Treat Women Like Shit And They’re Not Going To Have Your Babies

Content note: This post discusses sexual violence, domestic abuse and economic abuse.

I don’t understand why it’s so complicated. If you treat women like shit they’re going to stop having your babies. No one needs a whole load of stats or a whole bunch of research, it’s just common sense. Would you want to have a baby with someone that’s treating you like shit? Probably not.

The stats do, however, seem to back this up. In England and Wales the latest birth rate figures are at 1.39 children per woman, which is the lowest ever since records began in 1938, and it’s the fourth year running at a record low, so the trend is downwards [1]. It’s even worse in Scotland, they’re only at 1.23 [2]. The birth rate that would keep a population level is 2.1, so clearly these numbers are way below that. In fact two thirds of the people in the world live in a country below 2.1 [3]. The lowest of those is South Korea, which had a rate of just 0.72 in 2023, and at the time that was the lowest that had ever been recorded anywhere in the world [4]. In the years since, it has marginally increased to 0.75 in 2024 and 0.8 in 2025, which has been explained by people delaying their weddings during the pandemic [4]. South Korea is also the only OECD country that has a rate below 1.0, and it’s been that way since 2018, so almost a decade [4]. Other countries of note that are low include Japan, Italy and Spain, all of which are under 1.3 [3].

There’s a few people in the world who don’t like this, and they’re mostly men. I’m pretty sure you could’ve guessed that. Probably the loudest and most influential of them is Elon Musk. In August 2022 he said that population collapse was “a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming” [5], and clearly he was trying his hardest to solve the problem single-handedly, as he has had at least 14 children by four women, and he even said as much in July 2022, that he was “doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis” [5]. Cringe. JD Vance also famously said in 2021 that America is run by “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives” [6], although after the backlash he did state this year that it was one of the dumbest things he’d ever said [6]. Another famously nice leader, Viktor Orbán, felt so strongly about it that he implemented a whole host of incentives and subsidies to encourage an increase in the birth rate, and he spent a whopping five percent of GDP on these policies, which included a €30,000 loan written off after the third child and no income tax for life for mothers of four or more [7]. The rates in Hungary were 1.25 in 2010, 1.59 in 2020 and 1.31 in 2025, which shows that it didn’t really work, probably because house prices and 25% inflation gobbled up all of the subsidies that were offered [7]. A demographer at the Vienna Institute of Demography publicly stated that this was “clearly a failure”, although Orbán’s buddy Vance then went on to praise it as a model! [7] Orbán lost the election on the 12th April 2026, and after 16 years of trying his best to increase the birth rate however he could, it sat at just 1.31 in his last full year [7].

Claudia Goldin, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2023, wrote a paper in 2024 that explained the reasons behind this [8]. Goldin revealed that the countries that got rich quickly after the war, like Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Japan and Korea, have got the lowest birth rates because women’s education and ability to work changed the fastest in that period. But running alongside that, the men’s share of housework and caring didn’t change, so that gap ended up being taken on by the women. She’s consistently doing more than him and it shows in the numbers. In Japan it was 3.1 hours a day more, in Italy three hours, and those two had birth rates of 1.36 and 1.27 respectively in 2019 [8]. Looking at countries that had a smaller gap between men and women, she found that in Sweden, where the daily gap was only 0.8 hours, and Denmark, where it was 0.9, they had higher birth rates, at 1.7 in 2019 [8]. Across 20 countries she found exactly the same pattern: the bigger the gap in hours at home, the fewer the babies [8]. She also found out that mostly men want more children than women. There were only three of the eleven countries, Belgium, France and Norway, where the wives wanted as many children as the husbands [8].

In Korea the gender pay gap is 29% (for comparison, ours in the UK is 12.8%), and it’s been the widest in the OECD every single year since Korea joined back in 1996 [9]. A government institute’s survey found that 63.5% of women would be perfectly happy living without children, whereas only 41.2% of men felt the same [10]. And the trend is definitely downwards in terms of marriage too. Statistics Korea found that only 28% of young women were positive about marriage, and across all under-35s it was 36%, down from 56% a decade earlier [10]. The four big nos from women in Korea are no dating, no sex, no marriage and no children [10]. Sounds like a plan!

The UN also looked at this issue in 2025 and surveyed 14,000 people across 14 countries [11]. (Spoiler alert: they pretty much confirmed that if you treat women like shit they’re not going to have your babies.) It found that most people wanted two children, although one in five expect not to actually have the number that they want, mostly due to the cost of having kids [11]. One in five were also pressured into a child that they didn’t want, and one in three had an unplanned pregnancy [11]. 11% said that having to do most of the caring at home was enough on its own to stop them from having a kid, and the UNFPA’s own words were that part of the reason people were having fewer children was a “toxic blend of economic precarity and sexism” [11]. There you have it.

Here in the UK women are also getting a rough deal, and I’m not surprised in the slightest that women are wanting to have fewer babies. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the amount of pay that she misses out on after having her first child, 42%, and over £65,000 after five years. Pair that up with one woman in twelve being a victim of male violence every single year (and that’s not just me making it up, that’s the police’s own statement) [12], and it becomes even more obvious why women don’t want to be anywhere near a man. And when women are in relationships, one in seven of them had a partner that was controlling her money last year, of which 940,000 said that it stopped them from leaving [13]. Then we have Reform, the political party that’s currently second in the polls, who want to scrap the Equality Act, make it harder to get a divorce (yes, that is actually one of their policy aims) and reopen the abortion debate, with a view to stopping women’s rights to bodily autonomy and getting an abortion [14].

And really, so what if the birth rate falls? We don’t need the babies. It’s the men who need the babies, and none of them are offering to do it! The world is going to reach a population of 10 billion by the 2080s whatever British women decide to do, because most of the people who will have those children have already been born [3].

Being a parent to a girl is difficult, and I think it’s even more difficult now. I will certainly be encouraging her to live her life to the fullest, to be as successful as she can, to do the things she wants to do, and let her know that there’s no requirement for her to settle down and have babies. I’ll also be making sure that if she does make that choice, which of course is also fine, she does it with her eyes open, with the information and facts about her finances in front of her. Sadly she doesn’t need me to explain about the threat she faces from men. She’s 13 years old and has repeatedly experienced disgusting behaviour from boys and men. One of my closest friends, who I’ve known since my early twenties, has chosen to never have children, and she is as happy as anything with her life, and good on her. No one needs a man and no one needs to have a baby. Wanting and needing are two different things, and when it comes to babies it’s the patriarchy doing the needing, not the women.

And at the end of the day, if the birth rate goes down and there aren’t enough younger workers to pay for the older people’s pensions, then we’re going to need to change how our society works. Our society is already pretty rubbish, and different leadership, a different way of running things and different conditions for all of us to live in is not necessarily a bad thing.

For fuck’s sake, it’s not complicated. You don’t need to have read any of the stats in this blog. I repeat: treat women like shit and they’re not going to have your babies.

The Receipts // (Sources)

[1] Office for National Statistics, “Births in England and Wales: 2025 (final rates),” 8 September 2026.

[2] National Records of Scotland, August 2026. The Scotsman, “Number of babies born in Scotland hits record low for third year in a row,” 25 August 2026.

[3] United Nations, “World Population Prospects 2024,” 11 July 2024

[4] Statistics Korea, “Birth Statistics 2023,” 27 February 2024. Statistics Korea, “Birth Statistics 2025,” 25 February 2026.

[5] Elon Musk, X, 7 July 2022. Elon Musk, X, 26 August 2022. Elon Musk, X, 18 January 2022. Today (NBC), 16th January 2026.

[6] Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox News, 29 July 2021. JD Vance, Communion, 2026.

[7] Bloomberg, February 2025. BBC, June 2026. Fortune, 19 August 2024. Al Jazeera, 13 April 2026. American Enterprise Institute, November 2025.

[8] Claudia Goldin, “Babies and the Macroeconomy,” NBER, December 2024.

[9] Korea Labor Institute, “Wage Information Brief,” 2025. OECD, “Pensions at a Glance 2025.” Office for National Statistics, “Gender pay gap in the UK: 2025,” 23 October 2025.

[10] Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, 20 December 2024. Statistics Korea, “Social Survey,” August 2023. Observer Research Foundation, April 2025.

[11] UNFPA, “State of World Population 2025,” 10 June 2025.

[12] National Police Chiefs’ Council, “Violence Against Women and Girls: National Policing Statement,” July 2024.

[13] Surviving Economic Abuse and Ipsos, “Measuring economic abuse,” December 2024.

[14] Reform UK, policy statements, 2025.

Sources correct as of September 26th 2026