[AbrahamParangi]

It's so ridiculously Orwellian (or should I say Atwoodian?) that I can't imagine anyone except in the most deranged countries is going to roll back access to birth control.

The obvious long-term solution is that we do nothing and the fact that a desire for children is partially genetic solves the problem on its own.

[nobody9999]

>It's so ridiculously Orwellian (or should I say Atwoodian?) that I can't imagine anyone except in the most deranged countries is going to roll back access to birth control.

My country is, apparently, one of the most deranged then. While all forms of contraception are currently legal across my country, it's harder to gain access to it in some places than it is in others:

https://www.glamour.com/story/birth-control-laws

However, some places in my backwater country have attempted (but not yet succeeded) to limit various forms of contraception, despite its legality[0] nationwide since 1965:

https://stateline.org/2022/05/19/some-states-already-are-tar...

And hundreds of elected representatives in the national government voted against[1] and finally blocked[2] nationwide legislation ensuring access to contraception. What's more, some members of our highest court have indicated that they'd like to revisit the issue[3] with an eye towards revoking such access.

I wish I didn't live in such a backwards country. :(

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/house-republicans-voted-again...

[2] https://www.help.senate.gov/chair/newsroom/press/republican-...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/24/contracep... (https://archive.is/dvON8 )

[WarOnPrivacy]

> a desire for children is partially genetic

While true, any western reduction in birth rates can be trivially explained by changes in child-raising. Children's critical hours of self-raising/peer-raising have been sharply degraded thru danger-culture & the erasure of free-roam areas. All of that is being forcefully replaced with adult micromanagement.

In short, we've swapped much of the joy with stress and stunting.

[abathur]

Thought exercise: functionally speaking, how similar is ~compromising the quality of high-school sex education (i.e., getting rid of it, making it elective, giving parents any control or veto over the curriculum, converting it to an abstinence-only curriculum, ensuring it's taught by prudes, etc.) to rolling back access to birth control?

(Edit: not really directed at parent poster. Just something you made me think of...)

[DoingIsLearning]

I am all for thought experiments but this discussion is fairly disturbing.

How about:

- 12 month parental leave for fathers and mothers

- 20 days minimum payed holiday

- paid sick leave

- Free childcare

- Insurance covered 15 days assistance at home post partum with a post-natal caregiver

- Child stipends up to the age of 18 years old

None of this is ground breaking in many developed countries.

So much work yet to do in implementing pro-child policies and yet your first step is entrapping teenagers into a pregnancy and a lifelong commitment?

[vladvasiliu]

Not sure how long parental leave we have, but here in France most [0] of your other points are available, yet birth rate has still been below replacement for 20 years [1]. So something else may be going on.

[0] While childcare is technically free, my understanding is that, in practice, places are limited, especially in big cities.

[1] https://fr.statista.com/statistiques/512101/nombre-enfants-p...

[newaccount74]

Same in Austria. Theoretically we have very affordable childcare. But in cities there are too few places, so only a small fraction of parents can actually use them. On the country side opening times of childcare are so limited that they are incompatible with most jobs (childcare Mo-Fri 8-12 is better than nothing, but there are very few jobs that are compatible with those times).

The result is that most mothers pause their careers while the kids are small. The consequence is that most couples only have one or two kids.

[ajnin]

Childcare is not free in France, it is subsidized but parents pay in proportion of their resources.

[arrozconcosas]

There is no correlation in practice between these benefits and greater birth rates. Countries with some of the most friendly policies to parenting have the lowest birth rates. In the past, people with much more difficult lives had many more children. This sounds nice in theory, but doesn't hold up in the real world.

[beiller]

Quick google for France shows 1.83 births per woman vs USA's 1.64. So maybe there is a correlation.

[nightski]

That's going to be very rough on small business. I think it all sounds fantastic don't get me wrong, but most mom and pop shops can't float employees for 12 months while paying in full for their child care and other services.

[scotty79]

It's usually mostly tax funded

[bzzzt]

That's why we pay taxes in the EU...

[Maakuth]

This is basically what Finland does, but it doesn't seem to result into larger baby count. These are very humane policies and I'm all for them but they don't solve this particular problem.

[saiya-jin]

I think the aim is rather to raise few well-balanced kids who are taken care of by professionals so parents' work is not FUBAR. Motivating modern parents to have >2 kids takes a bit more than that.

The simple fact is, parenting these days is effin' hard. Even if you have place to put your kids in 5 days a week. I mean hellishly hard for few years, people go very close to mental breakdown regularly, or sometimes quite deep into it - seeing it a bit around us.

The bar to call yourself a good parent ain't about kids simply surviving. We know that ignoring child's cries whole night, every night messes them up badly for later life. Day naps effectively ruin your weekends. Diapers, fights for toys, lack of sleep which alone will fuck up most people badly but here we talk about all of this and much more, for years, while work doesn't wait. No help there.

The fact is, most folks simply have enough after 2 kids, we sure as hell do. There is very little additional 'parenting satisfaction' after 2 kids, yet costs and stress mounts. Also seeing quite a bit of fertility issues after first child around us, but that's not what people like to talk about.

[Maakuth]

I think you are onto something, although we've got three :). Raising well-balanced kids, who then become well-balanced adults isn't for nothing of course, but it's way harder to measure than the raw count of babies.

[abathur]

You seem to be imagining that I support the undermining of sex-ed. I am merely pointing to the dots. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_education_in_the_United_...

[lovich]

Oof, each one of those sounds like it might cost more than 10 dollars, much less all together.

Guess I’m going to vote for going with the dystopian choices or the more palatable one of sticking our heads in the sand and not deal with the problem until it’s a catastrophe

[rendall]

I suspect that the decline in birth rates in developed nations have to do with raised expectations. The amount of resources and time that parents are expected to devote to each child are quite high.

[hnbad]

While the GOP now literally has candidates in its primaries that explicitly position themselves in favor of "maybe some people should have access to abortion sometimes and we shouldn't put people in prison for it", prior to the catastrophic failure of its so-called culture war, the GOP actually had very vocal factions explicitly framing contraceptives as abortion - starting with the "morning after" pill, which literally prevents impregnation rather than inducing abortion in any sense of the word, but up to and including the regular "pill", which simply prevents ovulation at all.

Sure this is still not at the level of banning all forms of contraception, but it's not a long shot and given the historically evident incremental nature of this combined with the focus on "abstinence only" sex ed (i.e. no sex outside marriage, i.e. no need for easy access to condoms or any other OTC contraceptives) I don't think this can be dismissed as a "slippery slope" fallacy either.

[jtbayly]

You are spreading misinformation about basic scientific facts. You should do some more study. The Pill prevents birth via two major methods. One way is preventing ovulation, yes. The other main way is by preventing the fertilized egg from successfully implanting. That is also how the morning-after pill works.

A fertilized egg has its own unique DNA, and begins development and dividing immediately. By the time it implants, it is made up of 200-300 cells.

Yes, this is, objectively speaking, an abortion.

[hnbad]

You're conflating the two things I said. The pill interferes with the menstrual cycle to prevent ovulation and, usually, menstruation. The morning-after pill acts similarly in that it interrupts ovulation but additionally prevents any blastocysts from implanting, yes. That's why I'm saying it's usually the rhetorical gateway when trying to attack contraceptives before doing so is rhetorically viable.

A blastocyst has 200-300 cells, yes. But if you hadn't stopped reading the Wikipedia article (or high school biology textbook) you'd have noticed that it also says that a blastocyst begins to form about five days after fertilization and implants two days later. Also even without chemical intervention only 30% of fertilized eggs survive to develop into blastocysts and successfully implant -- with implantation failure being the most likely outcome even if the fertilized egg develops to that stage. A lot of the lead-up treatments in IVF processes only exist to ensure that a blastocyst can develop and sucessfully implant itself.

Note that the literal "morning-after" pill (effective within 72 hours after intercourse) available over-the-counter in most countries including the US often only contains a progestin, i.e. it's just a higher dose equivalent of the regular pill. What you are talking about are pills containing an antiprogestin, which indeed can also act as an abortifacient, even though I've never heard any medical professional refer to a failure to implant as an "abortion".

That you're conflating all three of these pills (the Pill, the OTC morning-after pill and the one containing an abortifacient) is a good demonstration of the "incremental contraceptive ban" strategy I described.

[sjsdaiuasgdia]

A blastocyst that doesn't implant is not a pregnancy.

[jtbayly]

A blastocyst that is intentionally prevented from developing further by making the uterine environment inhospitable is precisely the same thing both in intent and outcome as what happens with a medication abortion (RU-486):

“RU-486 works by blocking the action of the hormone progesterone, which is needed to support the development of a fertilized egg.” (From https://www.britannica.com/science/abortion-pregnancy )

The pill works at times by thinning the uterine lining, which is needed to support the development of a fertilized egg.

You can talk about what changes have or haven’t taken place in the body of the mother, but these are the same thing, just accomplished by two different means. We have other means as well.

[yamazakiwi]

You're focusing too hard on conflating the actions with the outcomes. A woman using preventative medicine to decrease the chance of a pregnancy is by definition not an abortion.

You're argumentation would also imply that if a man has a nightly emission he is performing abortion because a child could have been created, then listing the biological comparisons between a nightly emission and abortion claiming similarities make them the identical.

[yamazakiwi]

In this case no one is pregnant yet, so it is not an abortion by definition. It so deliciously ironic that you accuse them of spreading misinformation.

[jtbayly]

We could argue about the meaning of the word "pregnant," but let's be plain. contrary to the original comment, fertilization does occur still at times, and then biology tells us that a new life with its own DNA has entered the picture. (This is why nightly emissions have nothing to do with this, bringing in your other comment.)

That life is intentionally terminated by birth control and the morning-after pill in almost the same exact method as RU-486, which we know as the "abortion drug." Both cause the thinning of the lining of the uterus, preventing attachment or causing the loss of attachment to occur, respectively.

Most people who work in the field of abortion know this, and that is precisely why they bring up the loss of birth control as one of the (either intended or unintended) consequences of outlawing abortion.

In other words, both pro-choice and pro-life people know this is true, and acting like pro-life people are ignoramuses for believing this reveals a real lack of understanding of the science, not to mention the politics, and the moral questions involved.

[yamazakiwi]

>>We could argue about the meaning of the word "pregnant," but let's be plain. contrary to the original comment, fertilization does occur still at times, and then biology tells us that a new life with its own DNA has entered the picture. (This is why nightly emissions have nothing to do with this, bringing in your other comment.) That life is intentionally terminated by birth control and the morning-after pill in almost the same exact method as RU-486, which we know as the "abortion drug." Both cause the thinning of the lining of the uterus, preventing attachment or causing the loss of attachment to occur, respectively.

I wish your comment included the importance of sperm and eggs individually to the process of creating life. Any argument you make about life creation should be made hollistically, and drawing the line at the pregnancy because that is near the time medication is administered is a mistake, particularly since that is likely temporary and we will see many other solutions in the future. I'm not sure what you are trying to say by comparing the morning after pill to RU-486 other than you view them the same. That's like saying calling out of work sick the night before and calling out 5 minutes before your shift are the same thing because you used a phone and the result was you didn't go to work, so I'm not sure if that's really what you're implying.

>>Most people who work in the field of abortion know this, and that is precisely why they bring up the loss of birth control as one of the (either intended or unintended) consequences of outlawing abortion. >In other words, both pro-choice and pro-life people know this is true, and acting like pro-life people are ignoramuses for believing this reveals a real lack of understanding of the science, not to mention the politics, and the moral questions involved.

I don't think most pro-choice or pro-life people know much at all about the subject and are opinionated anyway. As with most contentious political topics.

It would be a mistake to assume that all pro-life people are ignoramuses or lack understanding of science. This bias comes from the media showing pro-lifers purposefully rejecting science historically. The media has also shown many years of pro-choice pretention and that is why none of this reveals a lack of understanding of science as much as it reveals our laziness towards learning truths and our reliance on others to provide talking points that confirm our naive suspicions; especially if they allow you to uninvolve yourself directly with the problem, and that's on both sides without a doubt.

[wly_cdgr]

The United States is literally in the middle of doing exactly that right now. And I don't think too many reasonably impartial observers would put the US in the top few dozen most deranged countries, for all its many serious flaws and faults.