Social Media Use Blamed for Plummeting Birth Rates, According to 'The Science™'
Experts™ and commentators continue to be baffled by continuously falling fertility rates: 'the Science™' with a new (partial) explanation that begs consideration
Short on time, hence no introduction other than: I found this piece interesting and thought you’d might, too.
Translation and emphases [as well as snarky commentary] mine.
Researcher: ‘One hypothesis is that it can be related to social media’
Birth rates are plummeting. A Finnish fertility researcher believes this may be linked to screen time and social media.
By Anders Eidesvik, NRK, 23 Sept. 2024 [source]
Over the past decade, total fertility rates (TFR) in Norway have plummeted.
Put simply, this means that Norwegian women are giving birth to fewer children on average than in the past.
Fifteen years ago, women had an average of two children. Now the same figure is down to 1.4 children per woman.
And it’s not just in Norway that this has happened. The trend is also the same in our neighbouring countries.
With the exception of the ‘baby boom’ during the pandemic [that’s the little bump in 2021], the arrows have only pointed downwards.
The biggest decline is in Finland, where the figure is down to 1.26 children per woman.
So why don’t people have children anymore?
‘I think it's about culture’
It's a question that’s very difficult to answer.
Politicians and researchers alike have tried several explanatory models, including economics, family policy, religion, and more [and the modRNA poison juice can’t explain the downward trend before the ‘Pandemic™’].
But despite a lot of research and investigations, the answer is still that we don’t really know.
One of those who believe we need to rethink this is Finnish fertility researcher Anna Rotkirch at Väestöliitto, the Institute for Population Research in Helsinki.
We can’t explain it with economic or socio-political reasons [good-bye social constructivism]. Nor can it be explained by religion or differences in education.
Instead, she thinks it’s about a major change in our entire culture when it comes to marriage:
Changes in relationships
Lifestyle changes
Childlessness
And she sees the changes partly in connection with the technological revolution that took place in Silicon Valley, USA between 2007 and 2010.
The iPhone was launched at the same time as social media such as Facebook really made its way into people’s lives [that’s a tricky one: the first iPhone hit stores in 2007, with social media apps coming around 2012].
Something happened in the 2010s, and one hypothesis is that it can be related to social media, although it certainly doesn’t explain everything.
According to Rotkirch, there are three major things that have changed in recent years.
1. Fewer Stable Relationships
Rotkirch points out that there has been a major change in the dating culture among young people in recent years:
We see that relationships are fewer, they don’t last as long, and they end less often for marriage and children. This is an important piece of the puzzle to answer the question.
Do dating apps play a role?
I haven’t researched dating apps myself. But we have prepared an overview of how screen time, everything you do on your screens—work, social media, dating apps and everything else—affects relationships.
She points out that screen time can have a positive effect on relationships. ‘For example, you can keep in touch with your partner, or find a partner’, adding:
But if you have a partner and spend a lot of time on screen, it affects you in two ways: you are less satisfied with the relationship and there is a greater chance of separation.
2. Lifestyle Causes Us to Have Children Later
Another major change is that people are waiting longer to have children.
Over the past ten years, the average age of first-time mothers has risen from 28.7 years to 30.2:
She believes that this is closely linked to the expectations that society sets:
What seems to have happened is that society encourages a lifestyle in which young people are taught to finish their education, jobs and everything else before they start thinking about children [that’s not an encouragement, it’s a set of policy positions/decisions]
This means that people simply start too late. A lot of people don’t manage to have the number of children they say they want to have.
She points out that although there has been great progress in assisted fertilisation in recent years, there is still a biological limit to when women can have children [good-bye ‘Gender Studies™’, and good riddance].
It’s a fact [sic] that if you're a healthy woman, your chances of getting pregnant and having a healthy child when you’re 35 are only half as great as when you're 25.
3. More Childless People
Not only are people having fewer children on average, but fewer people are having children at all:
In Finland, childlessness is at a record high. I know it’s much lower in Norway, but we have a very high childless rate. Among Finns aged 40, almost one in four women and one in three men have no children of their own.
In her opinion, childlessness is also about class [which was denied a few lines above: what is it, now?]. Rotkirch points out that those with a high income and education, as well as good health and a stable partner, are more likely to have as many children as they want.
On the other hand, those with fewer resources, lower education, lower income, and especially men, have fewer children than they would like or do not have children at all [that has likely more to do with the fact that women practice hypergamy, i.e., they seek higher-status partners, and if you don’t fall into that category as a man, you’re often stay involuntarily celibate].
Several Theories
‘It's a very good question why the birth rate is falling. Researchers in all the Nordic countries have wondered about this’, says Statistics Norway researcher Lars Dommermuth, and elaborates:
The Nordic countries used to be seen as a textbook example of how to combine good family policy with high economic participation.
But family policy in the Nordic countries has not really changed, yet fertility has fallen since 2010.
Dommermuth and others at Statistics Norway have researched the financial crisis of 2008-2009:
We firmly believe that the financial crisis caused the fertility rate to fall at that time, but I can’t see that it can explain the persistence of the decline [well, it inched upwards until 2015 before falling again…]
He thinks Rotkirch’s hypothesis is interesting, but emphasises that more research is needed in the field [hello, grifters].
Fertility Has Been Falling for a Long Time
Global fertility has been falling for a long time.
We have gone from a world where women in 1950 had an average of five children, to today where the figure is 2.3 children per woman.
Even in India, the most populous country in the world, the figure is down to 2.3.
For a population to be stable, women need to give birth to an average of 2.1 children.
Bottom Lines
Would you look at that: social media causes fewer children, ‘the Science™’ suggests. If true, we’d better ditch it altogether.
Moreover, as long-time readers know, I’ve written about the topic of dating apps and online dating rather recently:
I think that researcher, Ms. Rotkirch, is onto something when she muses about social media use: if whatever (shoddy) data on online dating apps is any guide, there is a small number of ‘successful’ men vs. a very large, disproportionate share of ‘losers’. It is reasonable to surmise that the former will also, over time, are more likely to father children.
As to Nordic data at-all, well, the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-09 might explain the decline thereafter quite well, in particular in light of the subsequent increase until 2015.
So, we now need to figure out what’s quite likely the cause(s) of the decline since then. This doesn’t exclude the after-effects of the modRNA poison juices after 2021, but the period from 2015-19 begs consideration.
Here are my musings:
Trump Derangement Syndrome and mass-media ‘reporting™’ on ‘the Climate Crisis™’ could have scared a certain segment of the population out of the wits from 2015 onwards.
In 2017, Norway and its neighbours began to restrict mass immigration, which I consider the more likely (part-time) culprit: it’s quite well known that first-generation immigrants continue their traditions etc., and as assimilation continues, by the third generation their habits and number of children are more in line with the host society. I suppose that granular data on ethnicity and background would be a good idea to look into, but I suspect this can’t be done for reasons of political correctness.
The ‘Covid™’ shocks first led to people having more time at home, but once societies in Scandinavia returned to (the new) normal, trends continued, amplified by the modRNA poison juice. So far, the latter’s impact is still obscured by the longer-term trend. We’ll have to wait a bit more to learn if the modRNA poison juice’s impact becomes discernible in accelerating declines in birth rates.
The looming outbreak of WW3 since esp. February 2022 might also contribute in two ways: first, in a comparable vein as the Great Financial Crisis (more insecurity = less, deferred children) and, second, by the importation of Ukrainian refugees whose uprooting and shared culture (small family sizes) were compounded by their uprooting and exile. Put differently: the massive influx of Ukrainians didn’t fix the problem for obvious reasons.
That’s it for now—what are your thoughts?
The real reason for falling birthrates, Sterility, and Infertility. Men are being castrated by bioidentical estrogen.
Read, Soy Boys: The Rise in Low Testosterone & the Feminization of Men Due to Phytoestrogens https://a.co/d/c3hy6e4
In the 1980s, Dr. Hobbins, a researcher in thermography, alerted the public about the link between soy consumption and an increased risk of breast cancer. The introduction of soy into processed foods in the late 1970s coincided with an increase in breast cancer rates, from 1 in 11 in 1980 to 1 in 8 by 1992. Since 1979, there was a reported annual increase of 1% in the incidence of breast cancer among men, and testosterone levels have been decreasing by approximately 1% annually since 1980. Effects are seen in women first.
In terms of potency, a gram is a billion times stronger than a nanogram. While chemicals like Atrazine, BPA, and phthalates raise estrogen levels, the use of popular phytoestrogens (PE) has exponentially increased this estrogenic effect. This is exemplified by products like the Impossible Burger, which contains an estimated 18 million times more estrogen than a Whopper. Combining these findings with studies showing the transplacental transfer of soy from mother to fetus, and the ability of Japanese researchers to produce all-female catfish populations using soy, raises concerns.
Their 2013 publication marked a milestone as the first researchers to publish medical evidence that demonstrated flax and bio-identical estrogen increased risk of breast cancer with a chapter warning about the feminizing effects on men. Research indicates that one cup of soy has the estrogenic effect comparable to one birth control pill, and flax is twenty times stronger than soy.
However, doctors advocated the health benefits of plant-based lifestyles. Adopting this trend, many women integrated estrogenic supplements like chasteberry, prepared meals with estrogenic chickpea pasta and sesame seeds, applied estrogenic lavender on their children and estrogenic CBD on their husbands.
The men's supplement industry has also embraced the PE trend, rebranding estrogenic fenugreek as 'free testosterone' and incorporating flax oil into testosterone injections. Over the last forty years, research has indicated a concerning trend: a 25% decrease in testosterone levels, a 52% drop in sperm counts, and an alarming study warns that if these trends persist, sperm counts could reach zero by 2045. Decline in testosterone results from an excess of estrogen.
The widespread use of PEs has led to excess estrogen levels causing PMS, menopause symptoms, low testosterone, early puberty. Women were labeled ‘crazy’ when they tried to express their symptoms. Doctors didn’t listen and prescribed synthetic hormones and bio-identical estrogen to mask the side effects, similar to how addicts are treated. Breast cancer remains the second leading cause of death. It's reported that the identification of girls as transgender has surged by 4,000%. Doctors recommend hormone therapy.
Due to the public's and doctors' reluctance to acknowledge physiology, we've reached a critical precipice. Children are exhibiting symptoms of gender dysphoria, and signs of feminization among boys. Treat the root cause: reduce estrogen.
Phytoestrogens: the pill no one can swallow. Dr. Sellens' eighth book offers an extensive compilation of research on estrogen making it one of the most comprehensive sources on the subject.
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Radical idea for the researchers you look at here: look at the curve from 1850 to today. If people in 1850 had 0.5 more children per woman than average, then people in 1870-1890 too will have more children than average. Or lower, when there's a dip.
That there's an overall down-arching trend isn't new, it's been that way since the 1950s.
And there's no /one/ single reason for dropping births or dropping pregnancies either. Another thing to consider is if the numbers used are produced by comparing registered pregnancies/woman with live births/woman (in Sweden, the child must rage age 1 to count as a live birth), and if abortions are part of the numbers or not. Let's say Finland had 20 000 abortions carried out last year. If those are added back into the data for pregnancies/woman over time, it is fully possible that the downward trend would leveled or even broken.
That's just a sample of issues with the reporting on pregnancies/births - it's a lot more complicated, but the numbers exist (especially in the Nordic/Scandinavian nations; if you are an accredited researcher you can get data at individual city block level of detail) and the methods for collating and presenting are well-known. It may be useful to start e-mailing the relevant agency for any nation and ask polite but well-defined pointed questions about births, SID, abortions and such. Just consider the impact if 0.3% of fertile women of any year of birth chooses to sterilise themselves each year. That alone skews things, just IVF treatments do.