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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.
This resonates with the way people I know actually seem to talk and think in a way the "status" conversation doesn't.
I have some friends who can't have a biological child because of health issues the wife is facing. They're otherwise parentally inclined, and have been fostering unrelated children the past several years, and this is a really sad thing for them. But not as sad as dying in childbirth or becoming permanently disabled, so they probably wouldn't prefer the world where the options were to join a convent or roll the dice.
Another friend from a while back didn't want children because she had a ton of mental and physical health problems in just about every member of her family, and that seemed reasonable to me. As far as I know she hasn't married, and might not. That's also sad, but then so is raising a child only for them to turn into a crazy homeless person or take up everyone else's entire life managing their psychosis.
It doesn't really help to inflate the misery of childbearing, though. Personally, I didn't mind being pregnant, and the worst part of babies was/is feeding them. Inconveniently, it's hard to know how things will go until trying, and bad results can really mess up a person's life.
Agree with others that having to entertain a 4 year old all the time is some combination of poor choices on the adults' part and an unfortunate consequence of being the only person there with a child around that age. Possibly with a side of talking a lot about incomprehensible far away things as a social default, vs cooking or hiking or something that makes sense to children. Not that I don't have sympathy for having to deal with constant interruptions, but it's not helpful to think of guiding children through learning social skills as "entertaining" them. I am constantly annoyed that I have a large, interesting yard, and my 5 year ld mostly just wants to talk to me about her virtual cupcakes or something. That is, unfortunately, largely my own fault though.
That's very sad. Like the discussion on the Wellness Wednesday thread about dementia, some experiences are tragic, in a society that tries to ignore that kind of small everyday tragedy.
This part is probably unnecessary, though. I knew some teenage girls once, with a sister who had profound health challenges, which kept her homebound and in need of constant support. Because finding a home health aid was too difficult, the sisters had to learn to be nursing aids at a young age, and often missed school to care for her. Their father hated it, and moved to another state. Last I heard one of the girls had moved to her father's house. It was both very sad, and looked from the outside like some poor choices had been made, perhaps pressed upon people. We seem to be in a healthcare uncanny valley for some conditions, where people are kept alive at the expense of everyone around them when in previous generations they would have gotten a fever and died young, and maybe at some point in the future they could be cured. That's not an unmitigated good.
It's almost never a good idea for a family to let everything revolve around even a very miserable, sickly, disabled child. It's too bad she couldn't have more non autistic children, more going on in the household, maybe eventually they'll figure out how to not let their whole lives be ruled by caring for that child.
I don't know if the "fertility crisis" is a crisis or not. It's unsurprising that in a civilization with very little mandatory difficult and dangerous work, women would be opting out of having children as well. But for most, it's probably not for the best long term.
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