Adam B Coville, author

US Centers for Disease Control has revealed a study that in 2023 only 3.6 million babies were born in the US. 54.4 live births per 1,000 females aged 15-44. This is a wide range of ages to examine, and surely each age cohort has its own causes for the decline. But I'm mostly going to talk about the youngest part of this cohort: 15-19. This isn't age discrimination, exactly. I can speak from experience. I am now at the high end of that range. My child rearing days are done. The young group that is just starting theirs is down to a record low of 13.2 births per 1,000 females, a 79% decline since 1991. The highest birth rate group is shifting closer to 30 than 20, and continuing to skew older.

Why?

Oh boy... buckle up readers. It's time for a tirade.

What kind of life do 15-19 year olds lead these days? The outlook for a young person just entering the market or just having joined the market in the last few years is bleak. That's not me being a pessimist, that's the brutal, honest truth. This economy is merciless. It is dog eat dog. You have to make hard decisions to survive in this market, and for most people survival is the best they can hope for. There are lots of gaslighters and ablists out there that will try to convince you this is just your fault for not saving your ~$25 dollars hard enough. With $25 as your starting point, you aren't going to save your way into a $1 million dollar house. Sorry, but that's just the truth. It's so bad now that a lot of people can't even keep a roof over their heads even when they have work. Every time you think you're getting ahead, the rug gets pulled out from under you. Plants close. Someone buys the business and now there's layoffs. Some "once in a lifetime" economic meltdown comes and you get laid off. Inflation erodes your buying power. Greedflation and shrinkflation erodes it further. You can't plan 5 years ahead like this. In my experience, you can't even plan 1 year ahead like this. Most people can't plan more than 1 paycheck ahead. They are in a purely reactive, survival posture.

So what young person in their right mind would decide to start a family in these conditions? No one. If they're smart, they just won't have kids. It's too expensive. The having sex part isn't expensive. That part is still free, provided you ever have the time or the energy to do it. But every other part of it is too expensive. What are most young men and women of child rearing age doing with their time right now? They're working 2 or 3 jobs. They're exhausted. They're chronically stressed. They're eating unhealthy food. They're not able to afford regular checkups at the doctor's office or manage any medical conditions they have. They can barely keep a roof over their heads even when they've got 3 other roommates. Between their bills, their debts and their insurance the math just does not add up. A lot of young adults are moving back home with mom and dad (if they have that luxury) because they just can't afford to adult on what money they make. They have no control and no hope over their life. Life is just a constant grind of soul crushing labor without ever making progress on lifetime financial goals. The money they are earning does not even provide the basic heirarchy of needs.

Let's just call that what it is -- slavery. Young people in this economy are slaves. They're treated as slaves. They live the life of a slave. They are second class citizens. They don't have any rights. They do on paper, but if you don't have any resources and your life is just a constant grind on the knife's edge of ruin then what use are rights on paper? They are not in control of how their time is spent. Their time is consumed by labor just in order to survive and keep providing more labor. Nothing they do seems to be able to change the system. There's no whips and chains -- the implements, the tools and machinery of this slavery are differently than the slavery that existed in the 1800s. This is a different kind of slavery. It doesn't look or feel like slavery as we understand the term but it is. You don't have any savings so you can't afford to stop working, not even when you're sick or something is going on in your life like a funeral or a wedding. Weekends aren't even weekends anymore, you have to work those too. Can't pay down your loans, the interest is too high and you can't put enough aside. Can't declare bankruptcy, that won't even wipe out your student loans and it doesn't change the fact that you're poor and not making much money so you're still in a precarious position and would just fall right back into financial peril. In fact, even if the bankruptcy went perfect and all your debts were wiped out the IRS would count that as income for that year and assess taxes on it. So you'd end up with a big tax bill at the end of the year that you probably can't afford either. Anytime you go to see a doctor, you get billed for hundreds, even thousands of dollars whether you have insurance or not, and those bills hold you down like a boot on your neck, stopping you from getting even 1 inch ahead. How is being working poor on the knife's edge of homelessness and getting buried by a steadily growing mountain of medical debt different than slavery? It isn't.

I don't mean this in the sense of slavery as it existed in America in the 1800s, white plantation slave owners. That form of slavery was abolished, thank God. But that didn't end slavery in the world or even in America. The tools have changed. The people being enslaved are different. In this slavery you think you're free but you're not. And it's no longer just African Americans, it's equal opportunity slavery now. Everyone is equally worthless regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, or creed. Unless you come from money already, you will never get it. The people exploiting slave labor aren't really different. It's still anyone that consumes labor just looking for ways to minimize labor costs. And the US government has facilitated this through their actions and inactions for decades. It's not just agricultural slaves that they want now, but all wage labor. Ok, let me clarify: there are really 2 categories of people living in America today who put up with slavery conditions:

those earning at or above minimum wage, but are still mired in an unescapable poverty trap due to low wages, high bills, precarious work or gig work and can't get ahead. These people are fighting a losing battle with time. Their labor is not benefiting them in the long run. It isn't advancing their careers, it isn't advancing their financial goals. At best, it is just treading water. Poverty is used as a weapon to keep them in line.
those who are in the country illegally and are being ruthlessly exploited by the agricultural industry for sub-minimum wage pay and downright inhuman working conditions. These workers are held in line by the same poverty forces afflicting group 1, as well as the threat of deportation if they speak up.

It's slavery by extortion. Do what I say or I take your job away. Do what I say or I'll have you deported. Do a good job or I'll cut your hours. Close the plant. Move to Mexico or another state. Business owners have so many sticks they can beat labor with now it's ridiculous. We may be signing these employment contracts, and we are free to quit, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we have any choice or power in this negotiation. It is laughably lopsided in the employer's favor.

Frederick Douglas, a slave who taught himself to read, escaped the plantation and went on to become a supreme court justice had this to say about wage slavery:

"Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other."

-- Frederick Douglas

Emma Goldman, a fellow dissilusioned industrial worker who lived in my native upstate New York observed

"The only difference is that you are hired slaves instead of block slaves."

- Emma Goldman

So that's the financial dimension to the problem. Starting a family requires resources, and young people simply don't have them. It's still possible to start a family without enough resources, here to say. But this isn't a contest to say who had it tougher. If it's hard, then there won't be a lot of babies, plain and simple. If it's easy, there will be babies. You can (if you are privileged or feeling superior, as many do) gaslight the millenials and Gen Z who straigt nope'd parenthood for this reason, but that doesn't actually solve anything. It just makes people angry, in fact. If you are unable to move past this mental block, then I have an exercise for you: try planting a tomato seed in a pot that is too small for it, and never water it. Plant it in the cheapest soil you can buy -- just regular dirt dug up from your yard without spending anything at all. Give it no resources, and see how well it grows. Go on, try it. That's what it's like trying to start a family right now. It takes resources.

There's a social dimension as well, of course. If you're only ever at work or sleeping, then the only members of the opposite sex you regularly interact with are either customers (yikes!) or coworkers, which is also yikes. Both of these are bad for business. There are online platforms for dating, and I haven't been on them in a very long time so I don't know anymore, but I found them pretty frustrating / borderline nightmarish to use. If it's anything like modern job boards, then at least half the listings aren't even real. If they are real, at least you've got a pool of interested bachelors / bachelorettes to start narrowing down. But then you can only develop the relationship on your own time, which is problematic because you have no time, which at its heart is also a resources issue. And where are you going to take them to? Your room in your parent's house that you're living in because you can't even afford the rental prices? Or the flat with 4 roommates where you get a room or just a bed in a room? Hey don't mind us! Anyway... say those weren't issues for the sake of argument. And say you sacrified sleep or something and got lucky. You hit it off despite all odds. That's awesome, but should it have been that hard? What do you think the birth rate would look like if there were more regular social interaction between young people and they were well rested and had time to get to know each other?

This is what we've chosen to do with every young adult of child bearing age. Especially when they're just entering the job market and are taking their first jobs, where the pay is probably even worse than normal. So the youngest, who would have the easiest time conceiving biologically, we make their lives absolute hell to the point where any of them with a choice are choosing to delay having children or simply not have children because they've correctly observed that they can't afford to have them. They can barely look out for themselves. They use birth control if they're sexually active and they still live in a state where they can legally get it, but a lot just aren't sexually active. At an instinctual level, they understand that with the stresses they're living with, they just can't provide the right kind of life for a child. They don't have the resources to do that.

And man, hats off to these young adults in Gen Z, that's a spot on instinct. That's outstanding forsight. Parenthood is hard even under the best of conditions, but we've engineered a society where it's even harder than normal. Take whatever problems you have looking out for yourself in this market and then magnify them by two, and that's what you would be up against. Starting with money, it's something you will never recover from financially. The doctors visits, the meds if you need meds, the birth itself even with an easy birth you're just at the mercy of the healthcare industrial complex and you're going to get bills which are probably more money than you even make in a year at that age. God help you if it's a difficult birth with complications you'll see bills so large that it's probably easier to just travel to a different country and never return to the US than try to actually pay them off. I highly recommend this, by the way. I also recommend medical tourism as a way to avoid being exploited by the American healthcare industrial complex in the first place. Every other nation in the world has cheaper and more affordable healthcare than the United States does, so if you see a major operation or condition in your future, it strongly behooves you to shop around Canada, Mexico and other countries easy to reach with a US passport and get treatment there instead.

And that's just the conception to birth part. If you're the mother now you've got no choice but to sit out a few weeks while your body heals, and you've got to nurse the baby and are getting very little sleep on top of that so even in an ideal situation where you've got a husband or a boyfriend and some other family supporting you, it's hard. It's exhausting. It's basically a job. Especially if you have twins or multiples it is your fulltime job complete with overtime and off hours and stuff. At least the law still provides paid maternal leave in the US, although being honest it doesn't provide nearly enough of it. It provides basiclaly no paternal leave (I think I got 2 weeks, I can't even remember taking it). Realistically speaking, you get no time out of the hamster wheel when you're a man, it's just assumed that Mom will do all the childcare on her own, which is just terrible. The reality of childcare is that you could take the first 2 years of your child's life off of work and would still find it hard to get back into work difficult to cope with. You can put the children into daycare while you're at work, but daycare is now so expensive you might be losing money just for the right to go back to work. It's like signing a car loan so expensive you have to work all the time just to pay for it. You work to afford the car, and you only drive the car to and from work. You might as well just take the time off.

The bottom line is that you're just not supported. Not financially, not legally, not with the labor of family and community, not in any sense of the word. If you are wealthy enough to pay for all the diapers and baby formula, nanny, daycare, clothes, doctors visits and the 1,000 other things that parents have to do for their children then things go well. But if you don't already have money and you're working to earn your living, then parenthood is just a financial impossibility in your 20s and even these days it seems like in your 30s. Especially since it seems like whatever it is you need to buy the price is just going constantly up for no reason. Healthcare, baby formula, diapers and childcare/daycare specifically. I'm here to tell you it's hard even in your early 40s. Then of course there's the elephant in the room: housing, which is at the moment basically impossible for anyone born after 1950 to buy. None of these items are optional if you want children. You need them all.

Well bad news folks: what happens if you only reach a level of financial security where you can support a family later in life -- in your late 30s or early 40s, when it becomes all but impossible (at least for women) to conceive naturally? Well guess what, the birth rate goes down. Hopefully, that shouldn't come as a big surprise to anyone. It's just biology. Men's bodies produce less testosterone and tend to have lower sperm counts and quality at 40 than they do at 20. Older fathers are also considered a contributing factor to autism. Women have a harder time conceiving naturally at 30 than they do at 20 and it's virtually impossible after 40 although obviously in both cases there are exceptions. The point is that if the goal is to have enough babies that you can sustain or even grow the population, but you're only even allowing people to have babies at the time when it's difficult or impossible to naturally conceive, then you're just not going to have a lot of babies.

The great irony is that we've engineered society in such a way that young adults of prime childbearing age can't afford it, and we caution and admonish them not to have them, use protection or even just practice abstinence. And they're doing these things. But then we act surprised when the few people that do have the resources to start a family aren't making enough babies to maintain the population. This is cause and effect. So where do we go from here? This is a question that seems to be causing consternation among all developed nations. We want wage slaves it seems, but we also want the slaves to have babies! Here's a list of things they have tried

take away birth control and abortion, thereby force them to have babies. Yeah... not quite ethical, or effective.
various financial incentives. This is the right idea, but nowhere near adequate.
mass immigration. This is currently the favored solution, as it brings in more working age people they can feed into the wage slave meat grinder.

None of these actually work!

Taking away birth control is at best, an illusion. Like anything the government tries to ban but people actually want and need, it's just going to drive the market underground. Even if all perpscription birth control were outlawed federally tomorrow, it would just push those drugs underground into the war on drugs which has been going on for over 30 years now and no end in sight. Prohibition is ineffective, and makes criminals out of innocent people. Most notably, it criminalizes the very young people of child bearing age that you want to be making babies. Pretty hard to do that from inside a jail cell, and what an absurd thing to be sent to jail for although I guess an absurd number of US States feel differently. Hopefully the rest of us on Earth 1 that do not want to live in a religio-fascist nation can agree this is not the way.

Mass immigration makes certain numbers look good. To economists, it feels like population growth. It looks like GDP growth. In reality though, it causes capital shallowing, depresses wages, and results in a per capita recession. As far as the central banks and government agencies are concerned, good enough. When negative externalities from unplanned, huge population growth happen, they just misdirect and gaslight to avoid being held accountable for these perfectly predictable outcomes. It's almost like if you grow your adult population 200% faster than you're growing housing, transportation and other services, then you end up with overcrowding, shortages, depressed wages and inflation. But big business lobbyists that want cheap labor and high demand for housing like it that way, so that's the way we have it. It's also not the right kind of population growth. It's more people of working age, not more infants. This skews the demographic older. This too, is not the way.

The financial incentives are closer to the mark, but they miss it by miles. A 1 time gimme of $1,000 or so will be gone before the end of year 1. Possibly before the end of month 1. That won't even cover all the hospital bills. That won't even cover all the prenatal doctors visits. That's not even a year's worth of formula. An extra $1,000 here or there, even if it were just no-strings attached cash isn't even close to what parents are up against these days. Even a $10,000 cash check would go quick, which we saw from the federal stimulus checks during the covid pandemic. It wouldn't even pay for 1 year of daycare allowing the mother to return to work. It would probably cover a year's worth of diapers, formula and doctors checkups and maybe a few bucks left over in the bank. But that's it. On the whole, it wouldn't actually lighten your outlook on child rearing. It's not enough to justify you being sidelined from the labor market until they're old enough to go to school. It's better than nothing, but get real. $1,000 is nothing. That doesn't cover time off of work, clothes, childcare, housing and food needs. The whole cost of living needs to be easily bearable.

The reality is that in order for child bearing to be a bearable burden on the people of prime childbearing age, they would need a lot of things that the free market economy is just failing to make available to them. Housing, healthcare, affordable groceries, utility bills, extra child-caring labor to help out with things until the kids are old enough to start school, and the ability to take 2-5 years off of work entirely so they can focus on raising their child. What would that cost?

I'm going to go full Science-Fiction mad scientist for a minute here. Pretend for a minute that there are no rules. We are a human colony on some other planet trying to repopulate from extinction to a stable population. You are dictator for a day, and they can't roll back your rules after. Maybe this is not the most useful thought exercise. But we should take it seriously in that we do have to make more babies or it will threaten the human race's survival. Concentrate on how to grow the population, we can talk about any more bright ideas after. Here's what I came up with:

Straight up, pay young people to exit the job market and have children. They cost a lot of resources that young people just don't have and can't realistically get in time to move the needle. If young adults can't make any financial headway for the first 20 years of their careers, then what difference does it make if they don't even work those years and go to Camp Babymaking instead? I'm dead serious. Meet a girl you like, and you're into each other? 18-35? Congratulations lucky winners, here's the keys to a house. You can live here rent free-for 2.5 years for every child you conceive. Here's enough UBI to pay your groceries every month while you're in the breeding program. Don't worry about doctors bills. For you, special price: $0 while you're in the program. If you have time to do things like work, learn to grow a vegetable garden. Take some night classes and get a degree finished in that time, that way when you can hit the ground running when you re-enter the workforce.

Think it won't work? What if I told you this describes married life in the military? Aside from the small caveat of having to go to war, everything else up there is where I got this idea from.

Young people of prime childbearing age? check.
secure housing provided? No risk of eviction, being priced out, etc... check.
free healthcare? check.
certain amount of money every month to provide things like groceries? check.

It's sad that an adult looking to start a family can really only find the conditions condusive to starting a family if they join the military. This is the right idea, but the implementation is iffy. Less than 1% of the US population is serving in the military. Now granted, this isn't the military's mission and Pentagon budget wonks bitch constantly about the money they spend on dependents. But the sad truth is that if they didn't offer this security to young families then they'd struggle with recruitment even worse than they do now. The pay is not competitive at all, but these side benefits offer real tangible value. They didn't set out to solve society's most difficult problems, they're just trying to make sure that their service members aren't distracted from their duties by things like homelessness or their family going hungry, or not being able to afford healthcare, so they successfully got ahead of those problems by devoting the resources and solving them. As a consequence of taking this proactive step, if you want to start a family badly enough, and you're willing to put up with the difficulties of military life, then go talk to a recruiter today. That is a working solution in a society otherwise devoid of working solutions.

It's sad that the private sector does not take this same view. 40 years of Jack Welch's profit maximizing philosophy has trained management to view anything not directly contributing to the bottom line as waste, or somebody else's problem. But that doesn't make it true. How much of an assembly line actually does value-added work, vs how much of it is moving materials from station to station preparing for that work? Very little of any assembly line is value-added, yet they still buy the whole thing because they need the whole thing. Well not in human resources, apparently. By shifting all of these burdens onto the parents, it makes it so much more difficult for all of society not just parents, but it feels like parents especially get it hard.

Sounds funny? Well sorry man but you can't have your cake and eat it too. It's sad to view things this way but this is something, maybe the one and only thing that young people have a natural economic competitive advantage at. They can conceive more easily. Why shouldn't they use this to their advantage? If the economy is completely dog eat dog, everyone's out to maximize profit and shift externalities, then why shouldn't young people take advantage of this situation? In the long run, they are the only ones that can sustain this society (in theory, in practice the man considers mass immigration a viable alternative to native birth rates, but I'll discuss that in a different article). Gen Z is already on baby making strike. They should make this demand and see what happens. I'd back it.

Of course you could always take proactive actions to recalibrate the market in favor of young working people so that they didn't need the government to pay them just to afford to start a family too... man what an outrageous idea that would be. Effectively regulate your markets? Explore ideas like price controls, even nationalization of a sector failing to serve the public's needs as badly as the healthcare sector is? Burn him! Ok, fine. If it will make you feel better. It still doesn't make more babies. You can only actually get more babies by doing one of these 2 things:

You can have more babies by paying young people who have the easiest time conceiving to make them
You can have more babies by recalibrating the market in young people's favor, so they don't have to wait 20 years to start trying.

Choose one, or enjoy your population loss. Which by the way, will require you to radically recalibrate the market anyway.

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