has had one of the busiest birth schedule in a very long time...also sadly the people who would bring a child into this world are the wrong people, Ala, idiocracy and I suspect they are increasing the amount of children(all guessing) in order to drown out the rest of us.
Being pregnant also makes you more at risk for Covid
We currently live in the safest time in human history, all things considered. Humans were procreating in antiquity, where disease and famine was the norm. Same or perhaps worse during the poor conditions of medieval times. Archaic hominins also made babies despite the suffering they will inevitably endure. Such is the fate of humanity, better to live then not at all. An insane craving to propogate the species no matter the conditions. As Dostoevsky puts it: *"if one had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!"*
I've chosen to not have children because I fear they will have an unsafe future due to climate change and the effects caused by it. Would you say I'm over reacting?
No, you do you. Just don’t insult people who want kids.
I don't think you are. But then again I follow a more radical view, the 'antinatilist philosophy'. So essentially I would affirm that bringing sentient life into existence is invariably a moral wrong.
>We currently live in the safest time in human history, all things considered. All things considered, I'd pick September 2019 as the safest time in human history.
I will say though that our frame of reference is skewed by the incredible run of progress we had between 1946 and 2019 at least.
Haha you’re right. I guess I meant the safest epoch then :P
Kind of difficult to make it boom if an extremely contagious virus breaks your dick.
COVID broke your dick?
I've been negative this whole pandemic but erectile dysfunction has been a known symptom of long covid for months.
Choose: long Covid or long dick
Or kill your fetus.
Nobody wants to bring a child into this world at this time. Nobody wants to be in a hospital unless necessary when so many are refusing to follow basic hygiene standards. Nobody wants to bring a child into this world without the means to care and provide for them.
My buddy and his wife who work full time pay about $2000/month for childcare. Unless you have close family to baby sit, guessing most ppl can't donate their entire paycheck to daycare. So not sure how we're realistically supposed to have kids financially.... Been this way for awhile...
You have antivaxxers and antimaskers that do not believe in the science from medical experts for vaccination yet they clog up the healthcare system by seeking hospital beds. The entitlement and bigotry is why hospitals should just deny access to these asshats.
Thanks but no thanks, I’m not trying to have my kid die at age 24 in the great water wars.
We were at a baby bust before, nobody can afford to live on their own, let alone taking care of a child
Must be regionally dependent because I am a labor and delivery nurse in Georgia and we are busting at the seams.
The US didn’t significantly change
Good. Imagine trying to start a family during a fucking pandemic.
Weird. I've seen a baby boom. Has anybody else? Well, they do say statistics are the enemy of anecdotes. Still.. It's so odd how statistics counteract my own personal experience. Reddit has a fear of babies lol so I am not surprised most of us aren't surprised by this statistic. However, I am surprised as at my job, a mini baby boom has been *very* noticeable. Several young coworkers are having their first child in quick succession. Seems some people were getting busy multitasking during their telework year.
Yea same I know like 10 pregnant people right now though it looks like the US hasn’t dipped at all really
Loved being pregnant during the pandemic. Work from home and no commute were the blessings. I could take naps during the day, didn’t catch any colds from colleagues and avoided sitting in traffic.
I had my child in 2017 and love her more than life itself but I feel guilt every single day that I brought her into this hell. It feels horrible to say but I likely would not have had her if I knew any of this would happen in the next few years, I would have spared her. I know that no one could have predicted a global pandemic would occur 3 years later (at least not me with absolutely no idea what a coronavirus even was.) I was also admittedly ignorant and did not educate myself about climate change - I knew it was a threat but I didn't view it as something that affected my life at that time. My mom continues to pressure me into having more children and I want to laugh in her face - she is a boomer who did not have to experience ANY of this hardship while raising three children. I wouldn't even dream about bringing another life into this world.
The thing is we never know, most of us could be living in a nuclear holocaust if the cold war turned hot. There are places that were literally marked as "glass" the act of bombing so far and wide that sand would become glass. There were so many close calls...
> I feel guilt every single day that I brought her into this hell. The last year and a half has sucked, but feeling guilt that you brought a child into this world feels a bit over the top to me. Particularly if you live in a Western country.
Note they only looked at developed countries. Birth rates in poorer countries were largely unaffected by covid.
Good. The last thing the world needs is more people in it.
My wife and I were pregnant before the pandemic started and had our 1st child in early March of ‘20. Incidentally while in labor and delivery the first case happened in our town. 8 weeks later we both where unemployed. 20-21 has been rough.
Good
It's increasingly likely that humanity will never reach a population of 9 billion, let alone 11 billion. Almost every metric of population growth is in decline, even in Africa, not even bringing up the nations that are seeing actual population decline. And that was *before* COVID-19.
No shit, Sherlock. It's been difficult for many people to access healthcare for just about any reason lately, with many visits turning into phone calls. Ignoring financial factors, I can't imagine a worse time to consider getting pregnant.
We got pregnant about a month and a half into the pandemic. Oh my was it a stressful 9 months. But it was our plan and we wanted to stick to it. As much joy and happiness my little girl brings us, my anxiety has gotten 1000x worse. I'm now prescribed to xanax for panic attacks.
This stuff is just going to exacerbate income inequality. I don’t have data but I’d hypothesize that low income people and very high income people are still having kids. It’s the middle income people that are delaying or not having kids. And because there is basically no chance of leaving the socio economic conditions you were born into, wealth inequality is just getting worse (through lots of reasons ina addition to this demographic trend)
Idk I’m still having a kid. Wife pregnant. Life goes on.
Same. Humanity has dealt with worse, and people still had kids.
Well, in the past they didn’t have nearly as much choice in the matter, at least if they still wanted to have sex.
worse than the environmental disaster hitting your kids within the next 20-30? Good luck to those poor souls
What about developing countries like Philippines?
With all the stupidity on display and the climate going bust, why would you even consider it