I've seen people here get extremely weird about this issue. Just look at how this post has blown up. And honestly, i've seen much, much worse than this, outright entitled incel shit like "a society were women routinely choose not to have kids seems threatening to me." Any time birthrates and parenthood come up, people crawl out of the woodworks to start this endless litany of how they'd have tons of kids if material conditions were better and ... i don't know how to say this kindly, it's complete bullshit.

When you look at AES countries, places that had the best childcare in human history, absolute job security, super low costs of living, then no, it doesn't work like that. The DDR is a perfect example. Everybody who has experienced it misses the childcare and education system of the DDR, they had a lot more women in the workforce than west Germany, raising kids was so much safer and easier and they still had lower birthrates than the west. People made a lot of use of the free and easily accessible abortion clinics and honestly, good on them. It's not just economic insecurity that keeps people from having children. A lot of people genuinely do not want this. And given how much women in particular get pressured into seeing motherhood as a necessary condition for a happy and fulfilled life, i think it's still not enough people who choose this.

Hexbears have to get it out of their heads that "anti-natalism" is a rightwing stance. In fact, "anti-natalism" is a nazbol dogwhistle to smear queer liberation and free abortion, people like Haz have used it this way for years and it still just gets thrown around here willy nilly, it's sickening. The whole "ecofascism" thing people on here get workedup about is obviously abhorrent and eugenicist, but it is also an obscure, irrelevant position, an online oddity that has no real-world impact. Coercive pro-natalism is much more prevelant among reactionaries and is actually driving policies in imperial core and post-soviet countries. It's time we course correct on these takes.