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Notes -
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.
One more comment - not sure if you can read the Atlantic, but always thought this story by Ezra Klein's wife (Annie Lowrey) to be a fascinating one (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/pregnancy-birth-complication-abortion-life-of-mother/671006/).
It's basically about her harrowing experience with pregnancy through truly truly terrible itching (among other things). She relates this horror story she went through...then get about halfway through the story and relates how she still decided (and followed through on) having another kid.
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?
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For my background - I am the mother of four kids, the oldest of which is a handful and the third of which has some kind of birth defect that currently requires a fake eye and may require a kidney transplant when he's a teen.
When I say the oldest is a handful, I mean that she is seven years old and has been suspended from school twice for running away from school and across a busy street without looking. Let's call her A. I have trouble taking her places - either I take her by herself somewhere or I leave her behind and take the 6, 3, and 2 year old. It is much easier to take the 6, 3, and 2 year old places together than it is to take A by herself. She is a wonderful child 90% of the time, but 10% of the time she gets stuck on a Bad Idea. Literally stuck, she repeats a phrase over and over again, does not listen to anything, only snaps out of it after 20 or so minutes.
A babysitter quit because one of her "stuck ideas" was to get revenge on the sitter for some slight (didn't get the right color dinner plate, if I remember correctly.) Another stuck idea was to get to the check out line first in a busy Home Depot garden center - I had a toddler in a stroller, a 3 year old walking as fast as he could, and couldn't keep up with the lithe unencumbered A. I lost sight of her and wandered around Home Depot until the intercom said she was at the front - she tried to run into the parking lot by herself but an employee stopped her.
She officially has ADHD and I am supposed to take A to a therapist to treat her for this. They don't think she has ODD because she always feels remorse after. I think she might have high-functioning autism because she also has a very black/white way of looking at things. If someone doesn't predict the future she calls it a lie. Ex. "Can we go outside this afternoon?" "Yes, if the weather stays nice." then if it rains and we have to stay inside, "You lied!"
However, when I filled out the PIC-2 questionnaire with full candor and honesty, the Neuropsych wrote in her parent-facing notes: "[OracleOutlook] responded to the measure in such a way that she reported a slightly higher number of symptoms than is typical for A’s age. This is likely due to increased stressors in their life and not true feigning of symptoms; however, results were interpreted with caution." I suspect we are years away from getting a full diagnosis for whatever is going on with A.
I don't write all this to complain or ask for advice. I am trying to get across the experience of having a "bad kid." I don't take the other kids to as many places as I would like. I worry that they are picking up bad adaptations to having a turbulent, violent personality living with them. The next oldest has a fawn response. The younger two like to hit back. It's not great.
I also have a lot of medical costs from the third child with the eye prosthetic. When he was an infant he needed a new conformer every month or so, which is pretty pricey.
This isn't even getting into pregnancy, which is a crap shoot as you noted.
Ultimately life is a risk. The question is, is it worth it? I say yes. Humans throughout history said "yes" through worse difficulties and dangers.
There are many good reasons to be done having kids. Mine is that I want to increase the odds that my husband is alive and well up to the point the youngest turns 18.
One consideration is that having one difficult kid is hard, but I actually think it gets easier when you have more kids who are better behaved. I'm glad I didn't stop at A. If I had, I would assume there was something wrong with my parenting that caused her emotional disturbances. I also get to have "normal kid experiences" with the other kids.
If your complicated kid is the youngest, it's probably easier to manage. I've seen families where they keep going until they have 5-7 kids, hit a kid who needs more attention, and then stop. They seem pretty happy, even when they need to have specialized schooling, medical procedures, etc. It seems easier for an experienced parent to manage, and they also have older kids in middle school/high school who can help out more with chores and babysitting.
While having a really needy or psychotic child can be really bad, the odds of it happening without a clear family history are around the same as getting into a really bad car accident. Going into each pregnancy I worried about it around as much as I worry about getting paralyzed on a road trip, which is to say not overly much - certainly not enough to make me reconsider.
I hope this helps give you more to consider. I'm not trying to persuade you to have another kid, just give a different perspective on the "getting unlucky" phenomenon. I love A. I wish she didn't get "stuck" most days, but I'm glad she's here. I'll do whatever it takes to raise her right.
Also, life is sadder without a 1 year old in the house. It just is. I have a long ways to go before I get a grandkid to play with but I look forward to it already.
What was the punishment for this?
What was the punishment for this?
Usually punishment is confinement to her room for X amount of time, the worst was for two days in a row when she was suspended from school.
We tried spanking for a span when she was four, but it didn't have any effect. Confining her to her room doesn't really have an effect either, except giving her space to calm down.
My mom just recommends taking the next treat away, but the behavior is so continuous, disruptive, and unsafe that we're at the point where we don't do treats. We don't get to go to parties, play dates or movies. We take away the next trip to Costco.
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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.
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Thank you for the thought-provoking post, especially one from a perspective we don't get as much around here.
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My wife and I are expecting our third within a matter of weeks. For us part of it was just the joy of larger families and the new sibling relationships you get with each one. I sorta think of it like the formula for an undirected complete graph - with 2 people you have one relationship. With 3, you now have 3 (parents with each other, each parent with child). You have 3 kids right now, so you have 10 edges, adding one more kid will increase that by 50% to 15!
Maybe this is a weird way to think about it, but I feel like families I knew that had 4 kids always had the most fun family dynamics. You don't have the natural rivalries of two, the self-centeredness of one, or the ganging up that can occur with 3.
I don't think your other concerns are trivial though.
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.
Yeah I think it's hard to look at society writ large right now in the US (or Korea...) and think that increased parental attention is doing a lot of good for the median family (or even the 85th or 95th percentile family). I'm sure there's some Bryan Caplan's out there who are giving their kids a lot of good experiences but in general I think self sufficiency and learning how to entertain yourself without parental impact is generally quite good. I think you have good reasons to be wary, but I also think worrying about impact on your kids from a 4th is not it (kids like having little siblings too!)
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I was worried about that with my third as well, since I was around some of the kids who had lost the genetic lottery, and it really sucks. I think the odds of having an unbearably bad condition that isn't detected in early scans, and isn't caused by bad behavior on the mother's part is pretty low, though. (I did not personally get the tests done other than ultrasounds). I'm going on a road trip this week on a busy freeway, which is also not risk free, there are plenty of somewhat small risks that are worth taking.
I don't think I'll have a fourth child, especially since I'm closer to 40. My pregnancies were pretty easy, I was eight months pregnant, starting long road trips in the middle of the night and carrying around my toddler in the summer heat. The births were basically alright. It's both age and finances that would prevent me from having another. We need to be able to both work sooner rather than later, and get our finances in order, our current situation isn't long term sustainable even without an additional car payment for an expanded vehicle.
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There's a lot of serious consideration here, and serious replies; so I'll add something a little more flippant. For me and my wife, our 4th was the easiest marginal change in every way (except the bedroom splitting). YMMV of course.
Oh man the bedroom splitting. So much of our household bedroom furniture arrangement depends on the sex of this not even conceived yet child.
I (male) shared a bedroom with my sister (female) for a pretty long chunk of time. It's really not such a big deal.
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.
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I've got 4 kids (2f, 3m, 4m, 7m) and 2 kids bedrooms. Every week, there's a different combination of kids in the 2 bedrooms based on who's on the ins and outs with each other (and who wants to sleep/read vs play). This all mostly takes care of itself though at least with the kids being young.
The real difficulty is meal time. Each additional kid limits what can reasonably cooked for dinner so that everyone will eat. We've started doing 2 main courses of kids food (e.g. nuggets + pasta or pizza + fish sticks) where we know that each kid will like at least one of the 2 choices. Otherwise, 4 hasn't been any more work than 3.
FWIW my family started falling into the two meal habit for a bit. I still do it as a treat for expensive food - I'm not going to serve my kids prime ribeye till their palate can appreciate it.
But I nipped that shit in the bud fast. I had to grab the reins of cooking for a while to do it which was exhausting after a full work day etc. etc. but the multiplicative effort from it got to be ludicrous.
I've been lucky my kids are responsive to the "no candy after dinner if you don't eat what we brung ya", so while they're picky I just don't care. I'm making stuff I know they like if they'll just try it.
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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.
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4 is, IME, where transportation becomes a real problem. Just the sheer logistics of it! And ofc needing a vehicle big enough for everyone, including mammoth car seats.
Probably the age spread makes a significant difference. Having one or two kids old enough to sit in normal seats (or up front) helps. Still situations where a kid is crammed in-between two giant seats.
See, it’s three where you get the minivan, and 4 is no issue.
It might help that my kids are relatively close in age, but logistics ain’t an issue for us.
I take my son to his piano lesson and watch my toddler, or I take my son to his piano lesson and watch my toddler and a baby, is not significantly differently
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I have my perspective on this, but nobody is worried about my ingroup’s fertility rate except my ingroup. So what I’ll say is this- you clearly are going to keep working yourself up with worry until you just go ahead and have another baby.
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Your ex-boss’s comment, which if even in jest, suggests an amusing ignorance of the concept of tradeoffs.
I don’t recall the number for kicks specifically, but I have been struck in the balls multiple times as a teenager and young adult playing sports (kicks, knees, elbows, the… ball… itself, etc.) but chose to continue playing sports each time only for it to happen again some time later. I didn’t even get a kid out of each ball-smashing.
I suppose if the POSIWID, then the purpose of sports is to get smashed in the balls.
Or your purpose in life is to get recreationally smashed in the balls.
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Men go to war knowing that many will die, but fewer would if the purpose was to die for sure. I assume it's likewise with sports - there are none I know of where you must stand there and take the nut shot with no protection or dodging allowed.
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Are you sure youre not exaggerating the risks? I dont know about most of them, but one that sticks out is:
Most women have kids, and even reading the plural strictly many do. If urinary incontinence were the default outcome, at least a third or so of middle-aged women would have incontinence, and I feel like I would know that. If women have more children in your circles, then the risk will be higher, but Id still expect the genpop prevalence to be at least half of those circles, which again doesnt seem to be there. I havent heard about it being the standard in past times with higher fertility either.
The point about fear as an obstacle is relevant, but fear often isnt related to real danger, in either direction; my mother is quite afraid of heights and has a motorcycle. I mean:
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?
Upon checking you're right that I'm exaggerating the risks.
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.
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.
I think I qualify in the "urinary incontinence" bracket, but it's just when I have a very, very bad cold at a specific time of my cycle, and I'm able to wear a regular pad to deal with it. About as inconvenient as a period. This seems to be the most common version.
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My wife has this, and I think it is a major (though certainly not the only) contributor to why she wanted to be one and done (my preference was for more).
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.
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I agree it's a poor argument, but I can assure you that this is not true. I know exactly zero men who would choose to get kicked in the balls even once to have a child, let alone more than once.
If that's all it took to order the stork's delivery, I'd take a few hits for the team.
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Gonna join in on the chorus of "I would" hah.
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Uhh, I would. Getting kicked in the balls is painful but it's not that bad. If that's what it took to have kids, I'd certainly at least have my current 3.
I got kicked and kneed in the balls playing rugby and football, why wouldn't I do it for something much more important?
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I'm curious how you know this. Did you ask? How many of the men you asked had kids?
I don't know anyone who's willing to get hit in the balls for any reason. Granted I haven't specifically asked, but it's a pretty safe bet. I'm honestly quite shocked at all the people here who said they would, it is something I never could have predicted.
Have you ever seen jackass? I know men who would endure multiple kicks in the balls for bragging rights and a beer.
I have not. And i definitely don't know anyone who would do that.
You never experienced any, partly self-inflicted, pain at all? As juveniles me and my friends used to put on a headband so we couldn't see, and just punch each other in the dark. Just a way to inflict and endure pain, fight for fun, without malice. You never did anything like that?
No, of course not. That sounds super weird to me, why would one knowingly subject oneself to pain? I heard legends of people doing stuff like playing bloody knuckles or sack tap, but never have known anyone personally who did that.
IDK if it's age, or peer group, or what, but inflicting pain on each other for teh lulz was a definite part of my childhood and adolescent experience. Bloody knuckles, hot hands, "Indian" burns, and the like were all a part of my experience as a child. And by the time I was a Senior in HS, I had friends that would literally sneak up behind another unsuspecting friend, reach between the legs of the target, grab the target's scrotum and yank it backwards while pushing the target forward and down with their other hand, and then laugh like hell at the results. No one was safe! For bonus points, one of these friends managed to pull of a newly-invented variant of this on me at work just as the CEO walked in, which was funny to me both then and now.
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no you sound weird, haha. Is your background hyper-liberal urbanite or something? Mine is middle class liberal, small town in western europe.
There's this quip that modern college kids' main problem is that they have never been hit in the face. Although I grant that it does sound pretty stupid to punch each other for seemingly no good reason.
Testing your limits, overcoming obstacles, preparing yourself for future fights and challenges, I guess. And in the moment there's the thrill in knowing the stakes are higher than usual. You can play a game for a pack of chewing gum, but it feels more important to play for the right to not get punched.
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We used to play a variant of conkers, where when your conker got broken you had to let your opponent take a swing at your knuckles, that used to hurt like hell.
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I keep getting accidentally kicked in the balls by my child. It hurts, alright, but it's nowhere near the most painful thing I endure for the kid's sake.
Frankly, I keep getting kicked, smacked and elbowed in absolutely all my bodily parts. I think that's normal. Right? It's normal for every day to be an MMA cage fight against a little monkey.
Certainly with my boys it was. Though they were more into wrestling and elbows off the top rope AKA bunk bed. Ohhhh yeaaah! I certainly got a few black eyes and knees/kicks, to the groin over the years, sometimes while trying to catch them while they leapt off something high, without considering the consequences.
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I genuinely have no idea how that can be the case. Getting hit in the balls is the most painful thing I've ever experienced, bar none. Even if you find it to be worth it, what the heck is more painful?
I've spent more time on the floor praying for mercy from heartburn and constipation. Toe-stubbing is worse than ball busting, IMO, although it's easier to stay upright afterward.
Getting hit in the balls is like 30s of ache. Gut stuff is Hell.
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Carrying the kid on my shoulders over several kilometers while both my knees have already given out, for one.
Being thoroughly struck by hayfever, my head one mess of snot and aches, dead tired from the antihistamines, and still spending the whole day outdoors because I can't stand to see said little monkey cooped up indoors.
Hearing "I'm bored" from the backseat for the millionth time.
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You might want to consider giving kidney stones a try sometime. I had a stone twice, and in both cases the pain was so bad that I vomited. The first time, it was over in an hour but the second time, it got stuck on the way to the bladder and required surgical interventions. It is the kind of pain where you start to think what floor the waiting room of the hospital is on, and if it would be enough.
When I had my four wisdom teeth removed and the anesthesia wore of I had pain where Ibuprofen did not cut it, but Metamizole did. With the stone, I went back to the hospital in an ambulance because Metamizole did not cut it, and was on an opiate drip within an hour.
I don't know if second for second, it is worse than getting kicked in the balls though. What is really dragging you down is that it does not stop. Getting kicked in the balls every ten seconds for hours might be as bad or worse, but good luck convincing your IRB and finding volunteers for that one.
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I'm kinda curious whether this reflects a difference in internal experience, or a difference in what you've experienced. A number of things I'd rate worse than a hard unprotected nutshot are fairly uncommon, but I would be surprised if something like a major bone breaking were outside of your imagination.
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Speaking for myself: Getting shredded from thighs to feet by trying to jump a barbed wire fence (and failing). Being glassed in a bar fight. Intestinal cramps from ulcerative colitis which literally made me vomit and pass out from literal pain for the only time in my life. Getting a healthy tooth removed by an old school dentist back in the day, while just on laughing gas. Migraines when I was younger, used to take me out completely for a few hours.
A kick in the balls hurts, but it's mostly over in a few minutes, unless you are very unlucky and rupture something I suppose.
I would say I've certainly had things which hurt longer than being hit in the balls. I've been trampled by a cow, I've had an infected tooth, and so on. But nothing that hurt more. Not even the time the oral surgeon cut into my tooth when it wasn't fully numb. Ball pain is just on another level in my experience.
Different balls, different pain I guess. I mean don't get me wrong, it hurts, but it's not on some other level of pain than other types for me at least.
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Were you also a little MMA monkey, long ago?
Turns out that it's normal for your kids to be like little mixtures of how you and your spouse were as kids, rather than for them to be like kids in general.
That sounds banally obvious when I put it into words, but before I had kids I'd never really put it into words, so I never thought of myself as a person who would end up really liking kids. Turns out that, although I still don't especially like kids in general, I really like my wife and I really like myself so I really like my kids in particular. As a slightly-less-obvious bonus, it turns out that kids make friends more readily with other kids who they have things in common with, so I like all my kids' friends and I really like most of them.
My son would never have kicked me in the balls, but he will gleefully launch a massive suicidal invasion against my in-first-place-until-then Civilization V nation, thereby distracting me long enough to let my wife win our family game while he gloats, which I guess is the nerd version of a balls-kicking (I don't think I've ever won one of our family Civ V games...). But because it's the nerd version I feel proud rather than upset. Even when he shows me up at sports, it's popular-among-nerds sports like rock climbing and "ninja" obstacle courses that he gravitates to.
I'm also a counterexample here. Personally I thought that the months of sleep deprivation during newborn care were worse than a more-acute-but-more-brief testicular injury (which I haven't suffered since I was a teen, thankfully), but each of the kids were still a net positive before they turned 1. Maybe I've just never taken a hard enough hit to the balls.
You have family Civ V games?!?!? Now that is goals... Well done
I'm living the dream!
We don't have them often enough, since my youngest isn't as big a fan as the rest of us, but variety is good too.
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Ancient dwarven motto:
If your head is level with their navel, their groin is level with your teeth.
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My husband has definitely gotten kicked, and elbowed, and headbutted in the balls more than zero times.
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As someone struggling with infertility, if there was some magical way to turn ball kicking into having kids I'd gladly take it despite the pain (in reality ball kicking tends to have the opposite effect).
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My wife and I agreed to stop after 3 kids, and she got a tubal ligation during the birth of our third.
With hindsight, I think this was the right decision - her births went from "C-section" to "with minor complications" to "with emergency post-op surgery", and one of my worst memories is of scouring medical journals on my laptop to try to figure out her survival odds while she was in that last surgery (around 99%, which sounds high now but sure felt terrifyingly low then).
With more hindsight, she now disagrees with me. She utterly hated being pregnant, and she doesn't have a death wish, but even in the hypothetical case of "what if the odds kept getting worse and you'd have been down to 90% next time" she thinks that would have been worth it for a fourth.
Her sister once had a kid who lost your game of Russian Roulette, with a severe mutation expressing both physically (he had stubs instead of lower arms or hands, legs he couldn't walk on, and cardiopulmonary problems that the doctors thought would kill him by age 3 or 4, and he eventually died of the flu at age 11) and mentally (at age 11 years he was mentally closer to 11 months). She still thought having him was worth the ordeal of caring for him.
I'm not sure what a good upper limit is, though. That sister has been raising (or completed raising; there's a wide age range) 4 other kids happily - but that might be partly due to good fortune in most of their lives? My father was the oldest of 6 young kids when his father died, and though his mother was a saint there's a limit to what a single parent on a limited survivor's pension can do to raise such a large family well.
I think that's the only reason I'm still glad we stopped at 3. As a terminal value I'd consider a 4th kid like our first 3 to be worth much more than a 10% chance of me dying, so I can't tell my wife not to feel likewise, but there's also the instrumental value of our lives to consider. If she had died then even our first 3 wouldn't be "like our first 3", they'd be in a sorrier state if they'd had only me (with a couple of her nearby relatives to help) raising them.
Nucleus Genomics just launched their "Nucleus Embryo" product yesterday, if you want to do IVF to get improved odds on the kid's genes. I'm not sure what their process is or how reliable it is, though.
Mean desired total fertility rate among young women in the USA is still over replacement; it's only the actual fertility rate that's now under 1.7 and still falling. But the biggest issues that have women delaying kids until it's too late to reach their desires aren't anything about the risks of pregnancy or difficulties of child rearing, it's the rapidly increasing difficulty of finding a spouse (especially difficulty finding a spouse while still young), combined with worry for their economic future.
That sounds pretty close to Gattaca unless I am missing something.
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Vaguely relevant (if mostly not actionable): LW on superbabies.
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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
And that of course is entirely dependent on factors not entirely in their control
Maternal mortality with no medical care isn't anywhere near 10% per birth- it's 1-2% per birth in the least developed parts of subsaharan Africa and that seems to line up with historic data from Europe(granted, needs to be taken with a grain of salt).
Yes? I feel like you're reading my comment out of context.
We were discussing
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)
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I empathize with all this as someone in a somewhat similar position. I would say - don’t have anymore kids. If you’re ruminating this much, and it causes this much angst, you shouldn’t consider it. as someone with 3 kids you’re already in the top 10 percent of fecundity of people in your generation. You don’t owe anyone or the world anything more.
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Interesting perspective.
Everybody attaches their hobby horse to this problem: “it’s modernity, it’s lack of religion, urbanization, female education, not-enough state support, the wrong kind of state support, the housing crisis, devalued motherhood, it’s feminism, it’s not enough feminism...”. Men accuse omen and women accuse men, rightists accuse leftists and vice versa and so on and so forth.
You: “Women just dislike the pain and physical damage”. Everyone: “D’oh!”.
In my defense, I thought the problem was pretty much relegated to the past outside of some minor exceptions, but yeah if I look around irl the physical and psychological issues associated with pregnancy are still very common.
I guess we increase the painkillers/meds and supercharge the research into artificial wombs. Drip in, and baby out, asap.
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)
I also felt/feel totally blindsided by pregnancy and more specifically, postpartum, after having my first 5 months ago. I couldn’t walk for 3 weeks postpartum due to the pain and dizziness and I still can’t have sex without extreme pain. I just saw the GP due to the bleeding and pain after sex and was basically told “that sucks”. Seeing the pelvic floor PT is helping but, anyway, what I actually wanted to say is that I haven’t shied away from talking about my experience. We’re the first in my husband’s circle to have children and I don’t want any of the others to feel as blindsided as I did.
We were having a family meal a couple of months ago during which my husband was wearing the baby. One of the middle-aged women made a comment about how she wore her baby all the time and it was so helpful/nice and my husband replied that it was a shame I couldn’t do it. After which I admitted that the one time I tried I basically peed myself which was met with silence…so yeah, it does make people uncomfortable but I do think we should talk about it more.
Thank you for sharing (here and in real life). And I hope your continued recovery goes smoothly.
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I will second your observation that permanent health damage to the mother as a side effect of pregnancy is not much talked about in my circles. I mean, I occasionally read the Guardian (strictly for the Monday math puzzles), and while they certainly have a bee in their bonnet about women's health specifically, I don't remember encountering any articles on the body horror aspect of pregnancy.
If a medication had these side effects, it would either be banned or come with a big scary warning label, but for some reason, nobody has proposed legislating requiring the penises of fertile men to be tattooed "THIS ORGAN IS KNOWN TO THE SURGEON GENERAL OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE HEALTH PROBLEMS IN WOMEN INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, ....".
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?)
I think it’s because the only ones who know, have nothing to gain and a lot to lose by publicizing that information. First they don’t want to admit to themselves that they may have made a costly mistake, when it’s too late anyway. And even if they somehow avoid the psychological sunk cost trap, they realize the husband and children would only be sad to hear it. So the next time the subject comes up, they just mumble something about not wanting to have to buy a bigger car.
Generally, I think there’s way less people who say they regret having children, than there really should be. You’re already at disneyworld, you drove 8 hours for this, paid 400 dollars, might as well pretend everything is great.
Nah I don't buy that as adequate explanation.
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.
Ultimately, even pro-choice women mostly want humanity to continue another generation. So we have a volunteer military, and volunteer motherhood. If people stop volunteering, then that society deserves their slide into irrelevance and possible subjugation that will follow.
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If women don’t talk about it, and they usually don’t (you being an exception), then I don’t think you can pin the blame on men. Plenty of doctors are women, and besides, you can’t expect much from doctors. They have fixed categories they put people in, so they don’t have to think. Tell them a pregnant woman vomits often, nobody panics because it’s all part of the plan. But say that some undefined adult vomits often, well then everyone loses their minds.
As to why pro-choice feminists aren’t publicizing it, my guesses are:
they prefer to highlight damage they can attribute to men, rather than nature.
they don’t want to be limited to physical damage, they want the right to abort for any reason, including mere convenience.
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.
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There does seem to be a huge range in health outcomes, so that might be why it sort of gets tabooed. We have a neighbor in her early thirties that just gave birth to her 5th kid. She did it at home in a rental bathtub thing. She says her pregnancy was great, and aside from the discomfort of having a bowling ball in her uterus was otherwise totally fine. One of my wife's best friends growing up got a form of blood poisoning during the pregnancy and she died along with her second child.
My wife's pregnancies have slowly gotten worse and more difficult. We are both pretty sure we are done after our third just arrived a few months ago. Two of the pregnancies have been "geriatric" pregnancies, and the rates of complications start going up a frightening clip at these ages. For that reason alone I've become way more against more pregnancies.
You mentioned being in your lower thirties, my only advice would be to avoid geriatric pregnancies at all costs. If you think you'll really desperately want a kid later, then have one now instead. If you are already gonna be in geriatric pregnancy realm (35) I'd suggest stopping while you are ahead. 3 kids is great.
Just to insert a congratulations on the kid. I remember a discussion a while ago tangentially related and I'm glad it worked out well!
Thanks! and luckily the new kid has been great, chillest baby we've had.
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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...
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I can't give a definitive answer to your question (which I guess you're not really expecting). It's far too personal, and reasons you've given are valid to consider.
Louise Perry likens pregnancy and giving birth as the female equivalent of going to war. It's dangerous, intoxicating, glorious, painful and rewarding all at once. It's brings you close to death and closer to life. You're going through something that all of your female ancestors went through and coming out the other side having created a new soul.
If you do go ahead and have another baby, you'll be doing something heroic. That's all I can really say.
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.
Not sure your views on Genesis, but the pain of labor is literally taken in Christianity to be a consequence of evil entering the world.
Alternatively, our awareness of that evil. There's a take about the fruit which is that it was meant for us in the fullness of time, but we jumped the gun and became aware of evil long before we were ready for it.
In any event, as you say, it's a consequence, not a punishment.
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Thanks for sharing your experience (and welcome to the Motte!). There were always similar concerns in my household (my children are all adults now)--I would like to have had more children (like you, I come from a large family) but then I talk to people who were lucky to have one kid, or who struggled with infertility for years and never had any, and it makes me feel like an ungrateful whiner.
My main reaction to your post is "you don't owe a baby to the world!" You aren't overstating the magnitude of the risks--even today, though the risks of pregnancy and childbirth are much less than they were even a hundred years ago, they remain real. At the extremes, women still die in the process. Even the temporary stuff, like sciatica and morning sickness, is still genuine suffering.
But pro-natalism has arisen almost exclusively as a reaction to the rise of philosophical anti-natalism. And one of the central arguments in anti-natalism is an incongruency in ethics: there often seem to be morally compelling reasons to not have children (e.g. you know you are unable to care for a child, and know that no one else will), but (outside extreme cases of authoritarianism) essentially no one thinks anyone should be compelled to bear children (even pro-life people who think it is wrong to terminate a pregnancy don't believe it would be right to force a pregnancy on an unwilling woman). Anti-natalists inflate the arguments against childbearing toward an all-encompassing edict: humanity should voluntarily work toward its own orderly extinction.
Because I am not a utilitarian, I do not find such arguments compelling. When I say you don't owe a baby to the world, what I mean is this: it is morally permissible for you to have another child, if that is what you decide to do, despite the risks. Whether the risks are worthy to be undertaken is open to you to decide, but you are not under any utilitarian obligation to have another child even if that child would be of tremendous benefit to the world. Something that I think most ethical systems really miss is the range of permissibility; utiltiarians and deontologists frequently run into the assertion that there is always and only one truly right thing to do (the "best" thing) in any situation. It's very constraining! As a contractualist, I think that there is actually a wide range of things it is morally permissible to do, and that having children is often one of those things.
But if you do, you should do it because you want to, and because the risks are acceptable to you; or, you should not do it, because you don't want to, or on reflection you find the risks too great. 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. It's wonderful that you already have three children, and I wish you luck with that endeavor. Whether or not you continue to grow your family, I thank you for your existing contributions to the rest of the world, which we did not earn, were never owed, and can receive from you only as a welcome gift--never, ever as the fulfillment of a moral obligation.
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"?
More like the latter. Contractualism is the view that we should never violate a principle of action that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced, general agreement. In practice, we want to be able to justify our actions to others within our moral community. A principle like "always act to make the world a better place" seems reasonably rejectable; not only will I rarely have any idea which of my actions will "make the world a better place," even if I have a very good idea that it would actually make the world a better place to torture a certain innocent child, I have compelling reasons to not do that. In particular, innocent children have a weighty interest--a right--to not be tortured, and making the world a little or even a lot better for millions of people is not sufficient to overcome such interests.
Of course most choices are not so stark. There is often value in doing more than is strictly required of you, but even so it's very important to notice the difference between what is optimal and what is obligatory. If morality required us to always do the optimal thing, it would be impossibly demanding. Very likely no one would ever actually do the "right" thing, on such a view--there are simply too many unknowns. It is much more reasonable to expect people to act in ways they can justify to others. Deliberately making the world a worse place is not generally something we can justify to others. But it's not hard to justify to others, say, spending some time chatting about politics on the Internet, provided your other immediate obligations have been met and you find this sort of activity interesting or relaxing or fun. Is it the optimal way to spend your time? Perhaps not! But you are not actually under a moral obligation to spend your time optimally. So long as posting on Internet forums does not violate a principle of action that no one could reasonably reject, it's permissible.
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My interpretation: Suppose my eldest discovers a talent for drumming, and wants to learn to be a really good drummer. Should I be angry that their pursuit of drumming as a hobby means they aren't studying programming as hard, which means they won't be positioned to contribute to AI safety efforts when they're older?
People imagine that there's some Golden Path, and then measure their their current circumstances and choices against some idealized "best possible alternative". But the Golden Path is imaginary, and in fact there is much value to simply doing what one can where one is. Life's value comes from human connections, not from peak performance indicators. We have responsibilities to others and arguably to the world as a whole, but those responsibilities are sharply limited, and ignoring those limits is unreasonable. So, the latter interpretation, I think. It's not your job to save the world. It's your job to build a good life such that your corner of the world doesn't need saving, and it's your job to help others do the same where you can.
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