Thread by @ellim992

I've pointed out before the gross end goal of population doomers: they want more children having babies.
The CDC reports the birth rate of women 15-44 for consistency, but we've spent billions over the past decades trying to end teen pregnancy, and it's worked!
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Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho have added a claim against the FDA trying to reverse mifepristone approval on the basis that it's lowering their state birth rates. This is dystopian reasoning, but it also has no basis in fact —
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With the data saying fewer teens are having sex, (+lower STI rates), seems all the programs and efforts over the last few decades to reduce teen pregnancy worked. Births to teenagers have dropped dramatically. This isn’t a crisis, it's the goal we all agreed on!
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Birth rates are extremely volatile, and easily influenced by pandemics, recessions, vibes— They’re also shaped by the size of the cohort of reproductive-age women at that time in history, which itself is shaped by birth rates from 15-44 years ago. It’s a cycle.
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When you zoom out, you see births to adult women are pretty much on trend for the last 50 years (and women 30-44 are setting records). Overall, women are just waiting to have children. Any truly "missing babies" are from the drop in teen pregnancies, and that was the goal.
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Women in their 20's are waiting to have children, but older women are picking up the slack. The demographic cohort where this shift occurs is *currently* having children. The rates are inverting. Younger cohorts haven't caught up with the children they'll eventually have.
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Total Fertility Rate or “replacement level” is just a math problem for stating consistent data, not a conclusion, and we came up with it while ~20% of births were to women under 20!
Like bad polling demographics, these births have too much weight.
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The population doomers (Elon) love linear progression fallacies. Just because birth rates declined at one point doesn’t mean they’ll keep falling forever. Birth rates ebb and flow. This isn’t new, it’s cyclical.
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The U.S. population isn’t about to collapse.
Birth rates have dropped overall compared to the population, but so has infant mortality, so has under 5 mortality, and so has the likelihood you make it to 60.
1920s population ideas just don't make sense today.
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In fact, what we do know from the data is that birth rates are heavily influenced by economics and even just vibes. Look at history: the Baby Boom was fueled by post-WWII growth, while busts of the '30s and '70s were tied to the Great Depression and stagflation.
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We saw birth rates rising steadily again until 2006, then falling with the Great Recession. During Obama’s second term, birth rates started back up. But they began dropping again in 2017 (Trump?) and fell off a cliff during the pandemic, much like during the Spanish Flu.
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Fun fact: in 1959 the birth rate for women age 20-24 hit an all-time high, but they made up the smallest share of the reproductive-age population.
Huge federal tax incentives around this time to encourage births among that small cohort born in the 30s. Context matters.
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The current lawsuits claim reproductive healthcare access is driving population decline. But the data shows it’s not about 'missing babies', women aren’t skipping childbearing, they're waiting.
Again, birth rates to women 30-44 are setting records:
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Teen pregnancies that don't happen can result in the capacity to have more children later, so older cohorts pick up the slack.
Fertility tools (even just awareness) as well as paid leave also increase the number of births among older moms, in addition to the children delayed.
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TL;DR : Elon is surprisingly bad at math.
A shift in when women have children is not a trend of linear prophecy to the new millennium. We don't have a population crisis in this country. Declining teen pregnancy and delayed childbearing is a good thing.
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@threadreaderapp please unroll my excel-lent (ha!) musing that should’ve been a substack but instead became a Twitter novel.