These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
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If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.
In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.
I know a fair chunk of my friends who have given up on the dream of kids. When both parents have to work full time at jobs their post secondary education qualified them for and court mental health issues because nothing they do for work feels meaningful just to scrape by with the bare minimum and accrue damn near nothing in savings… They don’t really want to have kids.
A lot of mammals when they don’t feel safe or secure in resources abandon or kill their young. Humans given control over their reproduction just seem to settle on raising dogs because they are cheaper.