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Women have far fewer children than they want and have lower life satisfaction though. Are they really getting what they want? Are they really in control?
I'm not convinced that you have to limit access to contraception to get birthrates to replacement rates but the current situation doesn't even seem preferable to the situation where access was more limited.
Immediate happiness / life satisfaction is not the only scale on which outcomes should necessarily be measured. As I have said in the past, a 10 year old boy who believes in Santa Claus and has everything provided for him probably has more life satisfaction than the average 30 year old man who has to work for a living, but that does not necessarily mean that it is a bad thing for the 10 year old boy to become the 30 year old man. As women acquire more freedoms and responsibilities, naturally they will also in some ways become less happy. That is not a good argument for why the freedoms and responsibilities are a bad thing. There are so many men who understand this easily when it comes to other men, and even enjoy valorizing the idea of a sterotypically manly man sacrificing his happiness for some higher purpose, but then when they talk about women they make the argument that women should focus entirely on immediate happiness / life satisfaction delivered by things like pregnancy, without reaching for something that might be a maximum higher than the merely local maximum.
But that is exactly what is happening. People are going for immediate happiness over long-term satisfaction.
They're reaching for the local maximum by not having children.
While it might be true that for a majority of women, having children is actually the global maximum of satisfaction, there are also clearly many women for whom that is not true. It makes sense to support women's right to control their own reproduction so that women can make the choice on their own.
It also makes sense to pay attention to women material and social conditions so that they can do things that both make them satisfied and that is critical to the continued survival of society.
Just throwing our hands up in the air and saying that this is women's choice when it both seems contrary to their wishes and hurts society seems strange to me. Its not like we're asking people to give up all other pursuits and dedicate their entire life to just raising children, we're asking for 2-3 children per couple.
I agree, but supporting women's having better material and social conditions is not incompatible with granting them more freedom to control their own reproduction. One can do both.
On that we agree then. What I object to is the framing of this being the result of what women "want", I don't believe it is.
That people are less satisfied than even under the previous bad system should be a massive wake up call.
That's only if you believe either reporting of life satisfaction in 2024 or 1954 (or whenever you think women would be happier if they just accepted it was their lot in life) is actually good data.
Instead I should just invent data that conforms to my preferred reality?
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