I have many peeves, but one of them is this: the near-permanent state of anxiety some people have about fertility. Not just their personal fertility (anxieties about too much or too little of that are reasonable), but cultural fertility. We are apparently doomed if not enough of the right people, and by that they usually mean us white people, have enough babies. My annoyance is prompted by this post, in which a man-baby predicts the end of the Western world, because feminists don’t have enough children.
We’ve got records of ancient Romans moaning about this ‘problem’, and creating laws to induce more people to have children, so it’s not just this one guy. It’s a concern that’s been going around for millennia. And it’s nonsense.
World population is going up. One problem we don’t have is a deficiency of people. What this really is is a) a selfish complaint that women won’t have sex with him and bear his children, and b) a racist complaint that there other demographics than his that are increasing faster than his.
To the racists who believe white people have an obligation to have more children, I say…you’ve lost already. If your measure of success is simply the number of people of your same color in the world, white=loser. You’re only 16% of the planet’s population. If your preferred, elite group consists of white Americans, they’re only 63% of 320 million people, or about 200 million people — you’re less than 3% of the world. You’re not going to outnumber everyone else on the planet any time soon, and the more populous you get, the more likely everyone will start subdividing into finer-grained categories that will lead wackos to moan about the declining numbers of white Texans who vote Republican and drive American-made cars. You’re always going to be a minority of some subgroup.
Give up. If it’s a race to large population size, the Chinese already won, and they won big.
But that’s not the race, is it? Our goals are simple personal things: security, comfort, productivity, happiness, community. None of those are improved by simply increasing numbers. Your house does not become more content and more satisfying if 50 more people are crammed into it. Managed, sensible growth, or even stable maintenance, are more compatible with a productive lifestyle. Proliferation for the sake of proliferation is what cockroaches do, and it does not make your world happier.
It does not make your life better to just engage in mindless procreation (OK, one problem is that it does feel great in the short term, before all the responsibilities come crashing down). You want to encourage people to have more children? Here’s how: provide more basic public healthcare. Make more daycare available. Support education at all levels — most parents want to see their children get the best education they can, to the limits of their ability. Guarantee a living wage to every worker. And, you know, a small point: if you want to see the population grow, limiting the availability of deadly, indiscriminate killing devices, guns, would be helpful.
I’ll also add that we’ve got an eager immigrant work force. Educate and train them, respect them as members of our communities, and look, no problems.
OMG, that’s the progressive liberal agenda!
Furthermore, the decision to have children is always going to be personal. You are not going to get laid by insisting to women that they have a responsibility to the white (or whatever) race to have babies with you. Children are a gigantic personal commitment that will take over your life for a couple of decades — and men and women will make those kinds of decisions on the basis of personal and selfish reasons. Shouldn’t the Libertarian conservatives out there appreciate that?
So when I hear some guy whining about the lack of fecundity by women of his preferred race, I just roll my eyes and tune them out. They’re just too stupid and short-sighted to have anything interesting to say. Besides, give them a little encouragement and soon they’re babbling about Cultural Marxism and other imaginary problems, and I just don’t give a damn about their idiocy.
I mean, I totally get why he focuses solely on western civilization, but what justification could have for that aside from racism and US/Eurocentricism?
Like, there’s plenty of booming eastern civilizations, and they all have feminists too. If feminism was causing the inevitable end of western culture, wouldn’t it also destroy china, japan, and korea?
There’s also the obsession with “economic growth”, as if resources are infinite and exponential growth is possible. To wall street, 6% growth this year after 7% last year is considered “decline”. The pyramid schemes we have created for ourselves (i.e. retirement funding paid for by income taxes of future generations) either mean inevitable collapse, restructuring and lower monthly cheques or higher taxes to pay for it.
Japan has an aging and declining population, and is scrambling for solutions of how to care for the elderly. In the short term (i.e. 20-30 years) it means a shortage of care workers and declining economies, but in the long term it solves the problem of excess consumption. Aging populations will have as much effect as the refugee crisis on demographics and society in once homogeneous populations. In 2014, one in every 20 babies born in South Korea was of mixed ancestry, a result of 30 years of selective abortion that left millions of men with no women of the same age.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/07/in-rapidly-aging-japan-adult-diaper-sales-are-about-to-surpass-baby-diapers/277706/
http://www.koreabang.com/2014/stories/statistics-show-a-multiracial-korea-netizens-express-concern.html
Selective abortion is another story and problem unto itself (re: China, India).
I’m a carrier for genes for blue eyes, quick, fuck me! It is imperative that subsequent generations have impaired eyesight in very sunny days.
PZ:
That’s a fact. Gad, even if I had wanted sprogs, hearing that would have had me running away.
And just what is the definition of white? Out of curiosity about my distant ancestors, about whom I know very little before about 1770, I decided to take a couple of the commercially available DNA tests. The price had come down to the point where I said, why the hell not? Might be fun. BTW, I am white by the most superficial standards of our society. That’s what I state on the census. That’s what is on my Navy enlistment papers.
So, imagine my surprise when I learned that on my father’s side I am about 6% American Indian and 10-15% from Iberian peninsula. The rest was from the British Isles and NW France and possibly Holland. But it was my mom’s side that was the real shocker — 2% Ashkenazi Jewish, as much as 10% Roma, the rest German, Russian, and a dab of Swedish and Finnish. Her haplogroup was U3b, quite rare for Germany, which is where she was born.
So, am I white? Who the hell knows?
I guess I should be happy that there were no DNA tests available in Nazi Germany. If there were I probably wouldn’t be here.
I think in general there’s still so much pressure on people to have kids. I never wanted them, i don’t like kids at all. Now that i’m nearing menopause i have people either tell me “tick tock” or “i don’t understand that you never wanted kids”
And i carry blond hair, blue eyes and a high iq in my genes (and probably quite a lot of mental dissorders hahahahah)
Pascalle @ 6:
The one that irritated me no end, for bloody decades, was “what if you change your mind?” (I made sure I was sterile, and could not get pregnant ever again). Finally, I’d just pause, and ask back, “what if you change yours?” People can be such thoughtless asses when it comes to childfree people. “Oooh, you’re so selfish, not wanting kids!” Right, like having kids isn’t selfish. FFS.
Ask Cliven Bundy, notorious crime boss from a breeder cult called the…Mormons.
Cliven has 15 kids. So how does a guy with a high school diploma support 15 kids? Not very well. Cliven turned to theft to do it and now owes the US government 1 million USD. And none of his kids seem well educated. In other words, the US taxpayers were supporting his breeder lifestyle.
And it is crashing down. Four of the Bundy mob are now in prison, including dad.
Saying that if it’s a race to largest population the Chinese already won big is deceptive. The whole idea of “Chinese” as some sort of single, unified racial group is indicative of how demographics get divided up. The people whining about how white Americans are getting “outbred” are applying a pretty fine grain to groups they’re usually in. Americans get divvied up, white people are separated into numerous distinct groups of which only some count, and then big groups like “Chinese” are treated as indivisible. Meanwhile, in China there are distinctions made between Han Chinese and a whole bunch of ethnic minorities. Hell, the people whining about how white Americans are getting “outbred” are frequently happy to go a step further and use a generic term like “Asians”, as if there’s no distinct groups there that could choose to apply the exact same reasoning.
Even outside the overt white supremacist bubble, there’s a tendency among white Americans to treat the groups identified by white dominated American institutions as somehow definitive everywhere, as if the term “Hispanic” is used with minimal further distinction in Central and South America, as if “Indian” is a word that refers to exactly two groups of people and not a huge number of distinct cultures. Once in full fertility-panic mode, this gets even more ludicrous. The whole “outbreed” idea isn’t just stymied by subdivision of one’s own group, but by a systematic denial that there might maybe be subdivisions in the huge numbers of other people being shoved into one label that happens to be applicable within your particular local cultural context.
It’s just narcissism. My reaction on encountering most people who talk about having kids is “only you would want more of you…” I’m sure most other sentient lifeforms (except the cats, who need servants) would agree.
His user name is BlightedArrow91.
Perhaps there is more that one reason he has a problem in procreating?
Bob Foster @ 5
I’m mostly of Irish descent*. 150 years ago, I would have been considered part of the immigrant menace to White (Protestant) America, despite being blue-eyed and fair-skinned, unless I used my ambiguous surname to pass. But we’re several waves of immigrants past that and now I’m part of White America and Latinx and Middle Easterners are the ‘immigrant menace’.
* Dad did have his haplotype done, so we learned the ancestral Stardad-family are from Scotland, but had been living in Ireland for several hundred years based on genealogy and a non-Irish surname.
Actually, for most of human history, this was a fairly reasonable concern.
I think that, in order to defeat the anti-feminist agenda, you need to understand where it comes from. And it probably dates back to the first time that someone on a battlefield counted the troops on his own side, and the troops on the opposing side, and realized that the people he was fighting had a lot more guys than he did. If he survived the battle, he must have gone home and said, “OK, all you women who were doing other things, stop doing those things and make more babies, pronto!” If all the neighboring groups had similar military technology, then the ones that adopted cultural practices that gave them even a few percentage points more fertility would gain a huge edge over time.
It’s easy for us to forget that, for most of human history, the number one fear for most average people was the fear of “those hated people who live over there” coming over here and killing or enslaving them. It’s only been for the last seventy years or so — a blink in history — that wars stopped being decided primarily by who had the greatest numbers, and most people in the world could afford to stop making winning the next war a primary concern.
I firmly believe that most bad memes that are widely spread, including religion, were originally memes that evolved to benefit the cultures that hosted them. The problem is that, when society changes and improves, the old memes that were once useful have now turned toxic. They don’t go away easily, because they have evolved a host of support memes (duty, loyalty to the state, “family values”) to protect themselves. We have to understand, though, what was once good about them, before we can figure out how to eliminate them now that they’re destructive.
I find that graphic distressing because it suggests that a very large mass is quite near the earth and pulling people off the earth into space and then, presumably, splatting them onto whatever the mass is.
It’s always been the poor that had a lot of children, because they were needed to help you eke out a subsistence living on the farm, or wherever. Also because, until the 20th century, half of all children would die before reaching the age of five, and you needed to produce a lot to ensure that some would become economically useful, and would care for you in old age. Or, in the case of the rich, you had to count on losing about half to ensure that you’d have an heir.
So, those two drivers of having lots of kids have, mercifully, been eliminated in much of the world, and I *hope* that it goes without saying that we all agree that they should and will be eliminated anywhere that they still persist. There really isn’t any other reason, except personal preference, to have lots of kids, nor has there ever been. So, cry all you want, racists and man-babies, that won’t be back. Get over it.
part of it seems to be psychologically fixated on the “genetic fallacy”. That people’s inherent behavior is predetermined by their genetic ancestry. That {Nature v Nurture} is considered a moot point with Nature the foregone conclusion.
uhhh
then inconsistently there is the other foregone conclusion that genetics is irrelevant, that “you gotta raise em right…”
ugh
I must stop looking for consistency in failures to ‘think-it-out’. Consistency is a hobgoblin…
@brucegee1962 #13:
I respectfully disagree. Actually, I possibly less than respectfully disagree. Leadership, strategy, professionalism and weaponry count far more often. People who lead mobs against trained armies don’t tend to last long.
Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire by building upon his father’s development of heavy infantry, which had allowed Philip’s smaller number of Macedonian pikemen to conquer Greece. In previous centuries the Greek hoplites had of course twice fought off Persian invasions composed of vastly superior numbers.
Two thousand years later Britain created an empire by developing a professional navy and employing industrial advantage to field an army which on many occasions won against far greater numbers. This did also fail a number of times, such as at Isandhlwana when dire British leadership allowed excellent Zulu training and morale to overcome the technological advantage and let numbers tell (although still about a thousand men died on each side). Of course this battle was then followed up by Rorke’s Drift the following day, when numbers definitely didn’t tell.
Caine, #7
Ouch. I bet that would shut them up.
This one never made any sense to me. Selfish to whom?
How can you be selfish to someone who doesn’t exist?
Garnetstar:
People also had a fucktonne of kids, even when too poor to care for them, because they had no choice. Consistent, effective contraception has been a great thing, and a massive game changer.
I am amazed at the complete irrationality of this kind of argument.
If you probe it with a proponent of it you get racism which always boils down to illusion and so flexible a definition that it is impossible to define to actual populations. Then it moves to “western civilization” with things like feminism and minority rights being high on the evils threatening civilization.
which have their roots in democracy whose roots are firmly based in western civilization.
It looks to me that a case could be made that the proponents of these ideas and the ideas themselves are the real threat to “western civilization” when looked at over the long term trend of history. Maybe it is about perceived change which if examined in detail often proves to be illusion and ignorance.
So what ever the argument really is about it is not about western civilization as characterized by the history of the democratic western countries.
uncle frogy
We’ve been hearing a slightly different version of this argument in European countries a lot lately. Population of European countries is getting old, so we have to breed to support our unsustainable pension systems (left0ver1under already explained this better than me).
Considering the immigration wave carries a lot of young people, we should welcome them with open arms. For some reason, that can’t possibly be xenophobia or racism, we are not doing that. Instead we claim that our economies can’t take that number of people… but in almost the same breath the claim is made that we need more [white] babies. But, you know, no racism there.
As for feminism… I’m proud that feminism is one of the causes for less babies being born. Because between steps 1. more feminism and 35. less babies, there is a whole lot of progress in health care and human rights.
Biological colonialism. Outbreeding the untermenschen. It’s quite common even today. In the USA alone we have three breeder cults trying to outbreed the rest of us. The RCC, the Mormons, and some fundie xian cults.
It rarely works. After a few generations, the kids decide they have better things to do with their time and money.
Saad:
The sentiment always seemed to be that by choosing to not have children, it was a refusal to grow up, to be responsible.
@2:left0ver1under
Yeah, seen in this way, the world economy is like the ultimate ponzi scheme, and we all know what happens when those finally implode.
Sooner or later, we will start running out of resources if we continue to ignore the fact that we cannot grow the economy forever. I’m sure that most of the people responsible for the current regime know this, but it’s just too convenient for them to kick the can down the road another, say, 50 or 100 years (i.e. after they’re dead and buried). Oh, and they’re also conveniently certain that we will have innovated ourselves out of that crisis by then anyway…
Me? I’d far rather we tackle the problem now, with 7 billion people on the planet, than in another 100 years with 11 billion people around to suffer the consequences. The longer we wait, the harder the adjustment will be.
A few years back I went to a talk in the UK given by a former moderator of the Church of Scotland (I forget the name) on what we would need to do to avoid this crisis. He made a lot of sense, but I had been living in the US long enough by then to know that his proposals (essentially an overhaul of government regulations to rein in the excesses of the corporate economy) would never fly in Washington. Not in a million years.
Ah, yes, and then there’s the “coming European Caliphate” to give them yet another reason to hate Muslims. It’s like it’s Vienna, 1683 all over again…
Idiocracy was a documentary of what will happen if the “right” sort don’t reproduce. Isn’t it?
Yeah, we get that here as well. The US birth rate is below replacement and the population will start going down with present trends in a few decades.
1. It’s a fallacy. If your system depends on a continually increasing population, your system is broken, unworkable.
2. The population bulge is temporary. Fixing it with a permanent but unworkable solution is dumb.
3. At some point we will transition to a steady state. And the human birth rate is flexible and responds to incentives. If you make it easier and worthwhile for women who want kids to…have kids, they will. It’s worked in France and Australia.
PS 40% of US children are born to single mothers. One of the many hate groups of the fundies are…single mothers and they will discriminate against them any way they can. And oddly enough, without them, our population would be dropping like a rock right now. Fundies never, ever think things through.
I personally think that the world is overpopulated as it is.
I expressed this belief to someone a while ago and I think they said well you could every human on earth into a space with the surface area of new York. So on that most basic level there’s an argument the planet isn’t overpopulated or overcrowded.
But thinking about it in terms of what it takes for a society and economy to function, I think the capacity of both is being pushed to its limits.
I recently heard this idea from somewhere which is that we (say the state/government) can only manage a group of people up to a certain size above which there are simply too many needs and wants and too much difference between everyone to adequately cater to everyone.
Anyway, I think it might be helpful to try and actually decrease our population and somewhat reverse the process of globalisation and the state of everyone being interconnected to everyone else in an effort to try and reduce the stress that people put on earth’s resources.
Too late. Cliven Bundy already has 60 grandkids, with Ammon and Ryan contributing 6 and 8 to that total, respectively. And there’s always conjugal visits…
the graphic is very close to this corporate logo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherwin-Williams
uncle frogy
#21Beatrice:
When people ( like the whiner above) make it impossible to get abortions, or reliable contraception, by defunding things like Planned Parenthood , the only other option for women who don’t want kids is to say No, or hold off until much later to have them.
I have encountered this type of idiocy all too often before, usually expressed as racist dude-bros whining that White women having sex with men who aren’t also White is part of a ‘White genocide’ where ebil brown skinned people are supposedly all part of some ludicrous global conspiracy to breed White people out of existence and replace the entire White community with persons of dual heritage. They froth at the mouth about how this is the modern world’s acceptable genocide, because liberals hate White people, dontchaknow.
Trying to explain to them that they clearly don’t know what ‘genocide’ means, and have an even worse understanding of genetics and population dynamics, is the exercise in futility you might expect – their paranoia is utterly reason-proof. Their sad obsessions would almost be amusingly pathetic, if it wasn’t for the fact that we have seen ‘anti-miscegenation’ laws before, and there are all too many racist arseholes on the Right who would dearly love to reinstate them, and will find a ready constituency of useful idiots in this crowd to assist them.
Rich Woods @17
Thanks for responding to my post. I would respectfully suggest that the cases you mention are anomalies. Yes, occasionally one group gains access to a technology or a means of transport that allows them to conquer a whole bunch of other people quickly, and yes, what you get then is an Empire — Assyrian, Roman, British, Aztec, Spanish, etc. Far more often, though, the technology spreads faster than the bureaucracy and communication necessary to sustain an Empire. I think that, out of all the conflicts in history, far more would be of the category “two sides with similar weapons and tactics,” like medieval Europe or pre-colonial North America or feudal Japan, than the few big splashy occasions where someone makes a breakthrough that lets them regularly win battles against superior numbers. Though, probably, those occasions have become more and more frequent over the last few centuries, as technology has played a larger and larger role. When I said that numbers haven’t mattered much in the last seventy years, I didn’t mean they mattered hugely up until the end of World War II and then they stopped — it was a gradual process.
Also, note that even in the cases where there is a big military advantage, like the Romans mentioned in the OP, there is still often pressure to maintain a high level of population growth. Ceasar’s legions might be able to beat hordes many times their size, but still, every man counted — and the more legions you’ve got, the more territory you can conquer. “Get you the sons your fathers got, and God will save the Queen” — Kipling
@28
I am not sure that the interconnectedness of the earths population is a problem , I suspect that it is a very positive development, It allows information to move much easier. The globalization of trade seems to be driven by labor costs more than anything else. I think that that like the idea of perpetual growth is a temporary phenomena and can only go so far it is facilitated by cheap transportation costs which has influenced by fuel costs.
Their is the other trend that is growing robotic manufacture that makes it possible to do the same process anywhere at competitive price. So it is becoming possible to just ship the instruction and specifications (the information) with out the need to shift around huge ships moving stuff back and forth all over the earth. The vast number of jobs formally needed are still going to be disappearing.
The big but is there will still be the problem of what do the people do and how do we take care of all the needs they have when civilization is in the end the people who are alive
uncle frogy
And now that we did have a sproglet, we get to hear all about how she needs a brother or sister. Ain’t gonna happen.
My mom just told me that her mother, after having 7 babies, never had sex with her husband again because it was the only way to be sure she would not get pregnant again. Family planning education, contraception, and choice have been a great thing for humanity. We need more of it, everywhere.
Racists should really consider irrationally caring about non-recessive traits, it would make their lives easier. Maybe start a whole new form of ridiculous prejudice based on blood types or something…
And if the relative percentages of *white* MRA’s decrease, how is that not a positive outcome?
I’d rather the absolute number of MRAs approach zero.
It’s tribalism all the way down.
#36 Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia
The world has been there and done that in the early 20th century. The obsession with proving that blood types associated with white Europeans could be proven scientifically to be superior ended up leading to huge advances in medical science by establishing how to safely match blood for effective transfusions, but the original research was largely attempting to justify (or more rarely, refute) racial/ethnic exceptionalism.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-german-blood-purity-research-advanced-medical-knowledge-a-902865.html
Dutchgirl @ 35:
Oh FFS. It would be so nice if there was simple acceptance of reproductive choices.
Few decades ago I would have been considered a wog and non-white according to the White Australia policy.
Now apparently I am a stalwart bastion of Western civilization, no problem here’s your papers.
…
Back in Italy, the Northern League made a platform on keeping those dirty southerners off of our northern lands… But the southerners came and we’re still there, So the League went after the Africans, but they came and we’re still herem, then the Chinese, now it’s all about the Muslim middle easterns…
And guess what? Southern Italians vote for them.
Also surprisingly, the racists who are worried about the colored hordes invading us, don’t seem to give a shit about universal access to family planning.
(I assume because that would necessarily make it more available here as well, and we can’t have that..?)
Caine @41 At least its limited to (near) strangers. All the family members are totally accepting.
F.O. @43 Yeah, shouldn’t they be on the front lines of family planning for non-whites?
“Oh FFS. It would be so nice if there was simple acceptance of reproductive choices.”
As a happily non-reproductive couple we’ve heard all the reproachful comments and insinuations but it’s water off a duck’s back. They always come from those who have kids and I often feel there’s a hint of regret.
Apparently Japan already has that.
I read recently – I have no link, I’m sorry – that the birth rate for Muslims in Europe declines quickly to the local mean as they grow up enmeshed in western culture. That the so-called breeding peril is just another bogeyman, lurking in the lizard brains of bigots.
As for me, I’ve raised four kids, and got five grandkids so far, but created none myself. If I’m to leave a mark on the world, it can be four kids I helped raise to be solid citizens. My particular DNA isn’t part of that mark, and I’m good with that.
Why on earth is the white “race” needed, anyway? Given the shit white people have done to the planet and so many of its peoples, what possible reason should the rest of the world have to mourn our passing, if that unlikely event were to come along?
Azkyroth @46
Explaining personalities based on blood types was popular a few years ago in Japan but like most fads here, it has fadded away. It was never used much more than as a kind of horoscope anyway, not really any prejudice involved, sort of like “I’m Aries (Type A), what about you?” Whenever it comes up in my university classes I ask the kids if their personalities have changed at all since they were little kids. Most of them say it has so I then ask them if their blood types have changed at all since they were little. . . .
Also, while fertility can be a huge individual problem, in most cases it’s not. We’re carefully avoiding conception.
Yeah, the German right wing AfD (alternative for Germany) demands that all ethnically German women have three children each and no more abortion. They are, of course, against immigration, just when our primary schools are getting fuller again, lots of young people who want to learn and study and work here…
Could you believe that their support among women is less than 2% when they are overall polling at around 10%?
Which in turn shows that there is something seriously wrong with a large number of men…
Personally I’m glad for everybody who decided that having ki
Sorry, accidentally submitted..
Again
Personally I’m very glad for everybody who decided that having kids was not for them. Because they are a huge commitment and responsibility.
What I can do without is people acting as if having kids was the same as having pets and therefore totally your problem when you ask for some support and accommodations.
Because your dog will neither lick your ass clean nor produce food when you’re 80.
Yes, I believe it was a German study from the 1980s or 90s, where not only did they discover that the birth rate of immigrant family fell toward the norm within two or three generations, the birth rate started dropping as soon as the new families arrived, even among couples who had already started a family.
Add to that the more recent phenomenon of the birth rate dropping sharply across the Arab world. Many countries that had a birth rate of 7 per woman or more in the 1960s now experience a birth rate of between 2.1 and 3. Much of that decline is caused by a steep rise in the marriage age of women, from teens and early twenties to mid-to-late twenties, coupled of course with greater economic aspirations.
So surprise, surprise, when given half a chance, Muslim women want the same things for themselves and their families as women Western nations.
WTF? That can’t possibly be constitutional. Can das Alternativ gegen Deutschland be declared illegal under Verfassungschutz for suggesting things like this?
@40 tigtog
Which just goes to show that reductio ad absurdum doesn’t work with prejudice, because like life in Jurassic Park, it will find a fucking way…
Dutchgirl @35
Consider an alternative: we have three children, and they all happen to be the same gender. The most common question then becomes, “So when are you going to try for a girl?”
NEVER, that’s when!!! Followed by the unavoidable “But wouldn’t you like someone quieter and (the term translates to something akin to) more delicate around the house?”
To which I always reply, knowing me and knowing the boys I already have, there is pretty much 0 chance I will have a nice quiet polite and passive little girl.
Only the truly persistent add on a “But you won’t know until you try!”, and that never ends well, because I either end the conversation then and there, or I start a list of the physical dangers of pregnancy and potential negative outcomes. Depends on my energy-levels.
Although we have now developed a method for shutting this down pretty much right off the bat, since most people asking us don’t seem to have any kids (those that do, for some reason, don’t tend to these kinds of questions…): we simply ask them, in return, when are they going to have their first? A lot of embarrassed giggles and a change of subject follow.
Anyway, this little country is potentially going to see some pretty serious reproductive restrictions, if things go about as they seem to be going. Right down to limiting abortions, to criminalizing those performed without a prior professional psychological consultation (from the approved list only, of course), to limiting who can donate ova for other people’s fertility processes (apparently only women who have already given birth…). That last one mystifies me, though, because it seems rather counterproductive: those who don’t want kids won’t be having them anyway, and of those, those who want to donate their ova won’t be doing so after all. Lose-lose, if you ask me.
No mention of improving the social security network, access to support of all kinds (esp. for households like those in poverty, single-parent, with special needs children, etc.), improving education in rural areas and reducing the bureaucracy that covers everything like an acidic slime.
@#55, rq
Yeah, sure, because when there’s too much noise already, adding another source of noise will reduce the problem as long as the extra source is quieter. Because noise works by averages, apparently.
Of course! It’s like temperature!
Dianne
Well…
The “German women should have three babies” is voiced as a “should opinion”, not as a “let’s make this a legal requirement. Let’s face it, the best way to achieve such a thing is the usual way of restricting contraception and abortion. Abortion is isn’t even legal here except in cases of rape, maternal health and “socio-psychological indication” (read severe fetal malformation), but you can get an illegal but not prosecuted abortion in the first 12 weeks if you submit yourself to “pro-life counselling”. The AfD would simply roll back on this.
As for declaring them illegal, that bar is pretty high for right wing parties. They’re currently trying to get the NPD outlawed…
Caine @19: well, the most popular method for limiting families, for most of history, was infanticide. Then came abortion, which was more dangerous in those days, of course, mostly involving self-injury or swallowing near-poisonous herbs or minerals. However, for the most part, it wasn’t a crime, until more recent centuries.
But as you say, those methods have been supplanted by modern contraception, and that’s not going away either. So, all the factors that used to drive people to have large families have been supplanted just by modernity, not so much particularly by feminism, and modernity’s not going to change. MRAs and racists just have to get over it.
I have this one simple trick* for getting laid. Treat women as fucking individuals. Don’t play act. Don’t play PUA. Don’t be an Asshole. Also, wash your own fucking butt hole before going on a date.
But what do I know? I’m too busy having sex with friends and lovers. It’s like treating women with decency and respect is amazing. And, the weirdest part of this trick? I even have friends that are amazingly, intellegntly hot and sexy that I *don’t* have sex with because we are not sexually turned on by each other but enjoy hanging out together. Oh no!!!!!! I’ve been “friend zoned” arrrrrrghhh!! Does anyone have some PUA tricks that I can manipulate her into thinking that I am a great piece of ask to fuck to valdiate her sexuality to me??!?!?
*It’s really a simple trick to the point that to call it a trick is really derogatory to those who do not understand the importance of being a nice, fucking person. That you are not owed sex even if you are a nice fucking person. No one owes you sex! It’s so simple even this privileged, middle-aged white, cis-genered male understands it…..
I need people to respond to my survey. Please, I am desperate. Please do not use any coarse words
https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fes.surveymonkey.com%2Fr%2FF56KM2R&h=uAQFujqDp&s=1
That’s not quite right. I read an economist view of this a while ago and it struck me as being a good analysis. Our “aging” problem in advanced industrial democracies is not really about age. It’s about the fact that, with longer life expectancies, we now have two, rather than one, generations of retired people to support. And it’s absolutely true in my own family. My 90 year old mum and her two 65+ daughters are all retired.
The way to solve this “problem” is to concentrate on education of girls and employment of women to ensure that the mean age of mothers at first birth is nearer 30 than 20. A long-lived society with women having children from age 20 or thereabouts will have multiple generations by the time each individual woman is 80 years old.
A woman 80 years old in a society when first births occur around age 20ish will be, or will soon be, a great-great-grandmother. In a society where the usual-average-mean age at first birth is 30ish, that 80 year old woman can only be a grandmother. She would have been around 60 years old when her first child had her first child. Her eldest grandchild could only be 20 when attending her 80th birthday party – and their first child won’t be born for another 10 years yet.
Focusing on number of generations in a family rather than number of children makes for some interesting thought experiments.
@ Dreaming, #3:
But the squinting makes us look sexy, right? Right…?
Anyways, I laughed hard at that. Thanks. :)
mikipuita #61, if you want to improve the chances of anyone even considering clicking on your link you might like to add a few words about what it is and why you want it.
It’s funny (as in, not at all amusing) how the whole world doesn’t leap to espouse what is so patently a win-win – the policy of supporting women’s education, greater economic independence and access to reproductive healthcare even though we see all over the world how this goes hand-in-hand with social stability and slowing the birthrate (and hence reducing environmental degradation and the depletion of resources) to the benefit of all of us. Why, it’s almost like we can’t stand to see any immediate or medium-term benefit going to not-us, even when it harms all of us in the slightly longer term.
opposablethumbs
It often annoys me that things that improve the lives of girls and women always need to be justified with some greater good, you know, how more education and later marriage slow population growth and reduce poverty and so on. As if “it improves the lives of girls and women” wasn’t a good enough reason, all expenses towards that must also benefit the men.
It seems like the opposition has no such qualms. The fact that it benefits girls and women is reason enough to oppose it, no matter the secondary benefits for the rest of society.
Can I just put in a few words for adoption? Nothing weird or out-there or angry, I promise.
There are children waiting for a forever family, and while I recognize that not every person is cut out to be a parent, and not every parent is gonna be able to handle adopting, I think that more people would consider, and opt for, adoption if there wasn’t this weird idea that the only “real” families are those that fit the “natural” family unit (mom, dad, bio-kids).