Poland’s birth rate collapse is years ahead of forecast

More restriction for pregnant womens H care, More taxes and patodevelopers. Hauses for over half milion- this all sure will help…

Instead of investing into robotics and AI we are now importing Indians so they can pay social security – pensions to elderly in Europe, we are done

PiS once promised 1 million new apartments for young people starting their families. Instead, we have new apartments for 1 million PLN.

That is one and only reason why young people are afraid of starting family.

You guys gotta do more fucking.

[deleted]

o7


Yeah yeah, apartment, expensive, yare yare. I can afford a child, but since there’s no way I’m gonna keep them in case of divorce, I don’t think making one makes sense.

it’s womens fault

Before the classic outcry starts that abortion ban or housing crisis is stopping Poles from having a bunch of kids – that’s just not true.

[CBOS study on fertility from 2023](https://www.cbos.pl/SPISKOM.POL/2023/K_087_23.PDF) concluded that 57% Poles aged 18-40 have no kids at all and only 25% have 2 or more. At the same time, only 57% want to have more kids. 10% of women say they don’t want to have kids at all, ever. Out of people asked why they don’t want to have kids or want but aren’t planning more, housing, costs of living and abortion ban all together are mentioned as around 30% of the problem. So we have 57% people that want more kids that would need 2 more each to make our fertility close to 2.1 and even if the country turned into a paradise with free housing, abortion and whatnot still only 1/3 of them claim they’d have more children.

That’s not enough to save us, the problem is much deeper and it’s connected to the fact children are a burden if they are not put to work in the fields, mines, factories or whatever. 100 years ago Poland had a positive birth rate, but all the big cities were below 2, while rural areas had 4+ fertility rate, and that’s with no contraceptive pills. Now even in the rural areas we aren’t using child labour (at least not enough to make children an investment) and kids became a burden for everyone. We simply don’t want to give our lives up to raise children and the inner need to have them is not strong enough to force ourselves into having kids. No realistic amount of cheap housing, pre-school childcare, money and healthcare can convince people to have enough kids to sustain the population, and the crisis is going on for over 30 years now so we’d need 50 years of high fertility to recover.

I’m not advocating to bring back child labour or turn into totalitarian state with mandatory insemination, just saying you can’t stop the process now that it started. Czechia tried, they went from 1.1 to 1.7 fertility (still not enough!) and then dropped back to 1.27 and it’s still falling despite their best efforts. Time to stop lying to ourselves that we’re gonna have kids if our lives improve – we won’t because the improvement needed isn’t realistically possible and even this doesn’t stop the next generation from wanting more. People born in the 1990s saw this country go from post-Soviet shithole to an economic wonder kid of Europe and this still didn’t convince them. Poles that emigrated West had a higher fertility rate when their lives drastically improved – but their kids match the fertility rate of locals, which is dramatically low. Realistically, we need to look how to survive as a country despite shrinking population because convincing people to have children is not possible with the resources we have. Maybe if we tried 20-25 years ago to keep the fertility rates higher we’d have more time, but we can’t turn back time.

Oh and btw the article is wrong on the predictions again, if we’re at 37 mln people now we’ll fall to 36.6 mln people by 2028 not 2030. We’ve lost around 170k in 2025 alone and it’s speeding up because we’ll soon see more annual deaths from baby boomers while births will be dropping as 1980’s Millenials are over 40 or close to it, and those were the last years with high birth rates.

I’m American, but if I may offer my two cents: why can’t the world accept that lower birth rates are inevitable? I understand the risks towards social security but humans have managed to survive without government programs for 99.99% of our existence. The question shouldn’t be how can we increase the birth rate, but instead how can we maintain a quality standard of living for the vulnerable without solely relying on forced contributions through human labor?