You're not going to "outbreed" the childless unless perhaps you're extremely wealthy, and those folks are going to be exceptions, not a material movement of the demographic needle.
Fertility intent forward looking:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-exp...
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...
Rural hospitals at risk:
https://ruralhospitals.chqpr.org/downloads/Rural_Hospitals_a...
https://ruralhospitals.chqpr.org/downloads/Rural_Maternity_C...
Rural childcare:
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/rural-child-care-shor...
Childcare funding:
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/20/child-care-cliff
School closures due to demographic pyramid:
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/rural-schools-are-fighting...
(Urban folks have less kids than rural folks; as rural systems parents rely on inch closer to collapse, it is a forcing function on fertility)
By all means, I am absolutely pro-hospitals and healthcare funding, but it's not an important consideration when considering the overall birthrate.
Childcare is similarly not an issue. The sorts of people having a lot of kids are just not going to be using childcare a whole lot. One spouse will stay home.
As for the wealthy comments. I go to a fairly traditional parish in a HCOL West Coast city, and I don't think family income has a very large impact on # of children. We have families making anywhere from $60k to $200k+ and if anything, more money results in less children. At the end of the day America is very rich and well-off. You don't actually need a whole lot of money to raise a child as long as you can resist the memetic pressure to be like everyone else.
I mean, from what I've seen, income dictates whether or not a family decides to have seven kids versus six kids, but not 2-3. That's just a given.
Where healthcare access is limited, maternal mortality increases, impacting the total fertility rate (which accounts for infant mortality). I do expect people who want to have children to migrate to where they can obtain maternal and reproductive healthcare whenever possible, but if they don't, the evidence shows higher death rates of both mothers and infants. Citations below.
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/12/1128335563/maternity-care-des...
https://www.marchofdimes.org/research/maternity-care-deserts...
(South Korea's TFR is ~0.7, China is ~1, Japan is ~1.2, the US is not far behind at ~1.6, all 2024 figures presented)
I would more be talking about groups like traditional Catholics which have no such prohibitions, and frequently find themselves in very high-ranking fields. For example, I'd point to many Supreme Court Justices, several entrepreneurs, several media figures, etc. It's not just traditional Catholics [1], there are many groups with persistently high fertility rates.
It's not just Catholics. Conservative protestants also have much higher fertility. In particular, red states have higher fertility than blue states, and if you drill down deeper, it's simply due to these states having more of these groups than blue states, not any particular policy. The data are pretty unequivocal that government policy has basically no influence on people's decisions to have children.
Anyway, the higher fertility combined with the ability of full civic / economic participation means these groups will eventually come to dominate. There is simply no other way. We can talk about immigration until the cows come home, but overall, the global birth rate is sub replacement, so while any one country can migrate more people to solve its problem, this just punts the political football to another country which will invariably become more conservative.
To conclude, I can name several examples of 'conservative' groups with significantly higher birth rates, but I can't name a single liberal one. This is simply a cultural thing, but it doesn't matter for the economy. Regardless of who has kids, the kids pay the taxes necessary to sustain the welfare state. However, as I pointed out, it'll likely lead to political differences that many here won't like. As an example, I'd point to everyone's surprise that Gen Z is more conservative. I've been saying this for years now, because I first noticed the differential in fertility rates as a child in the 90s. People thought I was a chicken little, but we're seeing the results.
[1] Note, I'm calling out traditional Catholics here. The overall fertility rate for Catholics is on par with an average American. However, simply by breeding, there's already a huge faction within the Catholic church writ large. The progressives, with fewer kids, are dying out to be replaced by younger, more zealous figures. I think this will probably be the next step for the country as a whole as well
[2] EDIT: someone mentioned mormons... that's another good point. A small group of a few dozens of families moving west and now dominate one state and are important minorities in several others.
You and The Onion both:
https://theonion.com/study-uneducated-outbreeding-intelligen...
"Some countries offer child benefits, such as the UK, where the first child receives £21.80 per week and each additional child receives £14.45 per week."
What a joke. Start paying mothers 60k/year for the first 3-4 years like it is a job and suddenly we'll have more babies then we know what to do with. Scale it by household income like social security.
I get demographics change. Where I live is becoming increasingly more Mormon. On top of the poor economics for most people (the economic numbers are good but people aren't doing good) also tends to push culture to be more conservative.
All these sorts of things go in cycles. Culture drifts left, culture drifts to the right. Out of a culture so syphilis infested it became 'the thing' to wear wigs in the Georgian era we got the Victorians. We had heroin junky/hippie New York, then yuppie anti-crime Giuliani New York, then back again. It's all just cycles. The flapper partiers of the 1920s morphed into conservative 1950s which led to the hippies of the 1960s-70s. Once the religious conservatives reach critical mass there will be backlash and things will swing the other way.
What does this mean?
Problem is that we gate children behind careers and getting married which is atrocious because you will run out of years to start families if you wait too long.
Until the cavalry for extending lifespan and fertility arrive, we need to fix our economic and cultural system right now.
> Stunning stat: 64% of young women say they just don't want children, compared to 50% of men.
EDIT: I think many on here don't believe that there's anti-child cultural messaging, because they're in their 30s-40s where this pressure starts to go the other way. But if you start having kids at that age, on average, you will never have enough to hit replacement. To hit replacement TFR, the pro-child messaging must start at 18 or younger.
I don't see that being anti-child though.
Having lots of kids is counter-cultural. I have three children, which is not that much. However, being in a well-off neighborhood full of cultural 'elite's in Portland, OR means that I am a pariah. I am especially a pariah because I enthusiastically say we want more. THis means we don't do what the other people are doing. Hence, we're resisting the memetic pressure.
Another way of saying this, on an economic front, would be 'keeping up with the Joneses'. If you ever read the millionaire next door stuff, you'll notice the main thing these people have is the ability to resist the pressure to spend. That, in addition to the magic of compound interest, which also applies to fertility rates, means that they end up with disproportionately more capital.
For example, after my third, I've been asked multiple times if I'm getting a vasectomy.
No one speaks ill of it, but I'm definitely one of the only ones with this many kids in the area. I can count on my hand the number of 3+ kid families in the neighborhood. Whereas for my parents generation... 3 is a typical family.
As for the pariah bit... having kids means that we're probably not going to be doing a bunch of the adult-only activities that people invite us to. With a baby always at home, it's unlikely we would do that kind of thing until our kids are grown and my wife well past menopause.
Parents today expect to not only have children but also to have an adult social life of a sort that my parents and grandparents never expected. Rather, adults socialized with their families mostly. That was considered typical.