this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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I do think that the Nordic countries show pretty well that even if you treat your population well and put quite a lot of effort into helping the population with child rearing, it seems like women just don't want to have many children in modern society, even before everything became doom-and-gloom.
Maybe that's just how it goes when you let people decide for themselves. Or maybe modern, capitalistic society is just not conducive to childrearing, and no amount of state support for young families, kindergartens etc. is going to change that.
I read this article recently and you might find it interesting as well: Commodification of housing and fertility rates
TL,DR: high housing prices delay and reduce fertility rates.
In this context, Nordic countries are not much better than the rest of the developed world (don’t like this descriptor, but I can’t come up with a better one)
That's today, though. As an example, Sweden's fertility rate has been around 2 since the 1930s. That article didn't mention when housing started being such a big issue, but I assume it wasn't the 30s and not the 50s or 80s, either.
The 30s would be in the upswing after the Great Depression, which hit the entire world hard, and right in the middle of WWII. Post WWII was incredibly hard on almost every European country, as well. The founder of IKEA was inspired during the reconstruction period by Swedish socialists and a simple idea: that everybody deserves to be able to afford furniture. Before IKEA, the Swedish were largely using hand-me-downs of generational pieces or improvising wooden shipping boxes into tables and chairs. True furniture was generally custom pieces made for the wealthy by artisans. IKEA is still banned to this day from buying materials (like lumber) from a number of Swedish companies because they were black marked for providing affordable furniture to the masses by outsourcing the assembly labor to the customer with their innovative flat pack design. Much of Europe in the Cold War was massive concrete prefab buildings because the need to build large-scale housing quickly was so dire. Many cities were practically levelled by the air raids.
On another note, I think a lot of the conversation on the topic of birth rates ignores or under-values the impact of sex ed, safe sex, and the rise of accessible home entertainment. Teenage pregnancies dropping has had a major impact on the birth rate, as has the reduction in accidental pregnancy. Combined, they probably make up a lion's share of the difference between the present and a century ago. There's a reason that so many people are born in the summer/fall, and it's because 9 months before - in the winter - people are cooped up inside more and have less options for things to do for fun, which leads to more "Netflix and chill" and more accidental pregnancies as a result.
It’s almost like we shouldn’t structure our society around endless growth, including the population
It's true that "unchecked growth is the motto of the cancer cell".
And that nature's program has predation/feeding upon itself as its prime mechanism of survival, which runs on boom and bust cycles. For example, when conditions allow for echinoderm populations to explode everything that feeds on echinoderms is having a pleasant and easy time of living "high on the hog". But when that overpopulation inevitably leads to collapse(bust) due to resource depletion, plague, environmental/social dysfunction and disorder, etc, that's when all the beings whose existence depend(ed) on the pleasant and easy times of abundance get to see the real cost/bill of having profited from that oh so very temporary abundance.
Homo sapiens can attempt to structure their societies any which way that suits them based off of the conditions they're dealing with at the time. But unless they somehow graduate from animal-hood, or at least attempt to transcend being slaves to their instincts, they're destiny as animals will remain unchanged.
Yet i optimistically happen to see that a percentage of our species choosing not to reproduce(even for selfish reasons) is a good indication that some of us are able to control/deny the impulses of the body as a means of damage control. These things have been observed and studied for some time now, and fall under the categories of 'Malthusianism' and 'social decay'
Thank you. Demanding women to make more babies is sexist. But, this is what happens, when governments focus shit like productivity, gdp, etc. These are such terrible metrics.
There has been strong social support systems in Finland for example, but even there birth rates here have been falling. I can tell you that when you have an aggressive neighbor pushing a war right next door, job prospects are uncertain, inflation is eating away at wages, and social safety nets are being cut or dismantled, it fundamentally changes how people think about having children. That kind of instability and uncertainty about the future makes starting a family feel like too big a risk for many people.
I can also add that Trump is also screwing over the planet with his damn tariffs. This has caused variation in availability and fluctuations in pricing. It’s also continuing greedflation.
We hear about it every day. Now, let’s see how women feel about cranking out more tax payers.
I'm from a Nordic country: we've seen a clear birth rate decline since COVID and especially since 2022 with Putin's invasion and the war.
We got messages from our daycare that they have to make adjustments because there are so few children etc. So it might be several factors, but the uncertain world right now is definitely a huge factor.
Especially since COVID and the war sent inflation and prices spiralling out of control, with food and housing prices soaring, making having children a fiscally irresponsible thing to do.
We had our first child and signed up to buy an apartment right before COVID. Those interest rates were not what I had planned for. Like, quadrupled.
Sweden's fertility rate hovered around 2 since the 1930s. It picked back up a little in the 50s, but even then the highest value was around 2.4, and it dipped below 2 in 1970. So doom and gloom and all that, but even in the (relatively) good times, they barely went above replacement level, and under it as soon as contraceptive pills became available. Overall they did manage to stay at a higher value than other countries like Germany, so the effort is clearly paying off, but I think this still clearly shows that people just don't want to have a lot of children in modern, capitalistic society even when the circumstances are good.
Right, I'm just saying that it's even worse with the events of recent years. It's even made the news here on several occasions, so doom, gloom, and the effect it has had on the economy, very much has affected things, like I said. I have first hand experience. It's not been nice.
Childbirth seems decidedly not chill. Maybe women just want to chill
Nordic countries are also “highly” educated in the traditional sense, and part of that education has long been hammering home how having children is socially irresponsible in a global context. So, I’d say it’s less about social support or their own immediate environment and more about decades of Western culture and academia actively telling them to not reproduce or risk being seen as, or simply feeling like, bad global participants.
Also, economic security, women’s access to healthcare and early sex education contribute to their ability to follow through on that ideological shift. There’s no religion telling them to procreate but a whole lot of social cues instead telling them it’s selfish and potentially harmful to their own livelihoods, and the planet’s welfare, to do so.
Everyone wants to speculate as to why women don't want to have children. I'm not an expert, but hear me out. What if we just ask them? Not just why, but if. Do we actually know that they don't want to, or are there other factors we haven't considered preventing them from having children.
Heretic! If we allow them to have their own opinions (on childbearing no less!), then what's next? Giving them the right to vote?!?
I imagine that women "feel" the future and while there might not be crisis in nordic countries today, there might be in the coming decades. Our world is changing so rapidly, and humans live for 80 years; can you really say confidently that no major changing in living conditions to the negative are going to happen within your potential child's lifetime?