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Adding to the interminable hand-wringing conversation in these parts around the “fertility crisis” and what to do about it, I’ll submit an interesting Substack piece I stumbled upon today. The author, a woman, makes a reasonably well-articulated case about why women don’t want to have babies, and it amounts to “pregnancy and childbirth are just an absolutely brutal experience for most women, and it’s totally natural and inevitable that they should wish to avoid going through it.” That no amount of cajoling, cultural/media propaganda, government-provided financial incentives, etc. will prevent an intelligent and perceptive woman from noticing this basic fact about biology and doing whatever is in her power to limit her risk of being forced to do something that she’s going to hate.
Now, certainly this author is far from the first woman to make this case, nor even its most effective advocate. However, her piece resonated with me simply because it closely mirrors statements that have been made to me by multiple women in my life whom I respect and value. One of them is my younger sister, who has said explicitly and in no uncertain terms that she will not be having children. She has even discussed with my (aghast and befuddled) mother the possibility of undergoing a tubal ligation (“getting her tubes tied”) in her early thirties to prevent any further concern about the possibility of becoming pregnant. My sister is in a happy cohabiting relationship with an intelligent, well-paid, all-around great guy; her concerns have nothing to do with the fear of being an abandoned single mother, or of being poor and struggling, or anything like that. She just recognizes that having a child would represent a considerable and arguably permanent deduction in her quality of life. It would substantially decrease her freedom to travel, to make decisions without intensive planning around childcare and child-rearing costs, etc.
Our brother has three daughters, ages four, two, and infant. I love them to pieces and am extremely grateful to have them in my life. I envy my brother, and my desire to have children of my own gnaws at me daily. However, I have to acknowledge that a great many things about my brother’s life became infinitely more constrained, more stressful, more irritating, when he had children. His ability to hang out with us, to do any activity or attend any venue that is not friendly to small children, is massively constrained by access to childcare. He is very fortunate to still live in the same city as both our own father and his wife’s mother, which provides access to free childcare; I cannot imagine how much more constrained his life would be if he and his wife had to pay for childcare every single time he had to leave the children unattended. Nevertheless, we see him more rarely, and get less quality time with him, than we would if he didn’t have children. His oldest daughter is at an age where she constantly demands and monopolizes attention, such that any gathering which includes her inevitably requires at least one person to be fully attentive to entertaining and indulging her, lest she become a terror. I am so happy for my brother that he gets to experience fatherhood (and again, I fervently hope to experience it myself in the future) but I admit that it has negatively impacted my relationship with him in a number of important ways. And my sister sees that - and sees how even more constrained our sister-in-law’s life has become - and has, understandably, said, “No thanks, I’ll pass.”
At least his children are healthy and his wife seemingly content and well-adjusted, though. My very good friends - well, formerly my very good friends - had a far worse experience. I’ve known these two since high school; we were inseparable friends for over a decade, both before and after the two of them got married. My buddy always talked about wanting a large family; his mother was one of nine siblings, and he dreamed of having a similarly-sized brood. However, his wife is small-framed, physically fragile, and somewhat sickly. It was always clear to me that she was not built for having lots of children. And, in fact, when they had their first child, it totally wrecked her, both physically and mentally. She was briefly hospitalized for postpartum depression. Probably a large part of that depression was due to the fact that her baby clearly had something wrong with it even from an early age. (My brother and I would, sheepishly and in secret, occasionally sing a certain Stephen Lynch song and he would smugly crow about how much better-looking his own newborn daughter was than theirs.) Well, it turns out the kid has pretty severe autism. She’s now four years old and can barely speak. She’ll likely never know more than a handful of words. She’ll need lifelong intensive care and support, which will consume the rest of their lives. The experience of childbearing was so taxing and so confoundingly disappointing for them - and for her especially - that she has recently undergone a hysterectomy. They moved to a different state years ago, just before having that child, and my relationship with them has cratered, partially because the stress of the experience and the extreme impact on their lives made them so stressed-out and insular. It also rendered them somewhat unrelatable to me; what could I possibly talk about with them nowadays? Their whole lives are about caring for this broken child, with whom I can’t even have a rudimentary conversation. It was so damaging for them, and I guarantee if she could go back in time and undo the whole thing she would. Hell, I hope she would. Surely many women are profoundly and justifiably terrified by the possibility that something like this could happen to them.
I think we really need to grapple with the fact that the revealed preference of nearly every intelligent and high-quality woman is for having few if any children. And rather than bending over backwards and tying itself into knots to figure out how to psyop them out of this perfectly understandable risk-benefit calculation, perhaps a healthy 21st-century society just needs to put all of its eggs into the basket of figuring out how to have a successful low-TFR civilization. Whether that’s robots, or AI, or artificial wombs, I don’t know, but honestly I just don’t see a viable path forward for forcing a critical mass of women to do something that’s manifestly going to wreck the lives of so many of them. And once we admit to ourselves that white and East Asian women are probably never again going to organically desire large families, we can then focus on reducing fertility in the third world, since the TRF differential between advanced and non-advanced countries is the real problem that we as a global species need to deal with.
One issue that’s lurking in the background of your post is that most parents in the West massively overindex on the marginal impact of parenting, largely due to major misconceptions about the relative contributions of genes versus environment. The best act you can ever do for your kids is picking a high quality spouse to have them with. As for parenting time… did you know that contrary to the public handwringing about kids growing up zombified by TV and YouTube, parents in the West today spend roughly twice as much time with their kids as parents did 50 years ago?
While you can definitely fuck your kids up, there’s minimal difference on children’s outcomes between good and great parenting (though there’s a caveat here I’ll come to in a second). This is the whole thrust of Bryan Caplan’s book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids and I agree with his big picture.
I honestly think most kids today are horribly overparented, mostly to the detriment of their parents’ free time, but also a little to the kids’ detriment insofar as they don’t acquire autonomy and self-confidence as easily. I have lots of friends whose lives have been transformed by having kids in ways that don’t seem very fun. They live by a rigid schedule of violin practice, swimming lessons, reading hour, and so on, and they don’t have any spontaneity. My wife and I by contrast are lazy as fuck parents. Our kids learned early on that “mum and dad have their own lives and priorities” and they should too. Obviously we cook for them and clean for them and have fun family days out, as well as lots of nice spontaneous family time, but my average day isn’t drastically different from how it used to be before the kids arrived. Other parents are often amazed at how much free time we seem to have and honestly a big part of it is because when my wife and I are watching a movie we just tell the kids to buzz off and go for a bike ride or read a book.
To go back to my point about overindexing on impacts of parenting, I think the real problem is that people are over indexing on the wrong thing, long-term childhood outcomes, with empirically dubious motivation. Instead life is much better if you prioritise “how can my spouse and I and the kids have a fun chill time.” Of course that assumes you’re a competent adult whose idea of a fun time isn’t shooting up fentanyl or getting blackout drunk every night but with that proviso I think it’s a good parenting mantra. And I also think if people could learn to just relax about parenting rather than treating it like another demanding job then that would help at least slightly boost TFR.
Furthermore, if you structure things right, having your kids go to various activities isn't much of a bother and can often even be a break for you as a parent. Key here is that the activities need to actually fit kids, are group activities, and are close to home/school.
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