Seeing as society can’t exist without children, children can never be a commodity. Our leaders are failing us at the most fundamental level by ignoring and gaslighting us about the CoL crisis that is one of the primary causes for our decrease in birthrates.
That's a non sequitur. Many things are essential for mere existence (IE food, water and labor). But we regularly treat them as commodities in an economic sense. Morally and philosophically speaking, children SHOULDN'T be treated as a commodity, but to present that as a logical deduction to your point does not make sense. The necessity of something does not logically prevent its commodification.
A society can’t, but an individual in a society can. And since society consists of individuals, the situation where children are a commodity can arise, even if it threatens the existence of society itself. Pretty much every developed country is like this, as an individual you don’t need children to survive, pension system, own savings and investments provide a much better safety net for the old age than having children. Which for an individual means that having children is optional. Cost of living crisis is mainly centered around housing prices and taxation which are also affected by a lot of societal issues like centralisation where everyone from rural areas wants to live in a city and everyone from a city wants to live in a city centre because it gives better access to education, work and services, which are the basis for a chance at better standard of living than your parents in developed countries. Or increase in life expectancy where total population keeps increasing despite declining birthrates. I wont deny the impact of big fuckup of 2008 here, but right now the aftermath of COVID recession plays a way bigger role. Heavy taxation also comes from the fact that new generations must support social programs for more and more people and pay out pensions for more retirees and service the debt which was taken to allow the existence of those programs in the first place.
Because children are a big investment (monetarily, physically and emotionally) that rich people don't want to deal with. If it can't help them get richer, they don't want it.
You know what WOULD help that? Kids not being a massive monetary investment. Poorer countries have lesser access to education, contraception and abortion, which naturally means more kids getting made.
And that's the conundrum we're in. The people who want to have children can't afford them, the people who can afford them don't WANT to afford them, and the, and the people who either don't know how bad things are, or couldn't afford a condom, a pill or an abortion are having children.
You keep making it about money but it's not and never has been. There is no data that indicates it is. Denmark and Germany are rich countries with tons of protections for pregnant women and children in terms of healthcare and education and their natality is abysmal. The USA, which has less of all of this, has a higher birthrate, because the reality is the opposite of what people here claim: having people poor and keeping them poor makes more babies.
If you want to argue otherwise then provide some proof.
It's cultural, people in developed countries are focused on hedonism, consumerism, and hyper individualism over the traditional family. It is what it is.
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u/Temelios 1d ago
Seeing as society can’t exist without children, children can never be a commodity. Our leaders are failing us at the most fundamental level by ignoring and gaslighting us about the CoL crisis that is one of the primary causes for our decrease in birthrates.