On Wednesday, the day it was announced that the U.S. birthrate fell for the fourth straight year, signaling the lowest number of births in 32 years, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law the most draconian anti-abortion law in the country. That the two developments came at the same time could not have been more revelatory.
The ruling elites are acutely aware that the steadily declining American birthrate is the result of a de facto “birth strike” by women who, unable to afford adequate health insurance and exorbitant medical bills and denied access to paid parental leave, child care and job protection, find it financially punitive to have children. Not since 1971 have births in the United States been at replacement levels, considered to be 2,100 births per 1,000 women over their lifetimes, a ratio needed for a generation to replace itself. Current births number 1,728 per 1,000 women, a decline of 2% from 2017. Without a steady infusion of immigrants, the U.S. population would be plummeting. (chris hedges, truthout)

they want to control the population and therefore they want to control women. i think all the time i'm glad not to have brought children into the world as it is and as it is grimly becoming. i can't give birth, but women feel the same way, though men and women keep making babies remarkably, thinking that it's natural, which it is of course, and that the world will right itself somehow, or the babies will make it better.
but i hadn't thought about women's power to limit the power of men by not having their babies and not feeding the machine of destruction. nature still operates in this artificial paradigm of civilization, underground sort of. in nature when times are tough there are less births. in civilization, when war and fossil fuel and arms and pesticides are the engines of capitalism, it's tough times for babies.