Poland's birthrate on the decline

The birth rate in Poland is declining to unsustainable numbers.
Why have Polish women opted out of parenting ?
Poland use to have very large Catholic families.
Why are Polish women opting out of their job as breeders today ?
Is it because kids are very expensive and sticky and just to much work.
Is it because of the selfishness indoctrination of today's society with the alphabets, the popularity with easy abortions, no good men to support a family because they have been feminized, a failing social structure.........or all of the above.

Yes, not enough males want to participate in household duties and relieve hard working women who need to go to work first (coz their good for nothing husbands don`t earn enough to support the family) and then have to take care of the house. That is highly unfair and women have said NO at last.

Cultural shift. Different hierarchy of values. Mass media, popular culture, decline of Christianity - we all know that. Family has moved down the list compared to "career", travelling, comfortable life without much responsibility and material wealth. Even women who have hard-working (and well off) husbands very often don't want to have children or are quite happy with one kid. Sign of our times.

Like Kania said. We are 3 siblings and we have 6 kid but our 6 kids have only 3 kids. So is modern. It is a convenience, children are out of fashion. One and that much at best.

Just skimmed through the wiki article for "Demographics of Poland". It's really shocking to see how Poland has an only slightly higher population than in 1939. You sort of understand it intuitively, but to see it on a chart still produces a shock.

Looking at the first chart - I don't think it would be a stretch to say that if Poland had no losses in WW2 period, it would be comparable to France or Britain in population today. That would be a different Europe, and maybe a different world. Kinda makes one sad.

I was struggling to think of a country that's similar in its demographic history (excluding the Baltic states, where the driver is migration). I thought Cambodia, or Belarus might come close (Khmer Rouge and WW2 respectively), but after checking I was surprised to see Poland is actually still comparatively worse. The only country I can find which had something similar, or actually worse, is Ireland. Ireland has a population nearly 25% smaller than it did 150 years ago - which is simply spectacular. That Potato Famine really did a number on them.

Polish and Irish demographic history (1st POL, 2nd IRL):

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Not that shocking when you consider that in 1939 we had population of 35 million and in 1945 only 23 million. We lost one third! I don't think any other country experienced such slaughter. Proportionally Soviet Union would have to lose 65 million people in WW2 to experience similar population loss.

@GefreiterKania

It's impossible to wrap one's mind around that number. My brain just can't compute what it means to lose a third over such a short period of time.

From that same wiki article, something else surprised me. It's not specific to Poland, but just something wonderful about the guiding hand of nature, or God, in demographics. Quote:

Females were in the majority in the country. In 1931, there were 105.6 women for 100 men. In 1946, the difference grew to 118.5/100, but in subsequent years, number of males grew, and in 1960, the ratio was 106.7/100.

How the heck does that happen? How do wombs all around Poland synchronize and say to each other - "Ok, now for a bit we only make boys!"? Nature truly is amazing.

Another paragraph that surprised me:

"Before World War II, the Polish lands were noted for the variety of their ethnic communities. Following the Polish-Soviet War, a large part of its population belonged to national minorities. The census of that year allocates 30.8% of the population in the minority."

Out of a population of 31M in 1931, only 20M or so were Poles. Contrast that to post-war Poland which is remarkable for its homogeneity. That's a radical change. Usually I think people think of this change as a result of the Holocaust, but these numbers show that were was clearly a lot of other things going on too.

Quite.

That's why when some people say that Poland should resist the Soviets after WW2 and fight with arms in our hands against the Soviet domination, I tell them that they are crazy. It would amount to national suicide. We opposed Germany so fiercely and lost so many people as a result that if we had attempted the same against Soviet Union that would be the end of Poland as we know it. The national substance had to be saved and rebuilt - superficially we bowed down to Soviet occupation but deep inside we remained proud and free nation, history teachers did their jobs well, writers and intellectuals (most of them anyway) remained faithful to Poland and that's why we are a free nation today.


Indeed. :)


Poles were roughly 70% in 1939 Poland. 3 millions ethnic Poles died as a result of the war and oppression, 3 millions Polish citizens of Jewish origin were murdered as well. Millions remained outside our borders or ran away to various places all over the world. There isn't a single country in the world where you wouldn't meet Poles :) A survival strategy in its own right, I suppose.


That is correct, but you have to remember that majority of this 30.8% were assimilated. They were still registered as people of Lithuanian, German, Ukrainian or Belarussian origin, but they were loyal citizens, spoke Polish, had Polish names and fought for Poland with arms in their hands (this applies also to many Polish Germans, not only common soldiers but also commanders, like Unrug or Rómmel for example). The Jewish community had, by and large, resisted assimilation, and the only other large minority that wasn't fully assimilated was Ukrainians. So, realistically, I'd say that only about 10% were genuine minorities.

@GefreiterKania

I agree. If Britain and America didn't have the appetite to start an immediate hot war with the USSR, it would certainly be stupid for Poland to ride out into the vanguard. I can't believe there are people that would argue for this as a sensible thing to do.

In other news, I found another wiki article, which is specific to Historical Demographics of Poland. Link:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Poland

I like this article quite a lot. Would recommend quickly skimming through it.

An example of the cool tables inside, is one I'm attaching below. Just this one chart contains the answer to the people that say USSR=THIRD REICH. Of course, 150K dead Poles is nothing to be proud of, as a Russian, but at least I can tell myself it was 38X less than the amount the Germans killed. On the other hand, you can also see from this chart that Poland lost more people to the USSR through cession of territories than it did to the Nazis through deaths. This is the rest of the missing third (the Jews being the other part). Mostly Ukrainians and Belarusians that became Soviet citizens. A silver lining from this data also, is that the population of ethnic Poles has still almost doubled between 1931 and 2022, from 20M to 38M.

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Actually, correction to above point - Poland did not permanently lose all 7.8M people to the USSR. A large part (not sure exactly how many) were transferred from now-Soviet territory to the lands annexed from Germany and added to Poland, following the deportation of Germans (-750K German pop as seen in above chart). So as the Germans moved out, Poles from the Kresy came back in.

It seems like it.
Back in the day all the children pitched in with the chores to help out.
(Many hands make light work)
Today they want to be paid for anything they do around the house and camp out at home until they are 25 years old for free.

And the courts back them.
It's no wonder this generation of women don't want to fulfill their motherhood duty anymore.

You are quite right that it's a different scale altogether. Had Poland resisted Soviet occupation, however, the losses might have been comparable. Also, you have to take into account that from Polish point of view there is another difference apart from the difference of scale: Germany has totally rejected their nazi past, they apologised for their atrocities around 2.5 gazillion times and have been consistently reliable ally to us in the last 30 years or so. In Russia, however, the cult of Soviet Union and the Red Army is still strong, so in Polish eyes it is comparable to Germany still honouring Hitler as war leader, having thousands of monuments of Wehrmacht soldiers and commanders in all their cities, and every year in Berlin holding a huge military parade with swastika flags proudly flying in the air.

You'd be surprised how many private and discreet celebrations they have on 20 April. Some bars and restaurants serve his favourite food. At least it is discreet and low key.

It's true though that the r*ssians still glorify the Soviet Union: the monuments are still there and amazingly that macabre waxwork of Lenin is still in its vile mausoleum in the centre of their capital.

That's why Poland is so fixated on the idea of Intermarium - uniting all the smaller countries between Germany and Russia whose very right to existence is questioned by totalitarian ideologues, like Dugin for example, to ensure our survival. We don't have enough power though, either hard or soft, so it will most likely only remain a beautiful idea.

Not to turn a demographic thread into a military one - but I highly doubt this. Poland's military would rapidly collapse, and the war would be over quickly. In 1945 the USSR still had a monstrously large army, which had just gone from the Ukraine to Germany in under a year. The mortality rate in the GULAG was microscopically small compared to a Nazi death camp. The purges of the 1930s were already behind us. So I have a hard time imagining a scenario where Poland would lose another 6 million people in a struggle with the USSR. It would still lose hundreds of thousands, unnecessarily - this I don't debate.

Stick to the topic of the thread please

More testicles. But yes, such phenomenons are amazing.

As to birth rate. Let's start qith the fact that not even one of you tried to put a man in it. It takes two to tango.

But as to women:

1- the miracles of quite reliable contraception

2- the possibilities open to women

3- the stability- in Poland if something goes wrong you are f***Ed In UK (where the birth rate among Polish women is higher) you do have a safety net e.g. a women was 4 months pregnant with a second kid, lost her job; a month earlier her partner lost his job. UK gov helped.

4- tools that help raise the kids- nurseries, affordable activities e.t.c.

5- pregnancy and after birth care- while medically top notch the treatment is a different matter and scares women like hell

6- very unequal division of work in running a family

7- higher expectations when raising a kid and less of a support network

8- Less women care what people think and ignore the 'she's single/ childless because she's ugly/nasty etc ' and live their life as they really want to

9- people are more picky in choosing a partner which can make it hard to still have kids

Well, the process had indeed required the use of testicles but it still doesn't explain the phenomenon that Bobko mentioned.

As for 1-9... excuses, excuses. The real reasons were explained in #3, the rest is excuses and rationalising wrong choices to soothe one's guilty conscience.

women have to work, there is so called welfare, people do not children to support them in their old age and that goes hand in hand with high taxes.

All your reasons are not reasons at all - those are effects of those two reasons.
Ah there is another one, people watch TV or something like that and get those ideas about life from there. Flashy, high life, go there, have this or this or that - to do that all or some you need money, to raise a kid cost a lot of money,


I say no to your nonsense.

No, but as the gender is decided by the semen and not the egg it's the testicles that would have to make the pact.


Why would one feel guilty for not having kids? The only guilt should be if you DO have kids while not suitable for the role


Tell yourself that if it helps. Ignoring what women say about the matter will sure make them want to have kids...


And quite often want to

But again it is funny how everything is how women don't want kids and not a word about the man.

Here is one more reason::
If sh*t hits the fan it's usually the women that ends up qith all the care for the kids.

I'm trying to stay below Strelecz35's number of warnings. I seem to collect them like Zelensky collects presidents as friends.


That's the bottom line. It really is not very exceptional, just a country with a typical post-industrial fertility rate (France is probably the only big exception, but it's also playing catch-up).

There were a few waves of demographic change in the last two-three hundred years. In pre-industrial agricultural societies it made economic sense to have as many children as possible. However, mortality rates were also extremely high, and as a result population growth was stagnant or modest. Then, with the first improvements in public sanitation and healthcare that arrived around the same time as the Industrial Revolution, life expectancy exploded and child mortality declined, but birth rates remained the same as before. The result was a huge explosion in population. Life had changed, but people kept breeding like it had not. This is what is happening in Africa currently.

Several factors worked to correct this situation. The mechanization of agriculture meant less hands were needed for work. Public education regarding contraception was also important. Urbanization, however, was probably the primary driver. Each successive generation that was born and lived in a city would have lower and lower fertility rates. In cities, kids went from being a productive asset, to a net drain on capital. Because they needed to go to kindergarten, school, uni - meant that their labor was no longer available, and instead you had to invest in them over decades. This made urban families change their calculus and lower the number of children to 1-2, since a larger family meant poorer outcomes in both education and career for the children.

The present day problem is the astronomic cost of raising a kid, that makes people not want to have kids at all. I think this explains, to a certain extent, the huge fall in fertility after 1991 in most Eastern Bloc countries. The state used to offer those services for free, but now they became a serious financial burden on the parent.

Simple. You were given your childhood, your life, your education, warmth and love, and you are not going to return that to a child of your own, because all of your imaginary "conditions" for having children are not met. You can, of course, try to deafen your conscience and rationalise your selfishness and that's exactly what happens in most cases of old spinsters - I know many of them, they all sound like the same broken record.


Look, I know well enough what women say. I mingle with academic circles sometimes (not for pleasure, mind you, more out of a necessity) and I talk to people. Believe me, if I was given a dollar for every 30-35 year-old single, childless woman, who postpones children for "later" because first she needs to take care of her academic "career" and complete her PhD thesis on "Latvian cutlery in the 17th century" or something equally important, I would be a rich man.


Select the man wisely then, and forget about łobuz kocha najmocniej. ;D

that is so called - a one track mind.
Am I wrong? Do you claim that women don't have to work? If not why this brup?


What is wrong with you? Where I have meation women or men? I said people. are women not people in your mind? I hate debating with narrowminded people it brings the worst in me.

Women carry a baby before it is born, and then si more suitable to take care of it - what do you know if you don't know that much - BS and bias?

Yes, but at the end of the day it all boils down to one's hierarchy of values. Either you want children, to pass on the proverbial baton in the generational relay race or you go for comfortable life with fewer responsibilities. You either contribute to your nation's future (and that's exactly what children are) or you chose "career", comfort, money or whatnot.

I am not a rich man by any means (more of a lower middle class, I'd say) but I have two children and they are an absolute joy of my life. :) That's what those people who are rationalising their selfish choices in a 100s of "clever" ways don't get - you are not only being a parasite, who is not returning what she/he has been given, you are also missing out on the greatest thing on earth. :)

Oh, well... we were talking about nature... perhaps nature knows best. Maybe we really shouldn't try to convince those who don't want children to have them. Maybe there is some reason nature doesn't want them to multiply. Hmm...

If anything one should return it to their parents. And you have better chances of doing that while not having kids.


And did it ever cross your mind that that in fact may be why they made such decision?
Many people told me why the did it so they must be laying.


You just say they are lying or ignore it.
I am sure it will help increase the birth rate :)


Just to distinguish. Even if suddenly all man where able to support family comfortably on their own a lot of women would still want to work.


"Women have to work?"


Yes, BS- man are as capable at caring for a child. Saw it many times.
And yes bias- to create a child both are neede and as such man play equal role in the birth rate

Cut down on your quotes please

Nope. You were not given care in your old age (that's your future children's job) - you were given life, childhood, education etc. You owe that to a child of your own.

The rest is excuses, selfishness and, as Iron said, TV-made plastic dreams.


Here I completely agree - everything I wrote applies also to men (you can add old bachelors to old spinsters there). There is the same number of selfish, irresponsible and stupid men as women - no doubt.

Reasons:
women have to work,
there is so called welfare, people do not need the children to support them in their old age
that goes hand in hand with high taxes.
mass propaganda of consumptionist life style


Some would many wouldn't, that is not the point and that doesn't need to be distinguished.


good you addmit it, your Bias is nothing but a bias, what you say is pointless nosense.
GK say it better I have no time for narrow minded biased fools!
You can regnize them when at very turn they say - what about men?a u was murzynów wieszają.

Poland really is a sh!t country, if a bright guy like you, with perfect English and an electrical engineering degree, is lower middle class.

Alternatively... it's your kids that are to blame ;)))

I'm same age as you, as we established, and I'm still in proud solitude. Well, if you take my girlfriend out of the equation. In my case, I don't have much clever excuses - what I tell myself is I had no time.

Not at all. We have a lot of catching up to do but we are a smart and resourceful nation - my children will be better off than I am, and their children even more so (and they will be even more annoyingly Polish than I am). :)


... and, knowing life, Velund has probably a nice crowd of 6 or 7 kids running around his cryptocurrency mine and memorising, at their father's order, Joseph Brodsky's "На независимость Украины". *rolls eyes*

In any case, you better get your finger out, Bobko, and start making kids - our children have a rather high chance of finding common tongue; Velund's and mine... I'm not so sure. :-/

@GefreiterKania

Don't worry, I will do it soon, and more than just two :)

I always told myself I need enough money. Now when I have enough money, I tell myself I have no time. But as my deceased grandmother always said - it actually doesn't take much time at all.


I don't like your fatalism, hopeful fatalism, but still fatalism. Perhaps you need a bit of an American, a bit of a Russian in you. Stop thinking like a Chinese. We live once, and we have to take this life by the throat. There is enough time and opportunity in the world to make GefreiterKania able to support 100 kids without breaking the bank. Don't limit yourself.

Is class only about money?

Anyway, you're writing in English and using American terminology. I once saw a yank text referring to doctors and sales directors as 'upper middle class' and fell on the floor laughing. In Western Europe, doctors are middle middle class and anyone who works in sales is lower middle class.

I even saw an American reference to the middle class that was referring to factory workers!

In Poland there's the inteligencja although that has a very different meaning to the English word intelligentsia. Our word does come from r*ssian however it refers to a far smaller group.

The middle classes in Poland don't tend to have large families for economic and professional reasons. Plus, nowadays women rely wasn't to be treated as brood mares.