Originally published at: Pandemic curbs Europe's birthrate | Boing Boing
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Cue the ultra-nationalists and fascists fretting about “not enough (white) babies”. I’m sure that a similar situation in the U.S. will bring out their anti-choicer counterparts.
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Indeed, “Oh no! It is the Great Replacement!” 
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I guess “the end of the world” ain’t sexy after-all. Who’d a thunk…
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Yeah, I’d have thought a lot of time together and slightly-tougher-to-acquire birth control would have spun off a spate of extra pregnancy. OTOH maybe people were worried about the effect of possible COVID exposure to infants or during pregnancy and were careful NOT to get pregnant.
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Now I’m thinking of an Identitarian “Peanuts” special: “It’s the Great Replacement, Charlie Brown!”
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I think once we have herd immunity and life is more “normal”, we’re going to see a baby boom.
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I mean, there’s very little boning going on in Zombie movies. So it checks out.
Perhaps because after we see some stirrings of attraction between characters, one or the other or both get et. So maybe totally unrelated comparison.
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Seems legit.
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Maybe being forced to spend too much time with your SO has dampened the mood?
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It honestly has here. There’s something to be said for not spending literally every waking minute stuck in the same house as someone, no matter how much you love them!
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That Tarantino movie Planet Terror being an exception. There was a love scene in a restaurant called “The Bone Shack” that led to a pregnancy.
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The remake of “Dawn of the Dead” was another exception.
But the people doing the boning definitely died shortly after.
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I’m predicting a one- or two-year “Baby Bump” before the general trend of an alternating declining or plateauing birthrate resumes. Singles will be able to get out and connect physically again, partnered couples won’t be stuck together 24/7, and there will be a brief surge of optimism about the future. After a couple of years, though, the realities (good and bad) of life in the 21st century West will re-assert themselves.
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I saw this meme all over the place last spring:
It’s really hard to know exactly how much of an impact the pandemic made in the US because 2019 was already our lowest birth rate on record. It’s been on a downward trend for decades, and would have already been below the “replacement rate” here years ago if not for immigration.
As long as Boston Dynamics can build us enough caretaker robots to attend to the old folks then I guess it’s maybe the best thing for the planet, but I do wonder what numbers the world population will eventually stabilize at, if it ever stabilizes at all.
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Nothing like a global pandemic to put you in the mood for having children to make them suffer. Did you see how hard it was for people who had children last year? Awful. Like all the shitty funerals.
That and new couples getting together really not happening makes this not surprising at all. But yeah, next year we should see some of that pent up… potential getting released.
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According to the probably imperfect Worldomter (https://www.worldometers.info/) the world population is still growing:
7,851,235,597 Current World Population
26,257,562 Births this year
11,023,553 Deaths this year
People need to come up with an economics model that doesn’t rely on continuous population growth. Earth can’t take it much longer.
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The problem is the endless pursuit of corporate growth and profits, not people raising families.
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Well it’s dropping in much of Asia and Europe and South America. Most of the rise in population in this century is predicted to happen in Africa which is, frankly, underpopulated due to colonial depredations. What the earth needs is not fewer people but an end to colonialism, exploitation, billionaires, and poverty.
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Yes, but that’s baked in for the time being, even with a declining birth rate.
This talk (which is a few years old now) includes one of the more interesting and intuitive explanations I’ve seen of world population trends.
Agreed that we need to design an economy that works without an ever-expanding population. Because we’re almost certainly going to have that world in the near future. Personally my biggest concern is finding enough caretakers for the elderly. It’s never been easy to find affordable quality elder care, and it will get harder as the population balance trends older. There are already a bunch of horror stories coming out of places like China where desperate people end up hiring really shady caretakers because the need is so great.
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