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As right-wing governments seek to blame a rejection of parenthood, a survey reveals a lack of choice, not desire, stops people having the families they want
Archived version: https://archive.is/20250610132514/https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/jun/10/un-population-fund-unfpa-report-reasons-falling-global-fertility
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Factors such as the high cost of parenthood, job insecurity, expensive housing, concerns over the state of the world and the lack of a suitable partner stop people having the families they want, rather than any desire not to have children, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), said.
(…)and the answer lies in responding to what people say they need: paid family leave, affordable fertility care and supportive partners.”
Saved you a click
And to immediately reply to my own post:
I really really don’t want to raise kids, and this century is pretty much the first one where that’s actually an option.
I have a great husband, a suitable house, a good job (and so does he). But since we don’t want to spend two decades raising children, we chose not to have them. Because that’s an option. We don’t need children as a labor force for subsistence farming, we don’t get kids as a result of recreational sex and we don’t need children to provide for us in old age. That’s entirely new, none of those things were true a hundred years ago, and many still aren’t true in other parts of the world.
So yeah, even people who are super privileged like us, might still not have kids, because we think having kids sucks.
So another study that found out what the majority already considered obvious, except for some old fashioned extreme religious minorities
I have a suspicion that while all those reasons are legit, lots of people just don’t want them
People are seeing an alternative to the classic life-script, and are choosing to be child-free, but there’s still a lot of stigma surrounding it, so people make all sorts of excuses rather than saying “I just don’t want kids”
Even if your brain tricks you into caring with a chemical cocktail to rival any drug being fear mongered about, if you aren’t already high the entire prospect of parenthood seems awful. From destroying your body to forcing you to entirely reorientate your life around a burden that can’t even sleep without dying. Especially in an era kids can’t even walk down the street alone without some Karen calling the cops, you can’t even catch a break after they are old enough to exist independently.