I mean it’s also way worse for humanity in most other ways and is perhaps one of the biggest factors which created the low trust/high anxiety social environment we’re currently being forced to live in, but because the topic was about birthrate I focused on how it’s bad for that
in fact I think the fact that we’re discussing this issue using the technocratic framing of “not enough humans are being produced” instead of the human-first framing of “people are being unjustly robbed of love and happiness” exists downstream of the nuclear family’s destruction of community
I think the best framing for this issue is just to say that we shouldn’t punish people financially for the choice to have children - maybe that framing is not 100% accurate but it’s mostly there and it also keeps the focus on freedom instead of technocratic control.
it’s quite frankly insane that we’ve managed to turn having a child into a financial transaction akin to purchasing a car within the space of a single human lifetime but nobody has even really noticed that it happened