
'The desire to have a child never goes away': The Involuntarily Childless - simonsarris
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/oct/02/the-desire-to-have-a-child-never-goes-away-how-the-involuntarily-childless-are-forming-a-new-movement
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Dunan
Wasn't especting to see this kind of article referenced on HN, and it hit me
hard. I'm 41, partner is too, and would give absolutely anything to have a
child of my own. She was never ready until just recently.

I can't even go an hour without thinking about it...

~~~
mlevental
I don't mean to offend but what is the difference to you that the child is
genetically yours? why not adopt?

~~~
simonsarris
Some try to take a fundamentally 'rational' approach to life, or view it
through the lens of cost/benefit, especially fiscal cost benefit. In fact I
have some friends who do not want children simply because they will cost too
much money.

This brand of rationality is very alien to me. It makes all the difference in
the world if the child is genetically one's own child. It is not a toy or a
cat. It is an emotional extension of your own being that culminates in having
its own identity. It is both you and not you. I fear that if you cannot
intuitively grok the difference that it makes, there is no 'rational' way to
convince you that it matters.

~~~
jdtang13
Very well articulated.

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tathougies
I'm not sure I'd apply the term 'involuntary childlessness' to people who
chose to not have children and later regret that decision.

I married my wife at 22, and we started not preventing at 23. Two years, three
early miscarriages, three later miscarriages, and one stillbirth (our most
recent pregnancy) later, we don't have any living children. Doctors still
can't explain why our unborn son died. In the last ultrasound before he died,
he was kicking, swimming around, with a great heartbeat, normal morphology,
and a healthy placenta. The next morning, my wife woke up with a bad feeling,
and we learned his heart had just stopped. Nothing turned up on the autopsy --
everything normal. Just sudden cardiac arrest.

My uncle had a son die of leukemia at age 7 or 8 (before I was born). They
were lucky to have another daughter, but we have a few older friends who had
one or two children that ended up losing them to freak circumstances or
disease, and were then unable to have another.

These are actual stories of involuntary childlessness, not people who made a
choice to wait until it was too late.

And before people pipe up with adoption: (1) we had decided to adopt before we
married, but were too young at the time; (2) we started the adoption process
as soon as we reached the age threshold; (3) adoption takes a long time and is
expensive (but we are more than willing to wait and pay the legal fees); (4)
because of our age, we can only adopt younger children; (5) there are not many
young children available for adoption because there are more parents willing
to adopt than children needing homes, which is a good thing; (6) we would love
to adopt an older child as soon as the state would let us. But none of this
takes away from the fact that we would like the doctors to figure out the
miscarriages and stillbirth -- we want all our children to have a good set
siblings and the healthiest start possible.

~~~
nostrademons
The article leads with two stories of people who just waited too long, but
about 2/3 down there are a couple stories (and blog links!) of people who
actually were involuntarily childless - Lizze Lowrie, who had 6 miscarriages
by age 33, and Rev Sonya Dorah, who was raped as a teenager, contracted
chlamydia, and ended up infertile as a result.

~~~
tathougies
That's good to hear... in full disclosure, after reading the first 2/3, I got
tired of reading it and decided to rant :)

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sunseb
We are 7 billions people, it's actually a good thing that people have less
children. 7 billions people who want a house, a car, a job, that eat meat,
that travel and so: it's not sustainable.

~~~
bluedevil2k
Why do you say it's not sustainable? It's been sustainable to this point, and
technological innovation has always trumped the negative outlooks on
population growth in the past (fertilizer for example). Genetic engineering of
food, mass produced lab-meat, the innovations will keep coming and the
population will keep growing.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Logistic collapse is a real thing. It doesn't go away just because you _hope_
it doesn't apply any more.

There are numerous indicators, from antibiotic resistance, to increasingly
obvious climate change effects, to dead zones in the oceans, that suggest life
will become harder in the future, not easier.

I see no rational reason to be confident about humanity's future until the
challenges have either been dealt with, or they haven't.

That's unlikely to be clear before the middle of the century, at the absolute
earliest.

~~~
bluedevil2k
Humans flourished and grew in population during a freakin' ice age, I don't
think the Earth warming by 1 degree is going to drastically alter the steady
increase in population growth.

Likewise, the population grew tremendously before antibiotics were even
invented.

There's a level of hubris in every generation, I imagine going back forever,
that think "we have it harder than X", when in fact humanity is always
progressing and each problem we face is relatively easier to solve than the
previous one.

~~~
y4mi
you might want to check your facts.

Humanity didn't flourish during the ice ages. They almost went extinct.

I'll admit that antibiotics impact is hard to really isolate from all the
other discoveries we've had since ~1920, but their combined effect is pretty
obvious to see no matter which data source you choose to use.

finally, nobody says that our lives are worse than that of people from
pre/early industrial times. It's probably not even us who are currently
writing here that will need to live with the consequences. Its still at least
30-50 years off before anything really bad happens. At least that's what most
of the scientists write. I'm not one myself.

------
pmarreck
Odd that this post was directly beneath this one in my feed: "Mothers who
regret having children are speaking out":
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16132955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16132955)

~~~
simonsarris
I submitted because of that story. I wanted commentary from the HN crowd on
the flip side of the issue.

~~~
pmarreck
Smart idea and it's interesting to compare the 2

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devonkim
Something seems odd about the supposition and their opening data set with
older, childless women - do women that are childless and infertile from an
earlier age feel similarly? Why not flip this around to comparing how men with
vasectomies at earlier ages feel decades later? Paternal instinct and maternal
instinct overlap somewhat I presume but it’s not clear what the differences
are I suspect.

~~~
KittiHawk
I would be interested in reading about men's reactions later on after having
had vasectomies. That's something I've never seen discussed.

------
everyone
Can someone explain the desire to have kids? I have never felt it. Also, I
thought animals that reproduce sexually have a desire to _have sex_ , and then
kids end up happening as a result.

~~~
dmm
It's multi-faceted. Part of the desire to have kids is simply the desire to
have children around. It's the idea that a community without children is
incomplete. Children have many bad characteristics but they also have
qualities that most adults have lost.

Children are enthusiastic, sincere, unjaded and open to new experiences. They
find joy and fascination in the ordinary things which adults have long lost
interest in. Where adults obsess over profit and loss, a child will play with
a pile of dirt and a shovel all afternoon. The world needs profits but it also
needs the continuous renewal and reminder of wonder that children provide.

Another aspect is more abstract, maybe? When I was a child I was loved and I
always had adults around who looked after me and caught me when I made
mistakes and made everything right. My parents weren't perfect and made many
mistakes themselves but as a child I really believed that the world was as it
should be and if there was a problem someone would make it right. Of course as
an adult I know that isn't the case but the consequence of that environment is
a potency that has always been a part of me.

I think that relationship between child and parent is something that needs to
exist in the world and the best way to ensure that is to take on the role of
the parent.

Another way to see it is that I owe my parents a debt so great I cannot
possible repay it, no matter what I do for them. My only chance of relief is
to take that debt and "burden" another generation.

~~~
abootstrapper
>> I owe my parents a debt so great I cannot possible repay it, no matter what
I do for them. My only chance of relief is to take that debt and "burden"
another generation.

That's well said.

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Overtonwindow
I've had two thoughts on having kids. Full disclosure: I had a vasectomy,
which is important because I've come to learn this is a deal breaker for many
women. That said, here they are: 1) I would love to have kids so I have
someone to pass on the lessons and knowledge I have learned in life, and to
contribute to a better tomorrow for the world. Not to mention someone to talk
to in old age. However, 2) I really don't want kids. They're expensive,
fraught with liability, uncertainty, costs, and there's zero assurance things
will turn out well. Having children seems to be a tremendous leap of faith in
yourself, and the future, and I just don't have that much faith in either.

~~~
jackbravo
You can adopt or you can become an "uncle" of a less favored child. In my city
there are "uncle" programs in orphan homes where you visit them, play with
them, help them economically if you can, even take them out on weekends if you
and they want.

------
gozur88
"Involuntarily Childless" is a term I'd apply to people who can't have
children for medical reasons and not people who arranged their lives such that
they were unlikely to have children.

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n0tme
I don't want kids, but I really want to find someone to not feel alone and
depressed. Since I broke up with my gf after 10 years that we had been
together I feel more depressed every freaking day.

~~~
throwaway12332
Get a pet; dog, hamster... even bright aquarium is nice.

~~~
n0tme
Very funny, bro. Especially fish are big fans of conversations.

~~~
throwaway12332
Not a joke, you thing you are the only one in such situation?

~~~
n0tme
Thanks for making me feel special! Now seriously: Did I say something like
this? I just have another situation which is kind of close to the one in the
post.

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aaroninsf
As a parent I can say, the desire to have a life never goes away, either.

------
hosh
Huh, interesting contrast to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16132955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16132955)

------
lumberjack
It is an extreme option, but you can pay if you want to have a child, and I
don't mean abortion. If you have the money and the time, and a supportive
family, it is doable.

~~~
explorigin
It seems to me that the involuntary aspect of this encompasses more that the
physical presence of a tiny human but the ability to raise this tiny human in
a responsible manner. Wage slavery, broken families or unsupportive spouses
are just a few of many possible causes of this involuntary aspect.

