Due to Social Security, we don't need to have children to take care of us as we age.
Drop the big one and start over.
“Due to Social Security, we don’t need to have children to take care of us as we age.”
Things can change faster than folks might be able to have children to take care of them in their old age.
From https://humanlifereview.com/the-long-road-of-eugenics-from-rockefeller-to-roe-v-wade/
...Junior (1874-1960) had turned 19 in 1893.31 He learned population theory from his 19th-century college professors at Brown University, who were enamored of Thomas Malthus.32
The major intellectual influence on Junior was Brown’s president, Elisha Benjamin Andrews, a one-eyed, larger-than life Civil War veteran. Andrews influenced Junior directly in the courses he taught, and indirectly in the environment of the institution he shaped.
“Alone among contemporary economists, Andrews considered rapid population growth, through both natural increase and immigration, as a serious threat.” He exhorted his students to carry out their duty as Christians to solve these problems: “Where are the young men and women of means and leisure who will duly study the social problems of our time and help to their solution?”33. In 1894, Junior wrote a sophomore essay, “The Dangers to America Arising from Unrestricted Immigration,” denouncing immigrants as “the scum of foreign cities; the vagabond, the tramp, the pauper, and the indolent . . . ignorant and hardly better than beasts.”34
ARE THERE TOO MANY OF US?
BY PRESIDENT E. B. ANDREWS, BROWN UNIVERSITY
It was a confusing time for many Christians. Proof of that is Andrews was descended from a line of respected Baptist clergymen and it looks like he fell for that Malthusian falderal pretty hard.
Junior took over his father’s oil empire.35 By 1910, attorney Starr J. Murphy succeeded Gates as head of philanthropy. The biographers describe the Rockefellers during these early years as “institution builders,” establishing the great trusts that would do so much to mold the world we know today.
These trusts, according to the biographers, were not intended to relieve the needy: People with needs were considered to be displaying symptoms of other problems. Under Junior and Murphy, money was “diverted to . . . innovative groups that were attempting to deal with causes rather than symptoms.”36
Among these trusts were the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (1901; now Rockefeller University),37 the General Education Board (1903), the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission (1909), the Rockefeller Foundation (1913),38 and the Bureau of Social Hygiene (1913).39
Some people thought Jr was naive for a measurable length of time. I think into his 50's but once you understand the power his crew were building into those bureaus and boards, commissions and foundations you'll probably figure out where that phrase Deep State came from.
Anyway, Jr and his family (wife, Abby Aldrich and children), being impressed with all things China started drifting away from their religious beliefs; his son John D Rockefeller III must have really been taken with that Malthusian bedtime story because he's the one who powered the abortion alternative into America's psyche and who knows? perhaps he was guilt ridden, too, knowing his father was wrong about immigrants, so perhaps he took steps to influence the opening of our borders, too. I'll have to look into that.
There's a lot more to the demographic transition than that (especially since Social Security checks alone can't and don't keep most retirees afloat financially).
First, with reduced infant mortality compared to 100 years ago, there's less of a reason to have 10 kids with the hope that 1 or 2 make it adulthood, your one kid will probably make it.
Second, back when a large fraction of the population farmed their own plots of land, unless you were wealthy enough to hire labor, the only option was to breed lots of your own laborers.
Third, as women became skilled and educated, having their first kid while in their teens didn't make sense economically or socially.
To reverse these trends, we'd have to A. roll back pediatric medicine so that survival to adulthood becomes a crapshoot again, B. go back to an agrarian economy, and C. treat women the way Muslims do. None of those are going to happen, and none are desirable.
So our economies will just have to adjust to low or zero population growth - there will be a few decades of difficulty with SS and other retirement funds, but otherwise, this isn't a catastrophe. What would be a catastrophe is trying to reverse the zero growth by importing masses of Third World peoples to compensate.