Today's episode of Diabolical Lies is brought to you by the first episode outline I wrote about this topic.

The second episode outline I wrote about this topic.

The third outline I wrote and then abandoned halfway through.

And the two-hour sob session I put you, Katie, through on Friday,

which was technically meant to be our podcast recording and rapidly devolved into me unloading all of my anxieties to you.

I'm so happy to be here. Thank you. Again. So, Katie, today we are going to talk about

pro-natalism in America and something that is concerning me more broadly, which is how we talk

about family and children in America. I'm concerned by how the right talks about family and children, of course.

But I also am pretty concerned about how the center left and the farther left talks about family and children.

So this is Caro's Why I Left the Left Pipeline episode.

Yeah, exactly. I'm about to become a Rapalzacus.

She's building the foundation for her large-scale grift coup. Oh, my God. You're welcome, Katie. I'm going to make you rich. You can say you're a victim. So I don't want to talk about the birth rate panic for too long. We covered this a little bit in our Republicans are going to impregnate you episode, which I re-listen to, Katie, and we were such babies then. It's only been a few months, but that was, like, so early in our podcasting together, which is kind of funny. I refuse to listen back to our earlier episodes because I know they'll make me want to die. They gave me a lot of editing anxiety, but I think that you and I are still pretty unconcerned about the birth

rate, right? Would you say that that's true for you as well? Oh, yeah, definitely. So just some kind of

like stats for people to have, you know, an understanding about what we talk about when we talk about

the birth rate panic. So the U.S. birth rate is well below replacement rate. And when people

talk about these rates, they're talking about on average the, the number of children that a woman has. So, for example, right now,

we are averaging 1.8 children born per adult woman in America. That is compared to the 2.2

that you need for replacement. This is not just happening in the U.S. This is taking place in pretty

much every developed nation on Earth.

I did a lot of research into this for one of the earlier episode outlines I have planned so many fucking versions of this conversation.

And so if anyone ever wants to do a deep dive on like the population boom in Africa, I'm your girl.

But basically, all you need to know is Latin America, Europe, Scandinavian countries, North America, all of these continents, basically except for Africa, are experiencing a drop in the birth rate. And in some instances, in the U.S., that's kind of a drop that people disagree over how impactful it is. In other countries, like South Korea and

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