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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.
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)
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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