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+--- Thread: News Russia bans 'child-free propaganda' to try to boost birth rate (/showthread.php?tid=355)
Russia bans 'child-free propaganda' to try to boost birth rate - Clover - Nov 12 2024
Reuters, November 12 2024.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-bans-child-free-propaganda-try-boost-birth-rate-2024-11-12/
Quote:Russia's lower house of parliament voted unanimously on Tuesday to ban what authorities cast as pernicious propaganda for a child-free way of life, hoping to boost a faltering birth rate.
[...]
President Vladimir Putin, who has cast Russia as a bastion of "traditional values" locked in an existential struggle with a decadent West, has encouraged women to have at least three children, saying that will help secure the future of Russians. There are already financial and other incentives.
Tumblr post describing the situation:
lemurchik Today russian goverment banned "childfree propaganda" with the law fining non-complying citizens up to equivalent of 4k dollars and non-complying organizations up to 51k dollars.
This law prohibits any public (for now; soon it could be used even for DMs) statements where childless life seen as a better or even equal lifestyle to having children. It forbids saying that it's okay for women to have abortions. It bans any advices to not have children if women don't have enough space, money, health (!) or any other reasons (like going-on war hello?) except when you're talking about monkhood celibate.
This is in line with Putin's signed order "to save and protect traditional values" which already led to banning any mention of LGBT people and had people arrested and sentenced just for organising private gay events or heavily fined for posting a photo of you with your same-sex partner holding hands or screenshot of tv characters kissing. Two female police officers friends were fired because they left messsages under each other photos "showing simpathy" (not even flirting).
And now this. Of course it's not going to affect men who proudly say online how women with children are second sort or calling mothers protecting their children crazy "butI'mAMother"s (popular derogatory term), or advocate to cancel child support, or doing anything else that actually turning women away from considering motherhood. It's going to affect feminists first and foremost because it is us who relentlessly advocate how marrying men and having children in this society is a trap.
And they plan to ban feminism next (they were tryng to do this for years at this point) and also... eh... egoistical lifestyle propaganda whatever this means.
Crazy times but I think we will prevail. Soviet feminists refused to keep silent and were called dissidents and extradited. For now not one feminist channel, podcast, page or community I know is planning to close.
RE: Russia bans 'child-free propaganda' to try to boost birth rate - Iota Aurigae - Nov 13 2024
Countries with declining birth rates be like:
"Nobody's having kids! I think we will incentivize people to have more kids by not addressing any of the core issues that are causing people to not have kids!"
RE: Russia bans 'child-free propaganda' to try to boost birth rate - Possum - Nov 13 2024
(Nov 13 2024, 12:01 AM)Iota Aurigae Countries with declining birth rates be like:
"Nobody's having kids! I think we will incentivize people to have more kids by not addressing any of the core issues that are causing people to not have kids!"
The birth rate is declining in countries with great social safety nets too, Nordic countries also have low birth rates despite having good mat leave policies and stuff. I think the reality is that when women have a choice the birth rate goes down. Many women don't want kids, the women who DO want kids typically only want 1-2, and the only reason we had so many families with 5-10+ children in the past was because the mothers had no other option.
Society needs to adjust to a low birth rate because it seems like high birth rates are only possible when we violently force women into it.
RE: Russia bans 'child-free propaganda' to try to boost birth rate - YesYourNigel - Nov 13 2024
Men: "Women are naturally drawn to doing nothing but staying at home and birthing children. It's simple evolution. Just look at all this research by male scientists talking about how much evolutionary sense it makes for their wives to serve and coddle them and birth them heirs."
Also men: "We must brainwash and force women to birth children because the second we give them a choice, they don't follow the evolutionary path that they are programmed to want above all else! Women are so nonsensical!"
RE: Russia bans 'child-free propaganda' to try to boost birth rate - Iota Aurigae - Nov 13 2024
(Nov 13 2024, 8:05 AM)Possum The birth rate is declining in countries with great social safety nets too, Nordic countries also have low birth rates despite having good mat leave policies and stuff. I think the reality is that when women have a choice the birth rate goes down. Many women don't want kids, the women who DO want kids typically only want 1-2, and the only reason we had so many families with 5-10+ children in the past was because the mothers had no other option.
I actually had no idea it was declining in those countries too. I already knew about women choosing not to have a dangerous amount of kids, but I had thought that lack of social nets contributed to it in some ways.
RE: Russia bans 'child-free propaganda' to try to boost birth rate - periwinkle - Nov 14 2024
Something I read about recently was that high fertility very often causes high infant mortality. Some of the biggest factors contributing to infant mortality relate to infection, malnutrition and birth complications. High fertility often means short inter-birth intervals. It has been shown that birth spacing of less than ~3 years increases the likelihood of birth complications and is therefore correlated with infant mortality *and* maternal mortality (women’s bodies really aren’t built for constant pregnancy, no matter what men like to say). High fertility also often means women don’t breastfeed or stop breastfeeding early in order to become pregnant again. Breastfeeding is one of the best ways to provide nutrition for a newborn baby and to buffer their immune system. When women have multiple children with short intervals between them, they often end up with fewer resources and less energy to invest in each infant, which means that the babies suffer from lack of care.
Case in point: in early modern England, infant mortality was actually higher among the upper, wealthier classes than among the lower classes. Upper class women were often expected to be pregnant continuously (some even boasted about having 20+ pregnancies, *boasted*, I feel so bad for these women…) and to use wet nurses instead of breastfeeding, so that they could become sexually available to their husbands again sooner. Once these practices went out of fashion, the infant mortality rates dropped to around the same as the lower classes.
What I mean by this is that women having 5-10+ children *really* isn’t good, either for mothers or for babies. Women know this, implicitly (I mean, it’s kinda common sense, we’ve just been pretending it’s not). And so, yes, it stands to reason that when they are given a choice and are free from patriarchal pressures to reproduce, women won’t have that many children, regardless of financial support/social safety nets.