Clementine
9hr ago
Where I live abortion is allowed as a blanket rule if the mother is under 18, the mother is married but the child is not her husband's, the child is a product of incest or rape, the pregnancy is a threat to the health of the mother, or the child has been identified to have a serious disability.
All other cases of abortion need to get past an ethics panel to be allowed.
I consider this to be a very good state of affairs and a very reasonable solution that everyone should be ok with. I admit not everyone agrees with me, on either side, but blanket statements about no one on the prochoice side being happy with reasonable compromises because they want a family planning card is just you strawmanning your opponents.
Clementine
14hr ago
Thanks for sharing.
This gets close to but never really actually states the argument I always felt was missing in abortion arguments.
I mean I still remember seeing some lengthy debate back and forth about how a museum is entitled to kick out some guy who decided to squat there, and then arguing that babies don't decided to squat, it's decided for them, and that you can't kick our the squatter if doing so would kill them, and none of this was like "well women's bodies aren't actually museums and hosting a baby inside your body is a lot worse than hosting a tapeworm". I kept remembering those arguments when pregnant because they planted so much of my subsconscious belief that pregnancy was just some minor temporary inconvenience.
Like even in this article it doesn't really go do far as to say "is it ethical to torture someone for nine months against their will to save a life?" She still is pretty focused on cases where it's life-saving or where the suffering from the itching is bad enough two people killed themselves over it. Probably because she thinks that's the stronger argument?
Clementine
14hr ago
Yeah, in fact I did the same till age 8 or 10 so it's jumping the gun. I'm too used to thinking in terms of "a boys room" and "a girls room".
Ugh but closets. Whatever. Need to just resign myself to furniture constellations being something I'll have to tweak and change and tweak and change.
Clementine
14hr ago
I'm not blaming men, just noting them as a category of people not talking about it that doesn't fit "well it's because they regret having kids but can't say that so can't talk about it". Men have wives and see their wife go through XYZ during pregnancy but it seemingly doesn't get discussed during public discourse.
Your point re doctors is very true. Expected = irrelevant.
Yes? I feel like you're reading my comment out of context.
We were discussing
- A specific individual nowadays for whom the odds were 1%, not 10%, but who was discussing hypothetical 10%
- The past during specific time periods when maternal mortality spiked (because they got medical care and their medical care didn't wash their hands)
Edit: no actually I see your point. Yes, it makes no sense to invoke evolution for it for temporary periods (and in fairness when it spiked people surely didn't realize what was happening)
Clementine
21hr ago
Nah I don't buy that as adequate explanation.
- Doesn't explain women who get severe temporary or permanent health problems but continue to have children (so it clearly wasn't enough to cause them to regret it) not talking about those problems
- Doesn't explain medical professionals who see these women but have no personal stake in their life choices not talking about it
- Doesn't explain men not talking about it
- Doesn't explain how little is done to alleviate or solve it
At the end of the day, I have permanent tooth problems because of how much i vomited during pregnancy. I agree that I wouldn't discuss this with my child, at her current age, but I'm not unwilling to discuss it at all, see eg here. I very much regret not knowing, going in, that this was something that could happen, and for having walked into pregnancy with the totally mistaken belief I just needed to get through it and all the suffering was temporary (for one thing, I'd have dumped the doctor who didn't take my vomiting seriously and found a doctor who would prescribe me something to reduce the vomiting, if I'd known of the lifelong negative effects extreme repeated vomiting has. And I have an excuse for not knowing — why didn't my doctor? We're back to why women's health is treated as an afterthought in medical care, but then we have "even when discussing specifically women's health problems and specifically how they're neglected by the medical establishment we're still not talking about one of the most major medical events many women will experience before they hit old age, the one that will most massively negatively impact their long term health"
Like going back to my mention elsewhere of becoming pro choice as soon as I became pregnant — how is this not part of the discussion? All the prochoice activists can't mention the 25% odds a teen pregnancy ends with the teen girl now needing to wear special underpants for the rest of her life lest she pee herself in public? Oh she might have a psychotic episode from all the hormones, possibly one permanently affecting her for the rest of her life, but that's not at all relevant to the ethical debate we're all having here? Like ok maybe the pro-life people don't want to mention it because it doesn't help their case but I read SO much online debate about this topic and all the discussion about the right to choose and the right to control one's own body and aside from "sometimes you need to abort to save the mom's life" the idea of permanently physically harming the mother just never came up. Which is. Bizarre.
Clementine
22hr ago
Any theories as to why?
Amongst my friends, I know we sometimes don't talk about it if there's anyone struggling with infertility in the room, since it seems insensitive. But that doesn't really suffice to explain a strange seemingly culture-wide taboo. Especially as you mentioned in spaces where that kind of topic seems relevant.
I have weird pseudopsych theories like "people instinctively shy away from thinking about how much suffering they possibly caused their own mother" but I don't really take that seriously as a real explanation... and "it's a conspiracy of silence to keep the human race going" is pretty absurd... And something like "oh well it's a topic that makes people uncomfortable" just doesn't seem likely, there's plenty of topics that make people uncomfortable and yet get talked about.
I just feel like I walked into having a child fully aware that labor was painful — that I definitely was warned about, that everyone talked about birth plans etc, I said I'm an overplanner and I mean it, I was researching hypnobirthing and tens machines and all that stuff before I even went off BC — and yet somehow there was this giant, humongous, gaping, blind spot around the immediate and long term health costs of pregnancy that even now years later I just find baffling. I went to pregnancy classes and it didn't come up??? I spoke to doctors before I became pregnant about what I needed to do and know in advance and it was never mentioned?
To this day I still feel like it was treated as if anything short of being actually hospitalized just didn't matter.
(After writing all of this up I think "well maybe it's the sexism stupid" but is that really sufficient an explanation? Like yes I know feminists have been beating the drum about women's health being ignored, dismissed, and neglected and I know it's true, but is that alone enough to explain it?)
Clementine
22hr ago
I assume your wife has already gone to a physical therapist specializing in women's pelvic floors, but just in case she hasn't I am mentioning it anyway as something she should try. Everyone knows about kegels but physical therapists can help suggest other exercises and help with doing kegels more effectively.
Not saying it will solve the problem entirely but it can lessen the severity/frequency for some women.
Clementine
22hr ago
Thank you for sharing your perspective!
And yes there is a joy that toddlers bring that doesn't really come from anything else. They're just so much more seriously and wholeheartedly enthusiastic about life than anyone else I've ever met.
Clementine
22hr ago
Scott mentioned it at some point, I was curious and checked it out, and I've lurked occasionally since. So I've been lurking for a long time I guess? Because I don't remember when he mentioned it.
Clementine
22hr ago
I don't think it's a weird way to think of it and you've reminded me of another reason I want a fourth. Three kids feels like it invites weird sibling dynamics with both lots of triangulation and more rigid fixation in the roles of "oldest", "middle", "youngest" whereas larger families I know seem to have more fluidity in the roles.
Although I don't think the rivalries go down at all with 3 or 4 or 5. You're still fighting over what share you get of a limited resource (parental attention). Although I don't think it gets noticeably worse even with more fingers grabbing at the same pie... So maybe I'm wrong, and the natural decrease in resources allotted to each child actually does lower the tension as well? Now I'm second-guessing myself.
Clementine
1d ago
Yeah it does seem possible the range is the reason.
Your point about geriatric pregnancy is appreciated. It is something I keep in mind, as not "what number do we stop at" but "what age do we stop at". Also because of the increased concern for the child having issues...
Clementine
1d ago
The way we handle mealtime is we make one supper. And then if you don't like it you can have cereal or a sandwich.
But I'm lucky to have kids with no significant/difficult to accomodate allergies. My friend has a separate set of food restrictions for each kid, it's impossible for her to make only one meal for the family, 2 meals is already an achievement.
The work I feel would linearly increase with each kid is laundry (an unending task with three, I don't know how we wouldn't fall behind with four) and the pickup/dropoff juggle dance (bad enough with the bare minimum of just school/daycare and gets ridiculous if you want to add extracurriculars). Food and supervising definitely doesn't take much additional effort once you're already making the initial investment.
Clementine
1d ago
Oh man the bedroom splitting. So much of our household bedroom furniture arrangement depends on the sex of this not even conceived yet child.
Clementine
1d ago
I know about the show in a completely different way than you.
For a brief period Taylor Swift dated a British singer named Matty Healy. Her fans were enraged that she was dating him, because he was a racist who went on The Adam Friedland Show and made a joke about watching violent porn and then a female friend of his walking in on him. One of the hosts suggested that he was watching ghetto gaggers and he agreed that was what he was watching. (This is relevant only because the host later tried to explain that he was the one who suggested the name and Matty didn't actually watch it)
Fans started circulating a petition that Taylor break up with Matty among other insane behavior.
The relationship fell apart very quickly, but Taylor released a double album that included multiple songs about Matty, one of which was a song about how much she hated her fans for clutching their pearls at her dating choices.
Anyway tl;dr: the humorless far left fucking loathes that show so I don't think it could be like Joe Rogan who I don't think is considered an untouchable stain by the far right?
Clementine
1d ago
This is an interesting comparison although I instinctively find the comparison to war (evil that is only sometimes a necessary evil) to be repellent. But I suppose pregnancy and labor could also be considered a necessary evil and we have all gotten acclimated to ignoring the evil part.
Clementine
1d ago
Whatever you choose, it's not on you to make the world a better place. It's only on you to do what is reasonable. That's all it means, to live a life of choice and value.
I am still chewing on this and still not convinced I agree (but I'm also not certain I'm understanding you correctly).
Are you saying that to live a valuable life you need to only do what is "reasonable" as in the bare minimum of not harming others? Or "reasonable" as in "make the world a better place but you can spend moderate/reasonable costs and don't have to spend severe/unreasonable costs"?
Upon checking you're right that I'm exaggerating the risks.
Meta-analyses revealed that the incidence of postpartum urinary incontinence was 26% [95%CI: (21% ~ 30%)]
So not having it isn't "uncommon", but having it is still common enough I'm definitely lucky.
(The odds during pregnancy are 45/55 so basically a coin toss, but I lost that coin toss so...)
I'd guess the most likely reason you don't hear about it is women are embarrassed to talk about it with you. It's definitely treated as an open secret between women, now that you know about it you may discover yourself catching some jokes on the topic you previously missed. For example if they make an oblique reference to what happens when they sneeze.
youre pretty much describing panic attacks here. If you want to "get over it", try this: Instead of fearing that it will suck, imagine it would for sure be like your last time again. It would for sure suck. A few years later, youre sitting at a large table full of children. Will you be ok?
This is a reasonably good approach, thanks. It doesn't really help my fear of things going much worse, but it definitely makes me feel less anxious about things going the same.
Clementine
1d ago
My husband has definitely gotten kicked, and elbowed, and headbutted in the balls more than zero times.
Clementine
1d ago
I'm curious how you know this. Did you ask? How many of the men you asked had kids?
Clementine
1d ago
I did start hemorrhaging after my second birth but I don't think it actually got to the point of being truly dangerous (it's a little hard to know, the medical professionals try not to make you panic, but they gave me the necessary medication and got it under control pretty quickly so I think it was just a routine complication) and at the time my PPD was severe enough the slim prospect of being dead felt like a relief, I mostly felt bad for my husband. (Spoiler: I did not die)
But I don't think I'd be ok with a 10% risk of dying to have a fourth kid. That seems pretty damn cruel to the first three.
(Of course large portions of human history people seemed to feel otherwise, unless the only reason husbands were still ejaculating inside their wives after the first kids during periods of history when maternal mortality was higher than 10% was because they had religious reasons so strong it was worth risking their wife's life over. Idk, I find it very very hard to relate to the choices made during time periods with high maternal mortality, it seems pretty crazy to me, but maybe it explains why women who feel the risk is worth it exist because we'd have gone extinct otherwise?)
I have a relative who got post partum psychosis, which I consider approximately 1000x more terrifying than PPD, and she's on her way to a fifth child. Discussing having kids with her is a very strange experience because she's so much less ambivalent than me. Like I was listening to her describe her experience and feeling my ovaries shriveling up inside my body from terror and meanwhile she was talking about how much she wanted another kid. I guess the evolutionary drive to reproduce is just that damn strong in some people? Idk.
It's a good point re age and finding a spouse. Definitely having more kids is a lot easier if you start younger. I know women freezing eggs and women single-parenting-by-choice so obviously options do exist but I guess I probably agree that most women would really prefer to have kids
- Via sperm from a better vetted source than a sperm bank
- With the hope of actual support from a partner + the chance to give their child a normal family
And that of course is entirely dependent on factors not entirely in their control
Clementine
1d ago
In general all discussions around the topic of pregnancy seem to weirdly avoid the topic of both temporary and permanent pain and health problems as a result. It appears to be some kind of taboo to discuss. I'm not sure why.
I definitely remember feeling betrayed during my first pregnancy because cultural portrayal of pregnancy basically stopped and ended at "haha they throw up" (morning sickness was never really treated as a big deal) plus "labor is very painful get an epidural"
(...I didn't go into this above, but another reason I have mostly chosen not to get epidurals is because I know too many cases of epidurals not working, or causing horrific headaches for weeks after, or in one hopefully extreme outlier case I just happened to be close to, causing complete lower body paralysis for several years — so except for the first labor where the pain was SO bad (and I was also advised to get an epidural because they wanted to induce me (the epidural ended up reducing my pain so much my body was able to stop tensing up and actually let labor progress, so I ended up not needing an induction)) I've chosen to avoid them because I'd rather have the more manageable pain I experienced later than the risks.)
I definitely didn't feel like I'd been adequately warned what I was actually risking. I actually went from prolife to prochoice during my first pregnancy, because I became convinced forcing someone to be pregnant against their will was Evil with a capital E. (I do not believe a fetus is a full human, such that keeping them alive justifies torturing a full human being). Like yeah, I was willing to endure it to have a child I wanted from a partner I loved. But making someone do it against their will? I'd never realized how sick that was, because I'd never realized how awful pregnancy was, because, well, no one talked about it except for jokes about morning sickness. I had no clue.
(...which is crazy, because I'm someone who researches things a lot in advance. I read What to expect when expecting, I read those pregnancy month by month things. Was I actively filtering out the information about how bad it could get in a kind of denial/self-protection? I'd only vomited a few times in my life before I got pregnant, I didn't really know what it would be like to vomit every day. Maybe it's just impossible to realize until it happens to you? But that still doesn't explain why "and your teeth will possibly be permanently damaged" is never mentioned at all. It certainly comes up when discussing bulimia! But not pregnancy for some reason. I feel like what I read was mostly about things that indicated something might be wrong with the baby so go to a hospital right away, or something might be about to kill you so go to a hospital right away. Nothing less severe than that except as a sidenote)
(Btw I left out that if I do get pregnant I'd be doing so against the advice of my dentist... Although he dropped his "don't get pregnant" advice so casually I'm still not entirely certain it was serious or not, when I asked him what I could do about the acid damage to my teeth)
On choosing to have more kids:
This is a personal essay, I'm musing out loud, and sharing here only because I get the sense my own perspective is quite orthogonal to most natalism discussions here.
I have three kids. They're all (in my unbiased opinion you can take with as much salt as you please) smart, talented, physically healthy, and reasonably kind/generous/prosocial as appropriate to their age level.
(Side note: I don't feel I can take credit for my stellar parenting being the cause, although I do sometimes wonder if my more hands-off parenting approach is better for them than the more deeply enmeshed styles I see my therapist friend pursuing (...I have a friend who spends one hour per kid every single night "unpacking" their day. I know this because she was complaining about how exhausting not having any evening time to herself was. I don't know I would stay sane doing that. Possibly relatedly, her kids help way less around the house than mine do.))
In any case I see my kids as probably a net benefit to the world and it would probably be a good thing to have more. The youngest is 2 now, so now is around when I have to start thinking about having a fourth.
(I'm in my lower 30s and got married in my lower 20s, which is relevant.)
Most of my reluctance boils down to fear.
The first fear is having a child who is not, ah, as fortunate as the preceding three. Every single child is a Russian roulette where the bullet chamber features some of the worst misery mankind can experience. I used to volunteer with special needs kids so I have a mental graph of how bad the upcoming disability would be for me to unambiguously want to abort if I knew about it in advance, but so many of the most awful things you can be handed in a child are not something you can test for in advance. A bad child can pretty thoroughly destroy the happiness of their family unit and there's so very many different kind of badness out there. I see my friends dealing with real hard shit and they're not even the top percentiles of bad luck, like having a kid who has gotten expelled three times for violence and no school is willing to take him anymore isn't even the worst hand you can get dealt.
So every time I get pregnant I am risking my entire family's happiness and the number of people I'd be harming grows with each child I've already had.
That's fear number one.
Fear number two is more personal. Every single pregnancy has wrecked my body and health in some way, and it's a different way each time, so I can't even predict and prepare for it in advance. The first pregnancy I spent nine months straight vomiting, which was very unpleasant at the time but also did permanent damage to my teeth and oral health I haven't recovered from, the second pregnancy I got PPD and while my mental health is basically back to stable it took years, the third pregnancy wasn't as bad as the previous two, I just got horrific hip pain that made it extremely hard for me to move or sleep but after the pregnancy I didn't have long-lasting issues. I have been, relatively speaking, lucky, as plenty of my friends have had worse outcomes. (I'm grateful I still have urinary continence, something that's not common for women who've had kids.)
When I think about having a fourth kid, I envision committing to nine months of which somewhere between 6-9 of them will be marked by almost constant physical discomfort, and then hoping the birth goes smoothly (I've been very lucky with my births/labors, so it probably would), and then hoping the recovery goes smoothly, and hoping I don't lose my sanity like the one time that happened, and then all of this on top of the constant anxiety for the health of the fetus and baby, and then I sprinkle "will I get a lifelong health problem as a bonus" on top.
Dead last on my list of concerns is the "everything else" that I see people discussing when they discuss pronatalism. I'm gonna need to get a second car or a minivan since this will be the fourth kid, and our apartment is gonna be less comfortable to live in adding in another person into the small space. Dealing with sleep deprivation yet again will be annoying. I'm not concerned about my career, I've got solid protections and this will my fourth time taking 4-6 months of maternity leave (the variation is based on when daycare becomes available, which depends on when the baby is born, but I don't do less than four months because before that the baby sleep schedule is bad enough driving to work is dangerous). Kids are a lot of work but a fourth kids isn't that much work than three, Bryan Caplan has that much right, I felt overwhelmed at the transition from 0 to 1, and the transition from 1 to 2, and the transition from 2 to 3, but each time the transition was a little bit less extreme and overwhelming and I expect that trend to hold.
But the Russian roulette and the guaranteed health costs, that part makes me really wonder why I want a fourth kid instead of just stopping at three and being done with it.
Why do I want a fourth kid?
My current kids seem like a net benefit to the world, a future one could also be (not every bullet in the chamber is a blank or a bad bullet, you always have the possibility of creating a real great human being)
More siblings is good. Three kids felt like the bare minimum but it's so meagre and miserly. I come from a family of six and my husband from a family of seven, and less than five just feels so small.
Since I'm still at the age where I can have more kids, the nagging question of if I should is basically constantly present, and I hate nagging questions and kind of want to have a kid just so the question goes away for 2-3 years before it comes back again.
The social norm around here is definitely larger families. I don't think anyone would judge me for having smaller, people just assume it's because you couldn't, but I'd feel weird and vaguely jealous.
I'm not a very maternal person and don't enjoy kids very much, but babies are cute-ish and toddlers are very cute and I'm definitely not at peace with just bidding that entire stage of my life a permanent goodbye until I become a grandparent.
I don't have a good reason not to except for the fears outlined above, and I really dislike making decisions based on fear.
All of these reasons feel relatively weak against the reasons to not have another kid, but I still basically want to have another kid, if I can just overcome the barrier of shaking dread I feel every time I think about it. Like even as I start breathing faster with elevated heartbeat every time I think about going off birth control I'm still mostly planning on going off it this year anyway. I just have to psyche myself up for it.
I had an ex-boss who said childbirth must be less painful than getting kicked in the balls because no one chooses to get kicked in the balls twice.
This is quite stupid, if you could have a kid by getting kicked in the balls you'd do it more than once.
I broke a bone while pregnant — this happens, the ligaments get weaker during pregnancy so you're at higher risk of breaks — and I still remembered the pain of getting the bone set when I was in labor, so I had a good basis of comparison for how bad back labor hurt towards the peak of labor, which was basically if they set your bone and then set your bone and then set your bone and then set your bone...
(Although my cousin who has had multiple bone breaks says different bones hurt more or less to break so it's not a perfect comparison, it's just that before labor it was my highest grade for pain).
Normal non back labor hurts a lot less, although hours of it is really exhausting and hard. (Epidurals are of course an option. I got one eventually for the back labor, absolutely magical going from horrific pain to nothing, I was even able to go to sleep. My subsequent births just weren't nearly as painful as that first one so I didn't feel the need)
But labor is a maximum two day long experience, it's the months beforehand that are much more grueling... Or the months afterwards, if you're not lucky (I have only gotten very minor stitches, not like my friend who had severe tearing that then got infected, or all my friends who ended up needing C-sections...)
Typing this out I can't believe I'm voluntarily thinking about going through it again. But anyway that's what goes through my head as I think about it. If I could have a baby inside of an incubator with reliable genetic screening to make sure they were healthy it would eliminate most of the concerns completely. No horrible permanent costs to myself, no constant fear about the baby, what a utopian world that would be.
What does any of this have to do with women who don't have kids deciding to have some? Idk, I think the fear of physical pain and permanent health ramifications for the mother, as well as the fear of a negative outcome for the kid, might rank a lot higher than men discussing the issue seem to assume. (I find it odd that it never seems to come up when discussing relevant factors for women choosing not to have kids/having fewer kids when they do).
I used to attend baby circle meetups with my first kid and a lot of the mothers there turned out by funny coincidence to be single mothers by choice (one had a steady boyfriend, not the father of her child since if he wasn't willing to marry her she wasn't willing to bear his kid, which I found, um, interesting) so my impression might be biased but I do think lots and lots of women would have at least one kid if it wasn't so scary and risky and painful, even if the aftermath (the actual child) involves a lot of work and inconvenience. Even the women like me who aren't especially excited about kids, let alone all the women like (many of) my friends who have actively wanted kids forever and love and adore kids. It's just that the process of actually having kids really sucks and is scary so you can push it off a lot and then eventually you've pushed it off too long.
Clementine
1d ago
I enjoyed this enough I decided to bite the bullet and make an account here.
Thank you for sharing (here and in real life). And I hope your continued recovery goes smoothly.
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