No kids on the block
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Why are birth rates declining globally?
Birth rates around the world are declining. Women are having fewer children. The question of why this is is hotly debated. And on Today Explained, we're going to talk to an expert who says she has an answer.
You have the option of going out with your friends, getting dressed, coordinating. Or you can just relax, chill out on the sofa and watch a film or play a video game. And maybe that's a bit easier, a bit more relaxing when you've had a hard day, you just crash out and relax.
But the movement to get us to have more children, publicly led by people like Vice President J.D. Vance and Vice President Elon Musk, is also controversial because it is led by Elon Musk, who has as many as 14 children by four different mothers. And by J.D. Vance, who has suggested that non-parents should get fewer votes than parents.
Who are the prominent figures in the pro-natalist movement?
What should we make of the pro-natalist movement that's coming up?
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So let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America.
It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Vox's Rachel Cohen, who covers, among other things, family policy. OK, everybody has been talking about who's having babies. For my money, it's given none of your business. But you've actually been covering this as a news story. What's going on?
So there's a few reasons we're hearing about it more lately. One is that birth rates are falling pretty much everywhere, including in some of the countries we used to associate with really high birth rates, like India, Brazil or Mexico. And yes, the United States. It's happening worldwide at such a fast rate that last year the U.N. announced the number of people on Earth will probably peak in the next 75 years, which is a pretty big change from even what they were projecting a decade ago when experts thought the population peak was still well over a century away. And the other main reason people are talking about it in the U.S., at least, is that you have people like Elon Musk and J.D. Vance.
They're speaking out about it a lot lately. Musk calls falling birth rates the biggest danger civilization faces by far.
If we don't make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization is going to crumble.
And J.D. Vance, who opposes abortion rights, notoriously blasted, quote, childless cat ladies.
We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.
Yes, I do remember. These gents, and they are mostly gents, call themselves pro-natalists. What do they actually want to happen here? Or do they just want to criticize?
So pro-natalists, it's essentially this broad ideological movement driven by concerns that the world is not producing enough children and that society should work to change that. Now, not all pro-natalists are politically conservative like Musk and Vance, and not all conservatives are... Particularly pronatalists. Some self-identified pronatalists really support abortion rights. They would never want to force women into having children they don't want. But given the power and influence of people like Musk and Vance, their sort of interest and involvement in the movement has definitely caused a lot of people to feel pretty afraid. Yeah.
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