If you are an economist, then you know that macroeconomy is made by the addition of individual (micro) decisions. That is, birth rate is the result of many individual people (mostly women) decisions. And you do know about opportunity cost.
Society have made the opportunity cost of having children way higher for women than men, since not only women risk their health, they have to pay for hospitals, give up their careers, present and potential future income and it is something that it is not really valued by society. I mean, people said that they value women having children, but do nothing to help them or reward them for having them.
In fact, in practice there are punishments. If you are fired for getting pregnant, all the women around would get the message “getting pregnant gets you fired”, and so on. If a less competent male coworker is promoted because “you might get pregnant”, you get the message that you are being punished for having an uterus. Maybe that is not the intention of the people who fire pregnant women or that prefer men “because they won’t took time off to take care of the family and have more commitment”. But their intentions doesn’t matter, the result is that.
Boundaries between “being male and female” having actually changed that much. Women have always worked in the fields (go to africa and you would see pregnant women working the land) and there were many who worked as maids or in factories, although at lower wages. What you call “boundaries” is that now they are allowed to work at the prestigious and high paid jobs too, not just the bad ones. And some of them are getting credit for it, unlike before. And now women control their own money, so they aren’t dependent.
Sure, when women were considered minors under a husband control, the full risk and cost of pregnancy weren’t considered by him. Since the opportunity cost for him was lower, and it was easy for him to decide to have more children.
Families weren’t a !temporary solution for economic hardship”, marriage were decided as an economic arrangement between two families (leaded by men) were women were considered property, not economic agents. OF course when women get to make their own choices economy change, now full cost of pregnancy and raising children are considered and, suddenly, women’s time is valuable.
But family structure haven’t cracked, it just have changed. Once you realize that the new families, monoparental, samesex parents or other agreements are also families, you would notice that the only real change is that if you want higher maternity rates, you need to actually value children and mothers, not just pay lip service to that. And that you need to invest real resources in than. Like paying hospital bills, making easier to feed children (having children for them to starve is something most women would find horrifing).
By the way, read Amartya Sen, an economy novel that said that microcredits to women were the best way to help development and get children fed in poor countries. Apparently, in the “temporary solution for economic hardship and quick intimacy” of the traditional families, when the men controlled the money, tended to spend it on alcohol, not returned the credit and forgot to feed the children, while women invested in small business and make sure the children eat and went to school. who would have guess?
And Amartya Sen is not the only economist overlooked when analyzing birth rates. You might have read how worried there were in Davos about economic inequality impact in economic growth. Yet they would do nothing to improve equality. And that inequality and economic unsafety is another reason for lower birth rates. After all, would you have another children if you already struggle to fed one? No.
At some point, liberals and traditional men, should accept that if they want higher birth rates, they should put their money where their mouth is. That is: pay taxes that finance free health services for mother and children, house, food, clothes and school. Even fuel for the mother’s car when needed. And not complain or make the women feel like beggars for taking that.
Until then, what they are doing is crying because they have a problem (They need someone to pay taxes, their retirements and take care for them when they grow old) and they expect women to fix it for them and while pretending that the problem didn’t existed in the first place.
And if this sound harsh is because tiptoeing around the situation won’t solve anything. If it were true that gender roles would have disappeared, men would do their share of domestic chores and women won’t get fired or not hired for the potential of getting pregnant. Or paid less because the euphemism of “less commitment” which we all know that means that if they have children, they won’t do as much unpaid over time.
Either stop discriminating mothers or stop complaining about lower birth rates. Your pick.
