The State Sterilised My Generation—Don’t Let America Follow Our Footsteps

The American Dream is currently undergoing a quiet, demographic collapse. U.S. birth rates have hit an all-time low, and pundits are scratching their heads, perplexed. They blame everything from lifestyle choices, to a vague Gen Z hatred for humanity. But if you want to see the terminal phase of this crisis, look to London.

In the United Kingdom, the birth rate has plummeted to 1.41—well below the replacement level of 2.1—and the number of deaths this year will exceed births. In London, youth unemployment has spiked to nearly 25%. We are the “canary in the coal mine” for the West, and the message is clear: The state has effectively sterilised an entire generation through a toxic cocktail of high-debt credentialism and punitive taxation.

I am the woman the “Girlboss” era was built for. I’m following every rule: I study hard, live in the capital, and am currently finishing an elite degree. I was told that if I leaned in, the world would open up. It hasn’t.

My generation was pushed into high-debt “Mickey Mouse” degrees—credentials that often serve the university’s objectives more than our career prospects. We are over-credentialed, under-capitalised workers who can quote Marx, but can’t afford a three-bedroom house.

When a 25-year-old woman looks at her student debt, her rent, and the cost of a nursery, and realises she cannot afford a child until she is 35 (if ever), that is not “liberation.” That is the state stealing from her window of opportunity.

For women, this means we have traded our peak fertile years for cubicle sentences and DEI seminars, only to enter a job market that treats us as replaceable units of labour. The administrative state has replaced genuine education with ideological compliance training, saddling us with debt to fund a bureaucracy that is fundamentally hostile to the values that once anchored our society. Now, as we look toward the supposed “next step” of adulthood, we realise we’ve been priced out of our own biological instincts.

In London, motherhood has essentially become a financial suicide mission. In some cases, childcare now consumes 40% of a household’s income. When you combine that with skyrocketing rents and a tax system that punishes success, you can understand how it isn’t a “choice” to remain childless.

It is a state-mandated poverty trap.

The state has essentially inverted the social contract. Rather than investing in the future, the government taxes the productivity of the young to subsidise the stagnation of the old, all while making the basic building block of society—the family—an elite luxury good.

They would rather we remain soulless individuals, tethered to our desks and dependent on the state, than sovereign parents building a legacy.

This is an ideological victory for the de-growth movement. The same technocrats who lecture you on “carbon footprints” view a newborn child as a liability rather than a miracle. They have successfully rebranded the decline of the West as “sustainability,” while we—the women who were supposed to build the future—are left feeling hollow.

Being childfree has become the new state religion. We were led to believe “liberation” means being a taxable unit of labour in a skyscraper. The West is shrinking not because women have lost the desire to nurture, but because the state has effectively sterilised us.

The most insidious part of this British insight into the potential future is how we punish success. In the UK, a young woman earning £50,000 ($63,000) (hardly a king’s ransom in a global city) faces a marginal tax rate of nearly 60% when you factor in income tax, national insurance, and student loan repayments.

We are effectively working more than half our lives for a state that uses our productivity to subsidise a stagnant, barely moving present rather than investing in a vibrant future. By the time a woman achieves the “financial security” the state demands, her biological window is closing. The cruelty of the system is absolute: it breaks your legs in your twenties, then tries to sell you an expensive, state-funded crutch in your late thirties in the form of IVF.

America has always prided itself on being the exception—the one Western nation with the grit and the growth to defy demographic decay. But London is proof that culture-led decline is contagious.

America is currently standing where the UK stood a decade ago. But there is still time to fix this. Americans can choose to lower the barriers to entry for young families, reform the system, and stop taxing the next generation into oblivion.

But if Americans continue to neglect future generations, it will end up like us: a cohort of high-achieving, elite-degree-holding women wondering how we followed all the rules, yet ended up economically sterilised by the very system that promised us we could have it all.

The “Girlboss” is dead. We just want to be able to afford our own lives. We want our future back.