Regional health minister says those who are busy with careers can ‘create offspring’ on work breaks
While addressing a crowd at the Eurasian Women’s Forum in St. Petersburg on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed government policy geared toward helping women achieve the ultimate balance — professional success while being the linchpin “of a large, large family.”
He went on to joke that Russian women can manage it easily, and still remain “beautiful, gentle and charming.”
His comments are the latest in a public push by government officials to try and reverse Russia’s sinking birth rate by appealing to a sense of patriotic duty and promising financial incentives to sway prospective parents.
Russia’s fertility rate — which measures the average number of children born to a woman over a lifetime — stands at approximately 1.4, less than what is considered the rate for population replacement, which is 2.1. Kremlin officials have labelled Russia’s statistic “catastrophic,” and it comes at a time of higher mortality among younger Russian men due to the war in Ukraine.
Sure, in the long run humanity will adapt and survive, but we will definitely have problems to address in the near-ish term like the next 100 years or so. the main problem will be an inverted age structure; there will be fewer people paying taxes, and fewer people around to take care of the older generations when they are elderly. Many developed nations are experiencing this and worried about it.
and ‘sex’ isn’t the issue; with modern education, contraception, etc you have to convince families to want to have kids. It doesn’t seem to be any one particular thing holding people back either, so it’s not as simple as subsidizing childcare or making families more financially secure. Countries in europe give lots of financial assistance to raise kids, but their birth rates are still much lower than replacement levels.