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.
Government provides a flood of liquidity via Government Sponsored Entities that inflates the values of homes and encourages indebtness, last I checked the GSEs had more debt than the publicly held Treasury debt and were incapable of producing financial statements.
This is in addition to restricting new construction, taxing people to purchase "open space", etc.
Pish-tosh. Plenty of people living comfortable, modern, American lives have large families. It's simply a matter of your priorities.
How many children are your granite countertops worth? Your "garden bath"? Your "tray ceilings"? Do you lie in bed at night thinking, "My ceilings make me so happy!?" I lie in bed thinking, "My baby makes me so happy!"
(Note, this is a rhetorical "you," not a personal "you.")
Our society is more productive and supports a greater number of people in greater comfort than any agricultural society. If people choose not to have children, that's their business, but to claim it's economically unfeasible is simply false.
That's an interesting angle, I'd never thought of this from the fertility angle. Much of goobermint high school is squandered time that could be better used by having serious students head for college when they are 16. Indeed several of my most intelligent friends simply dropped out of high school and went straight to college.
When she ends up bitter, alone, and dying from a degenerative disease without anyone to take care of her, maybe she can get back to us on the Malthusian swill.
Sure it does. I have 9 kids, and they are educated, productive adults living all over the world and literally influencing the lives of millions.
They are doing G-D's work, and I am very proud of each one of them.
I know it’s tough, but I’ll take one for the team and help Anna have the kids she’s always wanted.
Angst? Saving the Planet? What a POS! The real motive is that a child requires a change in lifestyle. She wants to save resources then simply turn the clock back to 1955 and live the way that the Cleevers did.
Maybe it's just coincidental that as a society industrializes, the cost of education, housing, and medical care go up way faster than the gains in productivity from that industrialization. Those are three major expenses in having families, it's not just food and clothing.
You should not leave out the elite universities. They have been socialist seminaries since the 1930s. Their missionaries have taken root in the every cow college in America.
LOL! :)...drink-up
Glad you figured out a way to pay for them, somehow. It just isn't that easy, anymore. I presume that was some time ago, since they'd have to be adults to "influence the lives of millions." And not just twentysomethings, either.
Of course, the fact that you cannot spell out your deity's whole name tells me a lot about your attitude on the oldest part of the Bible...
baby economics: $8,000 for your egg in NYC.
Do they think that humans are a virus or something? If so, then they shouldn't have kids.
Humans can be extremely productive, helping other humans overcome difficulties, even with a changing climate. Humans can learn to adapt to changing situations and help their fellow man do the same, providing they are given the freedom to do so. In most places about which I imagine these chicks would discuss as dangerous or difficult in the world, they are countries that deny their fellow human beings that freedom to do the best for themselves and their families.
Yep. It is called having a budget and priorities.
Do you want the three week cruise or the kid with the rubber ducky in the $10.00 kiddie pool?
Me, I am taking the kid.
I used to work with first time moms. They'd often spout this crap at first, but later, almost without exception, would go on to have another, and often two. Why ? Because babies are the most wonderful thing . Especially your own.
Uh, no thank you.
But I do appreciate the offer.
Incorrect.
The gains in productivity and in goods far out strip the cost of those things. If you doubt this I would suggest that you actually go and spend a little time living in a preindustrial society.
The price rises in relation to the quantity being consumed.
Houses are larger and better constructed then ever and if you go by square footage the cost has kept pace with inflation.
Medical care is being consumed at a higher rate, things that our parents, "just had to live with" because there were no treatments for that condition can now be treated. Resulting in both higher productivity and a higher quality of life.
Education which was confined to the basics with higher education being reserved for the wealthy has also been opened up to more people with the current high school graduate being three times more likely to being able to attend college then his father was.
On a side note notice how she never mentioned who will care for her in her later years. I guess she figures the Canadian Government will be there to comfort her.
You are correct. Under John Dewey's stewardship of the Columbia University teachers' college, so-called progressive education, with its attendant emphasis on socialization (i.e., conformance with subjective social norms) and deemphasis on learning and basic learning skills like phonics, spread throughout the educational system. Many conservatives may sneer at the "ivory towers" of the prestigious universities, but those ivory towers are the control towers of intellectual life. Secular humanists and socialists gained control of these universities in the 1930s and even earlier, if you are talking about Harvard or Columbia.
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