Oh man, I didn't mean to imply that that paper is super relevant - it's just the one I know that said it first, but I definitely agree that paywalls on academic stuff suck! Texting you.
Sociologist and demographer. Never repping coauthors or institutions or anything like that.
4,918 followers 1,383 following 2,001 posts
view profile on Bluesky
Oh man, I didn't mean to imply that that paper is super relevant - it's just the one I know that said it first, but I definitely agree that paywalls on academic stuff suck! Texting you.
The birth rate discourse makes me snark in Black Gen X… they criminalized Black parents (teen & single) back when we were growing up. Reagan literally made our reproduction a campaign issue! (Read Professor Dorothy E. Roberts’ work!) Many of us Black late 1970s babies had kids late or not at all… 🤷🏾♀️
It's so infuriating that somehow the media forgot that conservatives and neoliberals browbeat us into lower birthrates!
I am so sorry, Maria! And I'm so happy you found some relief! <3
Absolutely. That paper is part of a literature on how social movements sustain themselves through periods of political hostility via things like interpersonal relationships and less public-facing organizing.
yeah, and I'd say that's not living up to the ideals of American science!
Federal funding, state funding, institutional norms of academic freedom - all of that was supported by a pro-science politics. And all of that is all that was ever special about American science. Without it, we're just a bunch of people who wanted to think hard and help people but got left behind.
No, because American science is only special because American politics supported it for several decades.
Are there abeyance structures for American science other than ((the rest of the world)))?
The society-wide trend of grifters who project grift onto others at the expense of us all: I hate it.
If you want to ovulate because you're into that or for whatever reason at all, cool. But saying you're only a real women or your real self if you ovulate is creepy propaganda.
Happy Labor Day 🙂
As a scholar whose discipline emerged from eugenics, I can see a direct line from fascist approaches to science and what they are doing to science now. The science of 20th century fascism was filtered and distorted. They’re escalating that distortion and filtering now.
👍👍👍
My Hard Opinion is you cannot call yourself a patriot if you don’t go to your local fair and nod approvingly at everyone’s beautiful quilts, lovely pies and amazing gourds
RFK's idea that disease is good, actually, is not just eugenicist - it's literally on the extreme bad edge of eugenics. Many original eugenicists understood that preventable disease killed "fit" and "unfit" alike. They wanted to prevent disease and practice public health. /1
It’s not perfect but the illogic really needs to be highlighted!
But more seriously, this was the part of p2025 that scared me the most - they are way to into making people pregnant.
And the digital tools for FABM are rife with scammers and scary data breaches. It's truly a nightmare. (Not that you need digital tools! A notebook, a thermometer, excellent communication with your partner/s, an iron will, and a dose of luck are all you need!)
Their opposition to abortion and contraception their pronatalism are totally a libidinal thing, I swear.
(Also, "the parenting crisis" is not a thing people say, right? But maybe it should be?)
Using pronatalism to address the parenting crisis is kind of like outlawing camping to address the housing crisis. Targeting specific visible signs of a problem doesn't address the problem.
To be fair to her, I first read it about a year ago and I didn't tell her about it because I thought it was too radical to be of interest. What I'm saying is things are changing.
My mom, upon reading the introduction to this book last week: "Why did you wait so long to tell me about this book?"
PAA and APC will host an in-person congressional briefing on Oct. 8, 3:30 pm. An expert panel of social scientists will discuss birth rate trends and impact of policy incentives like tax credits and paid family leave on family planning decisions.
So excited to see this book finally come to light! It's a much-needed corrective for the overemphasis on family structure as a both a cause and solution to racial inequality.
RFK Jr.'s #2 is stepping in as acting CDC director. You need to call your Congress people now and demand hearings until RFK is forced out. They're politically weak for another 48-72 hours, then they'll do unbelievable damage in the next month. Show me that you called and I will give you a reward 👇
Seriously! Don't let technocrats like me (I COUNT FOR A LIVING) show you up on political imagination! We suck at this! You would be better at it if you tried! I promise!
I'm a demographer! I shouldn't be more creative about political economy than a leftist writing in a socialist magazine!!!!
Also, their arguments are so bad! So you think population aging is going to be a problem, huh? Sure will be if we keep doing things this (bad) way! So let's make a plan about how we can change how we manage, compensate, and value care work to make it suck less! Or even to, IDK, make things better!
Pronatalism and antinatalism are both bad because they both think it's a good idea to try to change birth rates. If you want to make parenting easier, just do that. Birth rates don't tell us how much it sucks to parent. They just tell us how many babies people are having.
"I want different birth rates" always means "other people should change their reproductive lives to match my preferences"
For real, this stuff is very scary and dangerous and it's getting used by very bad actors to do very bad things. That's a big reason that it's sad and infuriating to see folks who consider themselves "left" uncritically reiterating the same points.
Of course there's more coming! Part of why it's not here yet is that funders really don't seem to care to fight this misinformation, but it's also hard to get serious scientists to take these arguments seriously because they're so patently silly to people who specialize in this stuff.
Here's an overview of some of the problems with pronatalism: theconversation.com/fears-that-f...
Here's a webinar from a few demographers (including me) on some of the pronatalists claims: Demographers Respond to Rising Pronatalism Webinar Recording cuboulder.zoom.us/rec/share/Z9... Passcode: x60N#t1y
It totally can be problematic - we need to respond! There are *many* different falsehoods in this piece. But most (all?) of it rests on a central argument is that population is going to "collapse" - which is far from foregone:
Ageism! Sexism! Fatalism! So much to be furious about!
But the most surprising thing about this take is its uncritical regurgitation of the sketchy, unsubstantiated (and often disproven) empirical claims pronatalists make about population aging.
Also, by far not the worst part of this, but he really takes it somewhere unnecessarily bleak when he argues that we're going to get "the end of children having friends" - give me a BREAK.
I want to ask this guy and all these left pronatalists: Who are you going to assign to have more kids? And do they get to choose when or are you going to pick the year?
I just can't imagine retaining the belief that this is all just a puzzle and if we put the right arguments together we will win.
this is not a game. how do we get them to stop treating this like a game?
Gender, my dudes, gender exists. And there's this field called demography where we study population.
truly
oh my god
Sure, some anti-abortion folks make money off their opposition, but as far as I can tell, their money making is neither as scalable nor as directly tied to restrictions as are the supplement/wellness things that vaccine opponents hawk.
As an abortion expert, it's extra scary that the anti-vaccine folks grift off their wins - they sell the supplements and scams that people turn to when they reject vaccination. This profit motive could really supercharge the pace of vaccine restriction.
Like everything it starts in the states. Of course infectious disease doesn't give a damn about state borders, but neither does this kind of policy. It took 50 years for them to do it to abortion, but there's no reason to expect it to take that long with vaccines.
This is how it started with abortion. They begin by lying to say something is dangerous and then they restrict it for some on that basis.
The persistence of "viability" is such a good example of how much damage Roe's frameworks did.
our species' greatest achievement has been figuring out how to keep our young alive, and it's so heartbreaking and infuriating that we're letting them die in Gaza and die in schools and die because we made software programs that help them figure out how to do it
This cruel apologist is sneering at an excellent, practical book about what is actually happening with "AI."
But these days we have to fight patent falsehoods because they're elevated for political ends. I'm grateful to the scholars who led this effort @ushma.bsky.social and Dan Grossman.
I'm proud to have signed this and furious that it was necessary. The science is clear: mifepristone is safe. The current efforts to throw that science into question shouldn't even be worthy of consideration, let alone debunking.
That makes sense. I guess there’s no work-around. It’s solidarity and structural analysis or nothing at all.
Do you think disciplines that need more than salary to do their work at all have a clearer view? I wonder if folks in humanities/social sciences are more capable of denial because the re are more layers before we simply can’t operate at all.
I have definitely noticed that older colleagues are much more willing to see what is happening.
I hope your retreat is productive. IME it’s scary how few of those in leadership and admin particularly are even remotely willing to recognize what’s happening.
But also I think they’d have to be willing to see it first - I’m not hearing that. Are you?
Same - it’s a heartbreaking burden to be the only one (or one of a few) who’s willing to talk about it.
Isn't NUMINDENT also a register of all interactions that change any of that? Seems very dangerous for that reason as well.
Somehow America needs to learn that every death is a world extinguished.
We owe each other so much better than this.
Maybe ask him how he figures out what to read!
Man. A point. And an example of how selection effects work that’s going to haunt me.
Sorry - thanks for sharing this! It's just so bleak!
They're totally coming for all the fortifications aren't they? And eventually wastewater systems, I guess?
How on earth can you make a counterfactual claim about childbearing without considering changes to norms????
(Not to mention how dispiriting it is that these conversations about men's housework somehow totally ignore /gender/.)
It is so so so dispiriting how widespread and commonsense the idea that fertility rates are "too low" is.
Truly Wyoming badasses are *so* badass.
Kelcie does excellent reporting in the west!
CALLOUT: I'm looking for people to talk to about their experiences with receiving any kind of care at Planned Parenthood, especially those who needed low-cost options. Can be any clinic anywhere, but bonus points if it's Alaska, Hawaii, Kentucky, Washington or Indiana.
Freer was better.
I really wonder who on earth is teaching people to use color-coding for data management and whether I can find them.
(To be clear, the teaching was long before I got a phd. It was peer-to-peer teaching for pregnancy achievement and avoidance.)
I love, believe in, and *taught* cycle tracking for a long time and this luteal phase stuff gets more and more tenuous as it gets bigger and bigger.
Especially when the need for the special diet is established on vibes.
It’s wild how consistently this pattern happens. ✊
So important.
Lots of things, but it’s an especially good example of how taking a stand and having a position are two very different things. Also how context changes our responses and thus how we should expect others to respond.
I’ve been thinking about this story for years and I finally just re-found it.
At the first Nazi-run faculty meeting at the first university they took over (the nation’s most liberal and most illustrious), everyone expected the most liberal professor to stand up. But just asked the Nazi position on funding in his area.
I don’t see how, but the backlash to earnestness seems real.
Your observation that this is often a reaction to others’ sincere feeling/concern made me wonder if the rise of the “centrist” contrarian has something to do with the terror of cringe?
Perhaps if we'd paid some attention to that sort of fascist/eugenic recruitment of birth-traumatized women and given it anywhere near as much attention as we gave Radicalized White Dudes Sad About Their Mediocrity, we'd be in a better place understanding how MAHA came about.
Real deaths of despair.
Literally not caring at all, that’s why.
Why on earth would you hitch your wagon to a falling star?
“Progressive pronatalism” is not a good idea for so many reasons, but also… have we learned *nothing* from this moment? Technocratic arguments for things that conservatives oppose are failing left and right.
A kitchen table issue I care about is the Smithsonian not twisting the facts of history to the president’s will.
If you're bent out of shape about fertility rates and not worried about making our nation attractive and welcoming to immigrants you're either making a big logical error or you're not really worried about the economy at all.
It's almost like the critique is bad faith, but I think they're also just freaked out by the existence of gender as distinct from biological function. I try to be patient, but it's getting harder and harder.
omg I am so happy for you!
This is so important!
The Dobson news really reminds me how coarse the 90s were. It was a bad time.
Cosign, honestly. I want credentialing before you are allowed to write about TFR, for example.
(Especially when the slippage between individual-level and macro-level causality is unhinged, which seems to be how it goes for the people shooting from the hip.
Totally. This whole conversation seems to resolutely ignore the problem of gender and counterfactual inference about gender in a way that makes me kind of sick.