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all organisms, including humans, have evolved to prioritize reproduction, or they wouldn't have survived.
Some people can see past that instinct and limit their progeny. Others blindly follow millions of years of programming and have child after child.
In some societies, having more children is a still a survival technique, but isn't really needed in modern America.
Incidentally, horrible things have happened throughout history. I don't think modern times are that much worse.
If people in the Middle Ages said "OMG, plague! Fires! I can't bring a child into this awful world!" you might not be here to express your angst today.
I know I will get a lot of push back on this but I feel it is something that is worth saying:
I think people who keep having children - especially more than 1 - while the Earth is heating up and we are likely to end up with horrible and plentiful environmental disasters including extreme temperatures, more frequent floods, hurricanes, and fires etc - is kind of irresponsible.
When someone tells me with glee, "____ is having another baby!" (2nd or 3rd or 4th), I just shake my head and say "How is that a GOOD thing?" I would never bring a child into this world nowadays.
And in addition to the natural disasters and temperatures increasing, the oceans rising, ice melting, forest fires and smoke in the northwest states, floods and hurricanes in the south, threat of nuclear war ... there is also the seemingly increasing division among the American people - hating each other, more racism and bigotry than ever, threat of civil war and domestic terrorism...
I know there is a drive to reproduce and continue the human species... but ... it seems like maybe people should slow down already with having more kids at this time.
Additionally, it drives me crazy when people have children who clearly cannot afford them.
Parents are both working and they can barely afford good daycare... I know women who are single mothers who can barely take care of themselves yet insist on having a child that has to be raised by random daycare centers etc... or expect Mom or grandma to take care of their babies while they work...
I just don't get why people keep insisting on having children they can't afford and who will almost certainly face a very harsh environment as they grow up, maybe even see a day come when the Earth is practically uninhabitable.
This isn't the 1950's or even 60's... when the world was pretty stable and life was much easier - at least here in the USA. Why have more and more children nowadays?
Make it make sense.
People have been saying this for centuries.
The fertility and birth rate have both been decreasing for decades.
all organisms, including humans, have evolved to prioritize reproduction, or they wouldn't have survived.
Some people can see past that instinct and limit their progeny. Others blindly follow millions of years of programming and have child after child.
In some societies, having more children is a still a survival technique, but isn't really needed in modern America.
Incidentally, horrible things have happened throughout history. I don't think modern times are that much worse.
If people in the Middle Ages said "OMG, plague! Fires! I can't bring a child into this awful world!" you might not be here to express your angst today.
People in the middle ages didn't have much in the way of birth control. Not sure that time period is a very good comparison to today's world for number of children.
But would you want them to experience floods, fires and hurricanes and etc on a yearly or semi-annual/quarterly basis?
Be burned out or flooded out of homes?
Fighting over water?
Fighting over food? Food shortages?
Various types of shortages of necessities?
Living in 110+ degree heat much of the year?
These things are no longer crazy conspiracy theories they are what scientists are saying are GOING TO happen and we are already seeing it.
Polar ice caps melting, oceans heating, floor zones increasing, fires increasing...
I dunno. I would not want to bring a child onto /into such a planet. Certainly no more than ONE child!
But honestly I would feel irresponsible to even bring One.
To each their own.
One way or another, many people are programmed to marry and make families. There are the biological urges, the family pushing, what we see in TV and the movies, if not financial incentives here and there. Now I say this that while I don't have these compulsions, I missed out on the line in heaven to seek a mate, I never the less understand that they do exist.
For many, I believe having children is their way of being immortal. What they are will be carried on by their children. Me, immortality is spiritual.
As far as having more than one. A, B, and C....at least.
A: Remember that low infant mortality is a recent thing, so many, one way or another, may be operating under the concept of having many for those who do not survive. Add to it the various factions and how they feel about birth control. Further, while I don't know if parents think this way, having a child murdered would also be a supporting reason to have more than one.
B: Is it all about the parent or is it about the child as well? What does it mean to them to be the single child? Do parents consider them having someone, a brother or sister, in their own world for them to relate to, to be able to talk to, play with?
C: Do fathers push for more children? A and B. A: I remember the ER episode, Bloodline I think, where Abby asks Luka
Spoiler
"Is one enough?" having lost her womb in the aftermath of the attack of the previous episode. Afterwards, Luka goes into a furious destructive outburst that they can have no more children.
Are fathers programmed, one way or another, to have big families?
B: For all the perils that await the next generation, is it the mothers, the women, who might appreciate it more? Or perhaps not for as women, so many of my sisters have said that growing up, they were taught to procreate, procreate, procreate. After all, what does the previous generation ask, often...."When are you going to give me grandchildren?".
People in the middle ages didn't have much in the way of birth control. Not sure that time period is a very good comparison to today's world for number of children.
Abstinence, certain herbs, or post-natal birth control of killing or allowing the child to die after birth were all used to limit children.
My point is that life in the Middle Ages was arguably much worse than it is today, but people didn't decide not to reproduce.
I do think the world is overpopulated and we should limit the number of kids we have, but if nobody has any kids, humankind will die off much faster than global warming (cough, cough) would finish it off.
Yeah well, you don't know what you are talking about.
I have hyperfertility (aka hyperovulation). I can get pregnant when I'm already pregnant; it's happened three times & the first time it was so anomalous that it qualified as a reportable occurrence to the CDC (conceived twice after I was already pregnant).
One of my triplets spontaneously aborted but I retained two & gave birth to twins who were days apart in gestational age. My second set of twins were about a week apart in gestational age. Again, I had conceived after I was already pregnant. My youngest is a vasectomy baby. It happens. Not just to me but to a lot of women.
I don't know anybody with a lot of kids who actually planned them & the topic of this thread is "why do people have multiple children". The point of my comment wasn't to defend myself personally for having had multiple children; but to point out that it's not that people are planning on having multiple children:
It's that people are choosing to NOT have multiple abortions.
The existence of "safe family planning" methods is a myth. Especially for healthy people. I have horror stories about every method available. They are all awful.
Thank you. It's interesting that the "Birth control isn't 100%" mantra is only valid for those choosing abortion but has no validity for those who choose life. Even more weird that's it's happening on a thread about why people have multiple children. Life should be the default setting, not the other way around.
There was a story in the paper a few years about a family who had two kids and the father had a vasectomy. The wife got pregnant, and they happy accepted No. 3. Then she had tubal ligation...and No. 4 appeared anyway.
I wanted so much to have a family of kids, four maybe, but I only got to have one because my marriage had turned bad and I couldn't stick my mother with another kid while I was working. I hoped for a time that I would get to remarry and have more kids, but I never got that chance. If people want more children and can care for them, whose business is it?
However, it's not to say that happy accidents like that are completely unpreventable if they are not planned for nor wanted. I'm sure after the 1st happy accident, you learned quite a bit about your hyperfertility. You could have taken steps to prevent them from happening again, but you chose not to. But let's not pretend that this was completely inevitable and unpreventable.
Exactly,
A "Happy accident" is a terrible rationalization for pure irresponsibility.
What a foolish comment, as if Democrats and others couldn't possibly believe in the value of human life.
As for the OP's original comment, not everyone is an extreme pessimist. Even the leaders of the CCP in China have admitted their one child policy was a mistake. Instead of blaming parents for having children because they can't afford them, maybe we should blame those who allowed housing, fuel and groceries to inflate to extremely high prices that many can't afford.
I am not an extreme pessimist. I follow science. Realism is not pessimism. Though it may seem that way when things are changing for the worse. One can either accept what is really happening or one can bury one's head in the sand and pretend everything is fine. I choose to see what is really happening according to stats and science.
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