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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.
When I met my girlfriend in college, she told me in no uncertain terms that she never wanted to have biological children -- but she might consider adoption. Her reasoning was that she was deathly afraid of pregnancy, and never wanted to go through it.
Of course, I was a 20 year old guy, I didn't know what I wanted, and I certainly wasn't thinking about having children at the time. So I just kind of shrugged.
Oh, how times change.
It was gradual, but I do think she hit 24 or something like that and immediately developed an irresistable urge to bear children. Whenever we go to a store and we happen to walk by the baby clothes, she can't help herself but wander over to them and point out the cutest ones, and then look at me with those puppy dog eyes that look suspiciously like fuck-me eyes. She tells me frequently that I'm going to have to put a baby in her soon. And our theoretical children who haven't even been theoretically conceived yet already have names: first, middle, and last.
(We both independently had the same idea for our son's name long before we met each other, she liked the name so much that in high school she named her dog with it. So my heir is going to have the name of my girlfriend's literal dog. "You were named after the goodest dog I ever knew.")
When I bring up that she once disavowed the idea of ever bearing a child, she says just exactly what everyone here is saying: not only her mother but her mother's mother's mother's mother did it, some of them several times, and if they could do it under social and medical conditions much worse than we have now, she can do it too. But also she just really wants a child, and she wants them to be her own.
I do wonder if what's happening is that Pope Francis had a rare moment of being unfathomly based and some women are redirecting all of their maternal instincts and desires towards animals, leading to the "Dog mom" effect.
No, Susan, your corgi is not your son, and you're doing a disservice to both yourself and your dog if you treat them like a member of a species that they're not. I'm especially satisfied with this claim because the author of the original post describes herself by saying her favorite things are her "fam & pets", because heaven forbid her human companions get more letters to describe them than the animals who don't understand a damn word she's ever said to them.
But also, my interpretation of the past hundred years of human history is that disagreeable women (I'm using this not as a term of abuse but purely descriptively, to describe women low in OCEAN-trait-agreeableness), who for various personality-based reasons are much less likely to find satisfaction and enjoyment from caring for children, have taken the reins of what describes womanhood and shifted it massively in their favor. The Wikipedia article for trait Agreeableness literally has as its illustration a painting of a woman with her daughter entitled "Agreeable Burden," and I find this so unbelievably apropos that I'm afraid I'm on a hidden-camera show.
The author of the original piece has another post where she describes her belief that "masculinity is real, but femininity is invented" -- this is a sure indication to me that this is a disagreeable woman, someone who doesn't statistically "fit" in her sex, which averages higher than men in agreeableness. I believe women like the original poster commit the typical mind fallacy, and believe that because they are a woman with the personality they have, that women who naturally do have a strong inclination towards sacrificing for others and putting the needs of their children first are simply disagreeable women being suppressed by The Patriarchy. It's sort of like the Western conception that people all across the world are simply liberals being repressed.
The above is an actual quotation from that other post, and I edited it in after the fact. Frankly, I'm not convinced this woman isn't an actual psychopath, with that kind of deranged and zero-sum take. And why would I listen to what a psychopath has to say about companionship or self-sacrifice?
Sorry, Kate, but you haven't met my mom, and you probably wouldn't like her if you did. But she's the greatest and most wonderful human being of either sex I've ever known, and I respect her a great deal, because she always respects and considers the needs of others. I frequently tell her that she's the best mother in the world, and I mean that literally. If anyone deserves a "Medal of Honor" for motherhood it's her, and it's precisely because she'd never ask for one that she deserves it. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
Only the fittest will survive the coming population decline, and we can only hope that people (either male or female) so disagreeable and self-oriented that they'd begin their post on childbearing with a Barbie-movie meme that insinuates parents waiting for their children to get out of school are chumps, won't make it. Blessed are the agreeable, for they shall inherit the earth.
I didn't intend this to be a personal attack, but I believe it's more fruitful to describe these things in terms of personality differences than to make it about the cost-benefit analysis of childbearing, and the more I dug into this author the more intensely I realized how utterly spot-on all of my asssumptions about her personality were. If your children are the result of a cost-benefit analysis to you, then you shouldn't have them, and I wish people like Kate well in their free choice -- I mean that.
I experienced something similar. I mean, it's got to be mostly just changing circumstances and life experience, but more than once I've wondered if there's something biological going on. Some process that adds a second baby-making instinct just in case the first one from puberty wasn't enough.
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