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Notes -
IIRC most of the reduction in US fertility has just been the result of a very successful campaign to reduce teen fertility. Nobody wants to be a trashy mom trapped with a loser boyfriend like on 16 and Pregnant.
Arizona, for example, had their teen fertility drop by nearly 75% from 2005-2021. Texas had theirs drop by 2/3rds. Alabama today has a lower teen pregnancy rate than New York did in 2005.
The catch, it seems, is that it's hard to turn off that "You're fucked if you have kids before you're ready" propaganda merely by reaching one's early 20s. It doesn't help that young adults are spending more time in school than ever before.
The entire modern public education system seems like a giant psych-op to reduce teen fertility.
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On the one hand, that sounds plausible.
On the other hand, for instance, Kosovo has continued living in large multi-generational families through hundreds of years of poverty and war, and still has heavy family involvement in marriages. Kosovo's TFR. Every Western and Asian country I've looked at has been something like that, whether they had a teenage pregnancy campaign or not.
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