Sarah McCammon

But some of the researchers we talked to, and I know this applies in Finland specifically, which again, I spent some time reporting there, have talked about this idea that there's just this real fear of childbirth specifically.

uh, some of which may get amplified either online or in, or just in entertainment, you know, I mean, there's sort of this punchline in movies of like a woman giving birth and it's horrible and terrible and scary and it's like a laugh, but also like a horror.

Um, and, and it's something that, that Finland in particular, uh, I think some researchers have looked at like ways to sort of mitigate the fear of birth because, you know, giving birth is, uh, like

safer than it's ever been for most of the world.

Of course, there are disparities in that safety that fall along racial and economic lines.

But compared to a few generations ago when people were, when our great grandmothers or triple great grandmothers were having, one of mine had 14 kids, it was much more risky then than it is now.

And yet, there appears to be some fear around birth that may be contributing to this.

The other thing, I'm not sure how big of a factor that is, but it's something that some people are thinking about.

The other thing when it comes to technology and social media that I've heard about is less about frank conversations about parenting online and more about just sort of the way that.

Digital technology and social media and smartphones shape interactions between younger people.

And this is a theme I heard pretty consistently from both researchers and at least some of the women I talked to.

This idea that young people are having a harder time forming relationships.

They're not interacting in real life as much.

There's data that suggests they're not having sex as much, which last time I checked is usually required to make a baby.

Yeah.

And so if smartphones and digital technology are reshaping the way that we interact in ways that make us less likely to connect in real life, the theory is that that might suppress relationship formation and with it the birth rate.

And the last thing I'll say is one woman that I spoke to for the series talked with a lot of, I think, pain in her voice about just the horrors of online dating and the real misogyny and disgusting

conversations around women and the female body that she had heard from young men she'd encountered online.

She felt that they were being radicalized and sort of cut off from

that they were being radicalized politically and also had just sort of lost the ability to talk to women in a respectful way.