Breederville says YES!
Posted on 05/30/2007 11:21:26 AM PDT by qam1
Contradictory messages about women's fertility are breeding like rabbits this week. In largely-Catholic Brazil, the government is subsidizing birth control pills so poor women can afford the contraceptive, despite a recent visit by Pope Benedict XVI, who mainly used his time to condemn abortion, contraception and sex outside marriage. In China, officials are rounding up rural, pregnant women and conducting forced abortions to enforce the mandatory one child policy.
In Canada, on the other hand, I'm the problem. Thirty-something. Childless. And a threat to Canada's future economic well being. The nation's fertility rate has plummeted to 1.53 children per woman, and Maclean's has published the latest cry of alarm: "Hey Lady! What will it take to make you breed? Your government needs to know."
The culprits, according to the article, are female education and fiscal autonomy, secularization, birth control, Sex and the City, a heightened desire for personal freedom and the angst that comes of bringing a child into a dangerous world. "In a hyper-individualistic, ultra-commodified culture like ours, motherhood, for better and worse, is less a fact of life than just another lifestyle choice."
You don't have to read much between the lines to discern the big class bias behind all of this hand wringing. Stats actually show that young, unmarried, uneducated, non-professional women are doing just fine in the baby department. The elitist worry seems to be that the "right" kind of woman is forgoing kids. Read: middle class and up.
Baby economics?
The Maclean's story goes on to crunch the economic equation such women face -- and believe me, I've done the numbers myself.
The cost of a kid ranges from $260,000 to $1.6 million depending on whom you talk to. Women lose income when they have a child, unlike men, the "motherhood penalty," of about 20 per cent per year. Kids are the "new glass ceiling," only 74 per cent of women who leave the work force are able to return, and only 40 per cent of those return to full time, professional jobs. Mothers are 44 percent less likely to be hired than non-mothers with the same resume, experiences and qualifications. So not surprisingly, while the majority of male senior execs have kids, the majority of female execs don't. In short, women bear the costs -- financial and career -- of having children. "These days, it's not just a matter of a woman wanting children, it's a matter wanting them at the expense of everything else she's worked for."
What solutions flow from this analysis? Cash incentives don't work to address the problem, (paging Mr. Harper) but the French experiment does. Among many other benefits, the government provides an extensive, free child care system where parents can leave children on a moment's notice, a calibrated income-tax rate for families, and a tax deduction for in-home child care help. The fertility rate has soared to 2.0 from 1.8 in just two years. And some feminists say the real victory is that women no longer shoulder alone the social burden of reproduction.
Fine, let's say we wave a magic wand and make all that happen in Canada. The financial and career barriers have disappeared like a stinky diaper in one of those diaper genie things. There's stimulating, free daycare. I can keep working part time and spend time with my pretend child. I can keep climbing the career ladder, rung per rung, with my child-free sisters....
All well and good. But next time my friends and I get together to discuss the baby question, I'd invite the editors of Maclean's, and any wonk they'd like to bring along, to join us. They would hear a conversation very different from the one reflected in their input-output, incentives-driven analysis.
They would hear women struggling to reconcile head and heart.
Real conversation
When my other child-free but child-keen friends get together we don't talk about having kids to stimulate the economy, provide skilled workers and pay for boomers to have hip replacement surgery. We don't consider it our duty to solve the "crisis" caused by boomers retiring without enough young people to pay for their medicare. We don't lie awake at night fretting over the looming labour shortage, even if Canada does wind up, as projected, 1.2 million workers short by 2020.
We don't imagine it our purpose in life to produce labourers, consumers and taxpayers.
What we talk about a lot is whether it is morally right to have a child, given what we know about the state of planet.
My friends and I talk about how people like us in developed countries are vacuuming up the world's resources. We belong to the 10 per cent of the world population who consume 90 per cent of the Earth's resources. We talk about global overpopulation. We talk about children in other countries who don't have enough to eat or access to medicine.
Kind friends have soothed some of those concerns. Some have offered, brightly, that we might find real solutions to looming environmental apocalypse quicker than we think. Others have told me I should feel entitled to do what makes me happy. Hey, you're only here once! And some have provided this reassurance: if I create and raise a happy, healthy person with a small footprint who respects others then that's a kind of service to the planet.
Thanks, everyone. So far, though, your lullaby is still not quite strong enough to convince me.
What I would need to breed are reasons based on ethics not economics. That's how I've approached other personal decisions like which career to pursue, or even what clothing to wear.
That's just the reality that today's potential parents are dealing with, that's all.
Look, I don't have any problems with anyone having as many kids as they can afford. I also don't see why anyone who has a large family needs other people doing so seemingly for the purpose of justifying their own choices. You want a brown house, I want a blue house. Neither of us is better or worse for that.
Me, too. We have three or four in the $10 pool.
Irrelevant. It’s still about choices, especially for those well-enough off to agonize over overpopulation and the environment.
“...the angst that comes of bringing a child into a dangerous world...”
Just when was the world ever not dangerous?..............
If moron elitist liberals are so scared of the “dangerous world” why not do us all a favor and kill themselves?
Whenever i read about how much it costs to raise a child, and why that is an excuse not to have a child, I remember my econ professor when I was beginning my MBA classes. On the first day he asked each of us to introduce ourselves. Several were young men who were married for a few years, looking to improve themselves, etc. They mentioned waiting to begin a family when they could afford a child. The professor answered, “If you wait until you can afford it, you will never have one. Forget about that, and have a kid, then you can figure out your finances. Otherwise you’ll end up childless.”
What does it tell you?
You intended this for someone else,I think, but thanks for the information. I disagree on only one detail. Phonics is not necessarily the way some kids learn to read. My son was beat over the head with it, but did not learn to read until he was twelve when we found that he is a “sight” reader. He has a devil of a time listening to lectures and getting information that way.
If I were to have kids, and did not move to a self sufficient home schooling community in a remote area, I predict that I would be involved in numerous confrontations down at whatever school I sent them to including private ones. I’d also fight a losing battle trying to keep them from getting brainwashed by the MSM, and all the spew on the web. Ergo, no kids. I guess what would make me want to have kids is a world that no longer exists, and has not existed since the 1950s. I would have been a great 1950s dad, I live in the wrong time.
Breederville says YES!
Yo, youngster with the great burden of carrying crosses that you clearly feel unfit to bare.
The very first commandment in the Bible, given to Man, was to "be fruitful, and multiply."
I am excited that you read and post here from time to time, but mostly I think that you need to grow up, read a bit more, and respect your elders.
You'll have none of that, and so down the road, you'll get exactly what you have given.
Time has a way of insuring such things.
THAT MAKES 19 GRANDKIDS FOR ME!!!!!!!"
"I like my cigar, but I take it out every once in a while. " -Groucho Marx
Gai kakhen afenyam
and I mean that in the nicest way.
An abundance of children to care for you in your old age is nature’s welfare and retirement system. Tinker with it at your peril. The womb is the real weapon of mass destruction, the excess populations are used to wage war.
Agreed, and the overpopulation and eco-nut reasons are just excuses that sound good over a cup of Starbucks with your trendy friends. However, one of the first choices that any man or woman has to make in the breeding game is to find a suitable partner. It's way easier for a good man to find a good woman, than it is for a good woman to find a good man. That's especially true if that good woman wants to get started with a family while she's still in her twenties, at that point, most men who haven't been taken are still on some sort of exteneded adolescence.
It's no wonder that a lot of women still find themselves without a man to father their children when they're in their mid-thirties. They just have not had good choices for "daddy" material.
I agree. It's a tough situation for many.
That you're Orthodox Jewish, and generally, you don't think the world has changed fundamentally for about the last two thousand years.
Again, as I've said, live your life any way you want to, as long as you can afford the kids. It's a lot harder to do today than it used to be back when you were doing this.
Ah, good, use an old, dead language to insult me, because you’d get banned for spelling out that phrase in modern English. Or the same deity that would get hurt by having his name spelled out might be offended, as well. But Yiddish is what he speaks when he’s having fun, Hebrew when he’s being serious.
Please don't tell me what I think. You are not a freaking mind reader.
Margarita was awesome.....GOT MORE??
FREERIDING IS FUN!!!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.