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A comment on World fertility rates in 'unprecedented decline', UN says. Parent comment

Re:World fertility rates in 'unprecedented decline', UN says by mym1990 on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @02:15AM (#44233203)
200 years ago the average life expectancy was 30, no one was having children to "future proof" their life. Quality of life today is much higher than it was 200 years ago as well. While the cost of having children is undoubtedly going up, there are more factors in play than just the doom and gloom of the world. Even in pronatalist regions like Scandanavia, birth rates are falling. Education and advancements in contraception play a huge part in these declines, and are on the more positive side of the equation.

I agree that economic policy needs to adapt to keep a population growing and healthy, but as of right now I am finding it hard to see any signs of this(in the US at least).

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Re:World fertility rates in 'unprecedented decline', UN says by reycharles on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @02:24AM (#44233282)
> 200 years ago the average life expectancy was 30

If you take out infant mortality the life expectancy wasn't all that different from what it is today. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2625386/

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Re:World fertility rates in 'unprecedented decline', UN says by mym1990 on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @02:35AM (#44233356)
Fair point, this was a blind spot for me!
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Re:World fertility rates in 'unprecedented decline', UN says by josephcsible on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @02:27AM (#44233296)
> 200 years ago the average life expectancy was 30, no one was having children to "future proof" their life.

That's misleading because most of the reason life expectancy was so low back then was childhood deaths. If you made it to adulthood at all, you probably would live almost as long as people do today.

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Re:World fertility rates in 'unprecedented decline', UN says by dragonwriter on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @02:23AM (#44233268)
> 200 years ago the average life expectancy was 30

Yeah, but a very large part of that low life expectancy at birth was the very high rate of child mortality that the poster above you references.

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