Luxuries? Where in my post did I say that I didn't want to have kids because of luxuries? Kindly don't put words in my mouth, okay? Pretty arrogant of you to do that, I must say!
With the high taxes nowadays, often one income isn't enough to feed a husband and wife, much less a wholesale brood of children... even if they both want a large family.
No, it's not luxuries... sometimes, in today's job market, people can hardly take care of themselves.
I'm now too old to have kids, even if I had wanted to, but I got a 30% PAY CUT over a year ago. I've been the sole support of both of us, and my guy only recently started working again. We've been making do with the help of payday loans and some certain friends.
If I had had a whole litter of children to deal with on top of all I've been through in the last couple of years, I'd probably have eaten the barrel of my revolver, because the level of stress would have been even worse than it has been.
So... Mrs. High-and-Mighty, since you have NO knowledge of what anyone else's situation here is, you really have NO BUSINESS making pronouncements about how many LUXURIES I've had rather than having children. Believe me, there have not been very many LUXURIES under my roof... not lately, and not ever.
In my opinion, people who have dozens of kids without a clue of how to either take care of them, or have no idea of how they're even going to feed them (once weaned), have no business assuming that it's okay to live off the redistributed taxes of the rest of us, who are also struggling. In my opinion, they're being highly irresponsible.
Most couples self limit these days, for precisely the reasons I mentioned. They may not think of the things they have as luxuries, but believe me, families who chose to have several kids instead of always having a fairly new car, or the biggest house in the neighborhood, or trips to Disney every year, think of those things that way. Not that the families with more kids necessarily want those things; they are not as important to them as the love and fun times generated by their families.
We have four kids, and we never took them to Disney, Our kids never asked to go, mostly because none of us can stand giant crowds of people. The year we celebrated our 25th anniversary, we bought a brand new car; our first.
Different families make different choices that seem right to them. As long as a family is working and supporting all their kids, I don't care how many, or how few they have, whether they're stone poor or living in the lap of luxury.