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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45445434
Fox News Senior Medical Analyst Marc Siegel made some eyebrow-raising comments lamenting that birth rates are down among teenagers aged 15 to 19.
On Thursday, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that the U.S. fertility rate fell to another record low. The agency reported that the number of births per 1,000 women of childbearing age declined from 53.8 in 2024 to 53.1 last year. The latest figure represents a continuation of a decades-long decline in fertility rates.
Siegel joined Friday’s edition of America’s Newsroom, where Dana Perino said that while the continuing trend is not surprising, “the numbers might feel a little shocking.”
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The big concern is probably a decline in number of wage slaves. Children of teenage single moms are probably the best demographic for enslavement.
Next they will be decrying the decline in crime because it will harm the prison industrial complex. “We need more cops to arrest more people to keep us safe (from underpopulated prisons).”
Researchers like Timothy Leary felt psychedelics could alter the fundamental personality structure or subjective value-system of an individual to great potential benefit. Beginning in 1961, he conducted experiments with prison inmates in an attempt to reduce recidivism with short, intense psychotherapy sessions. Participants were administered psilocybin during these sessions weeks apart with regular group therapy sessions in between.[24] Psychedelic therapy was also applied in a number of other specific patient populations including individuals with alcoholism, children with autism, and persons with terminal illness.[24]
Studies on medicinal applications of psychedelics ceased entirely in the United States when the Controlled Substances Act was passed in 1970. LSD and many other psychedelics were placed into the most restrictive “Schedule I” category by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. Schedule I compounds are claimed to possess “a high potential for abuse and the potential to create severe psychological and/or physical dependence” and have “no currently accepted medical use”,[28] effectively rendering them illegal to use in the United States for all purposes. Despite objections from the scientific community, authorized research into therapeutic applications of psychedelic drugs had been discontinued worldwide by the 1980s.
Can’t have prisoners being reformed when they can be rented out as ditch-diggers for less than minimum wage. Just don’t call it slavery.
When I was born, the human population was around half of what it is now. If there ever was a time to organically decrease our population size, imo, it would be now.
Brace yourselves for the pedophile parasite class campaign to justify their crimes
Aren’t these the people who freaked out about teenage pregnancies?
They’re Republicans. Of course they are concerned about teen pregnancies.
Who do you think is making them pragernet?
They were angry about “single mothers” for decades, but that was a racist dog whistle.
If you’re all white, it’s all right.
This entire administration is just pedos and perverts, isn’t it?
Always was.
Not all of them. Here’s the exhaustive list of those who aren’t
In a normal country, a doctor endorsing teen pregnancy would get their licence suspended.
This just reminds me of a US coworker of mine who just became a great grandmother. It’s teen pregrancies all the way down. Mother at 16, grandmother in her 30s, great grandmother at 50.
How embarrassing
She’s pretty proud of it.
She’s either super cool or super annoying. Former teen moms don’t really have an in-between. since she’s in tech i’m assuming super cool.
Walmart or Dollar Store?
Tech
I mean, they’re right.
Abstinence education is working! How are they not happy at their success?
How many times do conservatives have to prove that they’re all pedophiles before the rest of us will learn?
not a matter of “learning”, it’s a matter of “caring”
everyone knows by now this regime is full of pedophiles… but nobody gives enough of a fuck to do anything about it
I’m not talking about the regime. I mean every last one of them.
15-19 yr olds aren’t supposed to be having kids.
Hell some of them ARE kids
From my perspective, everyone under about 24 is still a kid.
In a regular society? Yes. But this is America we’re talking about.
Fucking lemongrab grade screeching of purity and abstinence for decades and then suddenly this
Now, now, let’s not pretend these people are encouraging sex, those young whores are still to be shamed.
They’re just supposed to have kids and be loyal to husbando. No pleasure involved.
(Also, they always supported teen pregnancy because they have always been anti-sex education and anti-contraceptive which allows the process of teenage parents to happen without them having to condone it).
Our masters want us to breed.
Every accusation a confession.
They’re saying the quiet part out loud and why they’re anti-abortion. The younger the better for a quick turnaround:
They need the poors to fight their wars and work on their factory floors.
I frequently just stand outside and look at the sky and think, yep, we weren’t meant to work all day. We were meant to pick berries and mushrooms and take naps. I feel better about my station in life, knowing those oligarchs can never be satisfied, and all I have to do to feel right is take a walk outside.
Didn’t we always hunt?
Yeah, that’s why we can run
Edit: Distance running that is. Humans have better endurance than almost any land animal, so we can chase prey to exhaustion. It helps that we’re crafty enough to carry water and snacks with us
Not an expert, but that would depend on the location, probably. Smaller game, certainly, but not everyone had large animals roaming around. Likewise, there were probably people who hunted and didn’t gather that much because there simply wasn’t that type of plant around.
But the point made still stands: modern life is not something natural to our evolution.
Yeah, Ill sit in a deer stand all afternoon, or pick blueberries. Both are better than email.
Peoples would migrate across continents to follow the populations of animals if there were no large animals presently roaming around.
Given that, I think it’s safe to guess most early humans were more than willing to put in a little more effort to hunt over gather regardless of location.
No, they want robots to work in the factories, because they don’t complain and don’t unionize, and don’t take time off, and work for electrons.
Yeah, but the good news is they are going to keep us desperate and dependent until that can be attained with certainty just in case that plan doesn’t work out for them and they’re stuck with us.
They want to not have to pay the people who will be buying the things produced in the factories.
The logical problem with that is too many steps ahead for them to see.
I remember when teen pregnancy was considered bad and a sign of a decaying morality across the country. Now the same right wing moralizers are saying they need those teen moms again. But this time it’s about money so they are noticeably quiet about morality.
I remember when teen pregnancy was considered bad and a sign of a decaying morality across the country.
before that it was commonplace though. I’m 61, my grandmother started having her kids at 16, she had 8, one of them my mother, the youngest of her kids. Many of her friends were similarly 15-19 having thier first kid. My mother was 19 with me, I was born when she turned 20. She had 3 kids, i have none, my sister none and my brother 2, so family dynamics have changed.
This is Australia though, you can read books of some of the early convict ships coming over and they arrived with all the 13-16yr old girls pregnant, or having had their kid on board and being married etc
You can see some of the effect in The Philippines, pregnant teen mothers are everywhere. Religious indoctrination in regards anti contraception doesn’t stop teens fucking (and this in a nation with no divorce)
Only locally it’s a bad thing. Nationally, they need those girls waiting tables in diners. How else is someone going to get their nostalgia kick while driving route 66?
And don’t forget future soldiers are needed. There’s a place for everyone.
Yeah let’s feed the young men to the cannons, so that old guys can have the young girls, urghh…
I distinctly remember a time when boomers and talking heads would automatically respond to concerns about issues with the cost of having kids with:
“Don’t have kids if you can’t afford them.”
“If you couldn’t afford kids then you should’ve kept your legs closed.”
“Don’t expect a handout, nobody forced you to have kids.”
“Healthcare and child care are too expensive? Tough shit snowflake, that’s the free market! Work harder!”
“Why are my taxes paying for a public school when I don’t even have any kids that go there?”
So nope, no sympathies. And no, you can’t have your child sex brides, either.
They are still saying this when it’s convenient for them. The only consistent thing for such people is their cowardice in the face of responsibility.
Who the fuck wants to be having kids in this day and age anyway. Also why is it up to the underage teens to push out babies to keep the population up. Yeah let’s put pressure on them to ruin their entire lives before they even get to live it. Love the American standards.
The dude was conflating a number of things.
Teen birth rate is down the most, at 7% in 2025. 70% since 2005. Overall births are down slightly last year.
Overall we have a sub replacement birth rate of 1.53 per woman.The last one is a societal problem. But just saying we need women to have more kids isn’t a solution. You need to find out why people don’t want to have as many kids. Which I would bet is almost entirely economic. Kids are a large long term expense. And if you’re living paycheck to paycheck, with an uncertain financial future, a kid is a scary prospect.
The problem is the sub replacement birth rate of 1.53 per woman.
This is not actually a problem, except we want to keep the completely unsustainable economic system unchanged.
So what’s the alternative? Everyone’s old and nobody produces anything? I kinda like having food and stuff and that’s not fully automated yet.
There is still a substantial amount of working age people in that scenario. They just need to be allocated to jobs that matter instead of made up bullshit like for instance the vast majority of medical insurance employees. We have enough labor available that we could live in a straight up utopia but instead much of it is oriented to perpetuating economic serfdom.
Think about it… We used to have a large proportion of people running households instead of working for money, but now we both have more automaton than ever and a higher percentage of people in the labor market, and we don’t even work fewer hours.
Well running a household was also more than a full-time job.
If you’re even talking about stuff like medical insurance employees, you’re talking from one of the wealthiest countries in the world, where such bullshit jobs are more common and easier to justify economically. Everything you use comes from poorer countries which makes it seem like it doesn’t take much labor to produce the stuff you use.
I was not disparaging homemaking. Now, many people have to scrape together that labor AND do a paid job, which is obviously a degradation in quality of life.
RE: rich country poor country - we have enough labor globally to make everyone happy and healthy globally. That quality of life is so different in different places is another symptom of the global system of economic serfdom.
Are you implying that everyone globally needs to be unified under one government to dictate which jobs they all do? Because good luck getting that government to represent everyone’s needs.
There’s still a 1.53 replacement rate. That means if you just reallocate the people that idk, are currently making bombs to throw on other people (or other such things), to producing “food and stuff” instead, we’ll definitely have enough food.
Defense indudstry in most countries is under 5% of all employees I’m pretty sure. And we also kinda need weapons to defend ourselves. Maybe you don’t, but if Russia sends bombers here, it’d take a whole 5-10 minutes to reach my house from the moment they exit Russian airspace.
If anything, I think we should do away with the entertainment industry, liberal arts, etc. If anyone wants to produce art in their spare time that’s fine, but everyone under 75 should be forced to work a real job. We could also mostly get rid of the auto industry since old people shouldn’t be allowed to drive anyway so that’s a good thing, but then that doesn’t exist in most countries either so it’s not really a great place for cutbacks in most of them.
I also propose cutting back on doctors and nurses in fields that disproportionately affect older people. Great way to reduce the burden on society.
OR we can just start slashing the social safety nets now. I’m paying into the national pension of the current old people now, but there are going to be no young people to pay my generation’s. They’re already raising the retirement age, but they’ll have to start raising it faster.
NATO is pushing a commitment to a minimum of 5% of GDP on defense.
Which, admittedly even the USA does not do. But in the 60s it was north of 9%.
Most of the cost of things is the embedded cost of labor. Even minerals in a lot of cases. There are a lot of deposits of pretty much everything we could be mining but aren’t because of the cost.
One business may only have 25% labor costs, but the suppliers also have labor costs, and their suppliers, all the way down the line. And 25% is on the low side. Even rent has labor costs embedded.
The trouble with getting rid of all that is that other countries won’t. Until we have one world order, it’s not feasible to completely abolish defense.
NATO works. Russia has not dared to attack a single member. I’m writing this from a former soviet country that would’ve been conquered by now if we weren’t a member of NATO.
Economy or not, having one person who needs to take care of two elderly parents, themselves, and 0.75 kids isn’t great. That’s not the goal
Society doesn’t have to work that way.
Of course not. That’s the point. We don’t want it to work that way
Birth rates are down all over the developed world with Japan being the hardest hit
Japan is also contributing to my country’s declining birthrate.
I live in poverty and I gotta say, being a single recluse… between anime, their music, and JRPGs they offer entertaining and cheap ways to get my dopamine hits, but aside from a one off, their media does not help me get laid.
Most of the developed world has the same societal problems that boil down to, no one has the money, time or energy to have kids.
Also health as well. Pregnancy permanently changes a woman’s body.
I agree with the 1st sentence, but you cant expect people to wait until they are 30 to have kids
Its better to marry than to whore around… regardless of age, thats why “child” marriage should be legal but challenged by the families and test if there is actual love or nut
Live fast die young was most of human history, and I like it
We have way too much order, that it gets in the way
Think about that for a few years.
What reality are you living in? Are you 16?
whoring around is so fun tho
I cant tell if those are rhetorical questions because you’re upset…
Or if you genuinely don’t understand why the oligarchs are mad kids aren’t having babies…
You must be joking if you think “I genuinely don’t understand why the oligarchs are mad kids aren’t having babies…”
Honestly I’m concerned just why that’s the age range the “Oligarchs” are specifically calling out, not having enough babies. All I’m saying is, why is it up to the kids, and not the adults who have JOBS and MENTAL stability.
And I’ll go back on my first sentence, WHO in their right mind, in 2026, is like "Yeah, the economy is in such a great place today, that I think I’ll raw dog my wife until she becomes pregnant, and in 9 months I’ll dish out thousands of dollars just for her to birth a child, and then dish out even more thousands of dollars for doctor bills, diapers, formula, etc. And that’s just their infancy. Ok. Not everyone is financially stable to raise a child, even as a full grown adult. And not everyone is mentally stable, to raise a child.
But we’re wondering why the kids aren’t having kids.
