Atheist Memes

RANT:

Okay I've done a lot of reading on this, and have a lot of rage about it. Sorry in advance.

In 2024, the US fertility rate dropped to 1.599, and the entire right-wing panicked, especially the ownership class. Fewer people means fewer workers and soldiers, which means the supply is lower, and they have to pay more and treat us better. And as with Jeffrey Epstein, the rest of the ownership class likes its workforce desperate.

In fact, the US has had a birth rate well below the replacement rate of 2.1 for a long time now, and through the 20th century we've made up the difference with immigration, but again the right-wing is freaking out because most of those people are browns, not shiny whites, and hence we have the foundation of the Great Replacement, especially because we're soon to reach a tipping point, in which more of the US population is non-white than white, and for our Confederates and white supremacists, that just wouldn't do.

So, the far-right movement has taken its anti-immigration stance to the extreme. ICE is abducting our neighbors and throwing them into for-profit torture prisons trying to compel them to voluntarily self-deport. Right now more people are emigrating than immigrating (factoring into brain drain). The US is depopulating. Thanks to the persecution of immigrants by ICE the labor force that does all of our farming and gardening and custodial work is depleting. No one wants to work anymore. (And apparently we can't just replace all those workers with robots and automation.)

The movement against abortion access has developed into a movement against contraception, a movement to reverse women's suffrage, and a movement against no-fault divorce access. The Tradwife movement (which smacks a bunch of the Quiverfull movement) encourages young women to have more kids than they can financially afford.

It's not going to work, and when it does, it's going to work poorly.

The OBBBA budget reconciliation omnibus of 2025 drastically cut food benefits and healthcare benefits from low-income families by the millions. Combined with the Trump tariffs and the inflationary pressure from the war with Iran (still going. Hormuz is still closed), young people who might consider having kids are seeing no future for themselves, let alone for children of their own. And fewer young people are having sex just because (compared to prior generations when they were the same age). Zoomers are just not feeling the love, and we don't fully know why.

This is exacerbated by the battle of the sexes fueled by the same far-right propaganda machine that teaches Americans to love billionaires and hate trans folk. The Manosphere has redefined masculinity as exerting force to cause harm as a demonstration that you do not fear consequences, either because you're too rich and powerful for accountability to touch you, or you just don't care. (Trump's recent meddling in the World Cup to cancel a Red Card is a very recent example. No one asked for that.) Women -- even tradwife-minded women -- don't want to deal with that kind of macho nonsense.

Those tradwives who are not dissuaded are going to rediscover all the same woes that beleaguered women throughout history. If your husband is unfaithful, or a drug abuser, or is violent, or gambles the family life savings away, or is just plain absentee, you're going to need resources so that you can escape and get independent. Among the reasons murder rates dropped sharply in the twentieth century are women-empowering developments such as shelters from violence, no-fault divorce and women's property rights. Chicago (the 1975 musical) was informed by stereotypes from reality.

(Curiously, immigrant populations have significantly lower rates of DV, drug abuse and crime. So when Trump and FOX News discuss murderers and rapists and the worst of the worst, most of our specimens come from US citizenship, not the undocumented population. That doesn't stop FOX from showcasing the most recent heinous undocumented violent killers for three minutes of hate, explicitly ignoring the higher rate of similar monsters from among white US citizens.)

Our religious pro-natal communities don't want brown babies. The right-wing supermajority of SCOTUS has talked about babies as a commodity for the adoption market when discussing the ways they want to curb access to women's reproductive healthcare. (This ignores that our foster programs are underfunded, impacted and lousy with incidents of abuse, and they want to refuse to adopt kids to atypical families such as gay couples and interracial couples.)

In the meantime, a 2026 Pew survey shows 60% of U.S. adults believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 38% say it should be illegal in all or most cases. The US abortion rate continues to climb despite Dobbs in 2022. Maternal mortality rates also climb. (Of note is the disproportionately high maternal death rate of black non-Hispanic women, but that's been an ongoing problem in the US) The largest demographic for whom abortions are provided continues to be mothers who already have kids, motivated either by health concerns or household financial concerns, often aggravated by contraception failure.

PS: 75% of conceptions do not end in live birth, with the majority of them failing to implant in the womb. If life begins at conception in the Christian Cinematic Universe, then the most populous place would be the Limbo of the Innocents on the fringes of Hell, with ~400 billion dead. If Limbo isn't canon, then the Hell of the Damned since none of those conceptions were baptized. For their sake, let us hope that Universalism is canon.

/RANT