It's the natural result of becoming a biped. I'm a healthy, fertile female, and the thought of having my baby grown inside a surrogate or outside of my body scares me. I don't have kids atm and may never do, but if I did I'd carry my children myself (assuming it's possible for my body to do so at the time).
I've heard all the horror stories, I've watched every video, and birth is completely terrifying-- but every mother describes it with an additional sense of gratitude. They're thankful their bodies can do it, that they have now a child they love, and also they feel so much stronger for it. There's a certain spiritual sense about going through so much pain and taking so much risk to give life to another human being. That feeling must be powerful.
There's something wrong with your sample. I personally know multiple mothers who deeply regret the physical damage done by pregnancy and birth, and don't feel even a little bit stronger for having spent a month on hospital bed rest with pre-eclampsia, or tearing their vaginas during birth and being unable to lift their own newborn baby, or weakened abdominal muscles from pregnancy so she still isn't allowed to run with her baby now five months old, or spending six months unable to keep down water and losing weight due to morning sickness. They're grateful to have the kid, yes, but they don't delude themselves that it was a wonderful spiritual experience.
Well, people don't usually consider themselves to be coerced by themselves, so it makes sense that anyone who feels they were coerced into it is blaming someone else.
I mean, if you have a kid because society tells you to have a kid, I'd say the kid is the victim and that the adult made a poor decision under pressure. That's not victimhood, that's a mistake.
Certainly, I appreciate my mom and mothers deeply. This is such a stretch its not comparable but it’s the best I’ve got: Every gift a girlfriends given me just made me feel so grateful (not sure how to describe it). I had a girlfriend once crotchet a hat for me. The whole time she was making it for me I felt such deep care for me. I can’t begin to imagine how I’d feel taking care of my soon to be mother of my child.
It’s possibly the most human experience. Doesn’t keep me from wishing there was more we could do.
In a way, there is already however it is not very popular in society at the moment.
The answer is for the woman to have kids, or at least 1 kid, when the woman is younger. Varies by woman, but late teens or 20-22 years of age, greatly reduces risks both in that first pregnancy and in later pregnancies.
My personal view is that the high school--> college --> job track should be allowed to be interrupted or otherwise modified, so that people don't have to wait until they are almost 30 to start thinking about kids. But I don't have a fully fleshed out theory as to how to do that.
I wonder when "wait to have kids" starts to become bad advice. It was one thing to wait until high school, then college, but it seems like a _lot_ of people I know are waiting until they're financially stable and then discovering they're not there at 35 years old and looking at a hockey stick curve for likelihood of autism, etc. It's part of why my wife and I had a kid at 34.
Not to mention that if having kids is so great (and so far I do quite like it) we should logically want to maximize the time we have our kids in our lives, not minimize it.
More generally, though, I think this is a problem of how in an age of plenty we demand a huge chunk of your waking hours just to produce enough income to live whatever we've decided is a decent life, though a lot of this time is spent making other people - be they landlords or people who bought a house in the 80's or 90's, rich. Working half the hours generally means far less than half the pay, and many women see that their careers are destroyed if they take time out to raise a kid (perhaps some men do too, but it usually falls to the mom).
>>I wonder when "wait to have kids" starts to become bad advice.
It already is, but people try to balance to the best they could--given today's reality (Congrats! You're 22 but no money and no "good father material" so...wait).
Our genes weren't developed in the last 4 decades where women work and seek careers and then think of having children. It's not sexist or misogynistic, it's the reality of our genes. 22 is a woman's best age to have kids. The more you postpone, greater are the problems, even for the children. Pregnant women over 35 have/had to do the Down Syndrome echo. Why? Because women over a certain age are more likely to have children with issues. This may apply to men as sperm cells have had, say 50 years, to screw up the copying or to get damaged.
The “quote” from someone is along the lines of “The most valuable person to society is a young woman. The least valuable person to society is a young man.” As a man, I experienced that quite acutely. Still do though now I “have more to offer” and I sometimes feel like I’m being valued more than I was in the past. It’s hard to tell through the years of abuse and bullying.
At least people should be educated about the possible effects of having children late in life as part of high school sex education.
I have quite a lot of coworker women that are in their mid to late 30s who are astonished to learn that there are potential complications associated with having children at that age. Without exception they have expressed the desire that these potential complications had been communicated to them earlier in life.
Having kids in your early twenties helps with a lot of physical aspects, but a lot of people aren't ready to be in a long term committed relationship at that point, so it would seem that it's sacrificing emotional well-being for physical well-being. Certainly both factors feed into the other.
I think a lot of what's pushing people to have kids later is the desire to have a stable home, and that feels harder to acheive when costs of living seem to demand, for many, dual incomes and living paycheck to paycheck.
You may overestimate the demand for taking the pregnancy completely outside the body. I offered to pay for a high quality surrogate for our kids, but my wife didn’t want to. She went through a brutally complicated delivery and then a more regular but still, to my eye, horrible experience because she wanted her children to grow inside her.
I agree that "Soylent pregnancy" is unlikely to catch on. Furthermore, we have virtually no idea what all the longterm impacts of that connection are, and what the longterm impacts of severing that connection could be.
P.S. I think HN will tend to have a more mechanistic view of this process than the broad public.
There are some things that can help mitigate it, but they sound like one is advocating for women to remain "barefoot and pregnant," such as adequate rest, eating right, etc.
On the flip side, carrying a baby makes the mother a chimera and puts her through a whole host of changes that, in some cases, have profound positive impact on her health. You hear a lot less about this than about the horror stories, but it does exist.
Come on, we're fine these days. It's monitored and you have epidural pain killers. I'm not diminishing the burden, but we shouldn't make everything free.
dragon ball super(o) recently made me think that in a world where teleportation is possible we could just teleport the baby out of the womb, avoiding the pain of labor
of course there is still the hardships of carrying the child, and who knows what kind of havoc such a sudden event would cause to the mother's hormones
how much of the bodily functions associated with labor are evolutionarily built in necessities of human reproduction? do cesarean births have any hormonal consequences differing from vaginal birth?
