Ban birth control pill
Ban Abortion
Largely limit social media
Subsidize recreational activities like bars and other such drugs
After people have accidental kids, they will figure out the food, housing and so on.
The simple answer is that our current way of life (in the west at least) does not accommodate kids. We USED to have kids because they were an economic benefit to agrerian cultures, but have since become a burden since our society does not make time or resources for them, least of which is physical space when you consider urban life.
IF we want to increase the birth rate again, we need to shift our lifestyles away from being as career centric as they are today. We could for instance, remove the stigma of working part time or having a stay at home parent. We could encourage people not to grind long hours to climb the corporate ladder. Actually fix the housing problem without bending to NIMBYists and investors and provide affordable/accessible childcare.
Since children are the future tax-base and labor force of a nation, pay parents for raising kids, like its a job. It is kind of gross to view children in this perspective, but if we are talking about economics, well-adjusted children are just as much an input just as much as energy is.
Technologically speaking, we as a species are basically magic at this point, so I reject the notion that strategically recovering the birth rate is impossible, rather there is no will to.
>Ban Abortion
Addressed in the article, but I'll reiterate here: Ceausescu's tried and failed.
Also, during Ceausescu reign, there was no social media, there was no TV, and housing was literally handed out by the regime for almost nothing.
It didn't matter. Fertility rate still went down. And the unwanted kids ended up in large numbers in the grim orphanages.
Even North Korea has to encourage women to give birth[0]; the Kim dynasty can’t simply issue an order and shoot anyone who disobeys. It simply doesn’t work that way.
[0]: https://www.voanews.com/a/north-korea-s-kim-calls-for-women-...
The birth rate fell in North Korea because people are genuinely starving, whereas in other places it's mostly because of birth control. These are not comparable situations.
Thankfully most people have realized such things are insane and sexist, and don't want to see millions of more kids born to parents unable to properly care for them.
Nazi-Germany had a pretty illiberal and authoritarian family policy which basically reduced women to their role as housewives and mothers by banning married women from the job market and incentivizing having multiple children. They didn't achieve their goal of increasing the birth rate in any significant means. Their family policy also backfired hard during the war. Because women were not supposed to work and received financial support in the absence of their husbands, women refused to go to work during the hot phase of the war. Note that this was in a time where access to birth control was practically non-existent and access to abortion difficult.
Socialist Romania did all that during communist rule and it exploded spectacularly 30+ years later when communism ended, that we're still feeling the negative backlash effects today.
The answer to birth rate issues, is not more forced government intervention, but less to none of it. The reason we're in a mess in the west is the governments putting too many thumbs on the economic and regulatory scales for far too long, manipulating the natural order of life. Modern industrialized highly skilled societies are detrimental to human biological reproduction.
If you built an economic system where kids need to leave the parents' village to go spend time grinding studying and upskilling till their mid 20s in a big city and then working till their mid 30s before they afford to move out of shoebox, with their parents nowhere near to help with childcare, you can't be surprised demographics collapse. As per the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child.
You can't fuck with mother nature and not have it fuck you back. It's Newton's Third Law.
Plus, contrary to Reaganomics, the economy can't grow infinitely and neither can the population. Everything created by man eventually has a plateau and an end. So then why not reform the dated and broken "infinite growth" Ponzi-scheme economic system now towards a more sustainable model, instead of delaying its inevitable failure with stuff like 50 year mortgages and unlimited migration?
It is a combination of consumerist, pseudo-individulistic, hedonistic, nihilistic culture, economic exploitation under late-stage capitalism, destruction of familial and local ties, access to birth control, women emancipation etc.
Even such authoritarian countries like China are still very much soaked in the same systemic goo, so you may ban abortions if you like, but that won't change much.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_oral_contraceptive_pi...
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...