Declining Birth Rates

This cluster discusses reasons for falling fertility rates and why people are choosing not to have children, including cultural shifts, women's education and empowerment, economic factors, contraception, and personal preferences over family life.

➡️ Stable 0.5x Politics & Society
3,647
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#704
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
1
2008
14
2009
28
2010
44
2011
37
2012
40
2013
55
2014
46
2015
95
2016
143
2017
120
2018
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2019
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2020
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2021
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2022
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2023
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2024
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2025
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2026
10

Keywords

IVF US IMHO children.aspx theguardian.com i.e IS gallup.com ycombinator.com populationassociation.org children kids women having children birth birth control having kids fertility educated child

Sample Comments

It explains why people arent having kids for sure.

socalgal2 Jul 15, 2025 View on HN

Money is not the issue according to this from 4 days agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44529456According to that the issue is culture. We, as a species, have effectively just changed into people who no longer want kids (on average). Changing culture is hard. Sure, every little economic reason might have been some small influence on that culture but fixing the monetary issues will not sudd

toomuchtodo Mar 1, 2021 View on HN

Citation to back up your comment: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...

tokioyoyo Feb 28, 2025 View on HN

Top income brackets aren't really having more than 2 children either, which is a requirement for growing population. Like most studies has shown that, in general, educated women, freedom of choice and etc. will negatively impact birthrates. It's the same thing everywhere. Sure, income, less social pressure and etc. affects it somehow, but there's just no real need in general to have 3 kids in this day and age. Asking a woman to give away at the bare minimum 6 years of their youth

sametmax Jun 1, 2018 View on HN

Also a lot of people don't want children. It's a lot of responsabilities and constraints, so you need to feel the desired for it.The new generation grew with aids, feel less influenced by the authority selling the one family lifestyle and use more contraception.Now wait for Vasalgel to take off. When males will have total control of their involvment in pregnancy, you will see the numbers go down even more. And probably some serious changes in the man/woman dynamics.

kredd Mar 11, 2024 View on HN

In the past, more people wanted to have children. Every year, that percentage seems to be decreasing [1]. Birth control mostly decreases chances of unwanted pregnancies, and that is good, in my opinion. How do we make people want to have children? Well, that's the hard problem that every developed country seems to be facing, and nobody has found substantial success so far.To be fair, I am a part of the problem as well. The opportunity loss for people in their late 20s to have a child is

somenameforme Nov 6, 2025 View on HN

People overwhelmingly view the ideal number of children to have as way more than we're having. [1] So people are likely choosing to not having children for other reasons.[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/694640/americans-ideal-family-s...

jason0597 Jun 7, 2021 View on HN

And now you see why no one is having children nowadays. It's the natural order of late stage capitalism. Having children is just not rewarding from a cost-benefit analysis

ljlolel Aug 20, 2025 View on HN

… As in people are choosing not to have kids

red-iron-pine Oct 31, 2024 View on HN

and thus why no one is having kids