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Big decision. I’ve found one of the hardest things to do is to change your belief system to theirs for the sake of unity and peace just to remain a family.
One reason unmentioned so far in this thread is the issue of spouse abuse as another possible reason that some women don't want to have children.
I suspect that many women are aware of the prevalence of violence directed at wives by their husbands. There are countless news accounts and books on the subject that would make many leery of becoming tied down with children, unable to work, and suffering abuse at the hands of their spouses.
Today, the NY Times reran their review of a 2019 book on the topic: "NO VISIBLE BRUISES, What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, by Rachel Louise Snyder." The book cites many case histories but is unable to offer much in the way of solutions. Prosecutors tend to not take domestic violence as seriously as violence committed in public by stranger-on-stranger. But if I were a woman, this mess would be in the back of my mind when considering marriage and motherhood.
Excerpt:
"As Rachel Louise Snyder argues in her powerful new book, domestic violence has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. Fifty women a month are shot and killed by their partners. Domestic violence is the third leading cause of homelessness. And 80 percent of hostage situations involve an abusive partner. Nor is it only a question of physical harm: In some 20 percent of abusive relationships a perpetrator has total control of his victim’s life. (Countries including Britain and France have laws to protect against this kind of abuse, but the United States does not.)"
For those without a subscription to the NY Times, here's the Amazon review of the book that all may access.
Let's not go off topic into discussions of domestic abuse, but keep comments on track of how this issue might deter becoming parents.
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Well having children does turn any form of cohabitation, with or without marriage, into what George Washington called an "entangling alliance" which can and does stress out both partners. Domestic violence, which BTW can be inflicted by females on males as well as vice versa, is just one problem where having kids in the mix makes any solution more difficult.
It took about a year between the point where I broke up with my first husband and when I moved out. Things had already escalated prior to that, I still did have some hope that he might get help for his mental health, but I was convinced that enough harm had been done that we were through. The reason that I continued to live in the same house (in a different bedroom) for that first year, is that I felt like I was waiting for him to say what he wanted from the situation, so that I could give it to him...and he was waiting for me to say what I wanted from the situation so that he could fight me on it. If it would hurt me, he'd take the kids. If I wanted him to keep the kids, he wanted me to take them. And so on about everything.
We were just sort of tentatively circling one another. It felt like a very delicate and dangerous situation. I didn't want to put him over the edge. At times he treated our kids like hostages.
But we were both dating other people. It was, and I'm sure that this is going to sound weird to most, a critical part of extricating myself from him. He would not truly believe that I no longer belonged to him until another man's hands had touched me and I hoped he'd find someone else so as to distract him so that I could get away. All part of the dance we were doing that year. He actually insisted that I help him with his dating profile and he tried to force me to talk him up to other women, until I pointed out to him that I would not take blame for whether he succeeded or failed and refused to accept any terms of "recruiting and training my replacement."
But to the point. Despite getting my tubes tied (I think I relied on it too soon) I conceived during that year, by another man. While still living with my armed and dangerous ex and working on strategy to get myself and our teenage sons out of there.
Not a chance in hell I was going to carry that pregnancy to term. No way. I had already done my research and set up an appointment to terminate and thankfully it was not necessary; I miscarried at 5 weeks. Because of this, I know that you cannot actually GET any kind of an abortion before 5 1/2 weeks, and I sure wish that people who talk in politics about these 6 week bans would mention that. They amount to a total ban, and people need to be aware of that fact, even if the woman knows that she is pregnant from the moment it happens, she'll have maybe 3 days window to get an abortion in a state that has a 6 week ban. But I digress... I was, in theory, somewhat against abortion at least for myself (though I was pro choice, I couldn't imagine choosing it.) Until I was in that situation, feeling that unsafe.
I could not even imagine being as vulnerable as pregnancy renders a person, under the circumstances in which I was living.
As for the man who contributed to that conception, he was kinda crazy too, if relatively harmless, and what we were getting up to was only meant to be a fling. He knew I'd gotten my tubes tied. Neither of us had any intention of forming a serious life bond...in fact I believed at that point that I never wanted to commit to another man ever again. Asking him to provide any kind of support or parental role to a baby at that point, would have been about as rational of demanding it from a stranger in the street. Hell, I didn't even trust him enough to let him meet the kids I had. He never did.
Most people probably think that I should not have started seeing others until I'd gotten well out and away from the ex and spent some time alone or something...but if I'd tried that, I never would have got away from him at all. He would have gone to any lengths to force me to stay if he had been able to keep thinking of me as "his." Being "with" someone else is the only way that he'd accept that it was over, and yet I didn't want to get serious too soon...for one thing, if he believed I truly loved someone new, during that time, then the new man would have been in serious danger.
So yeah, it's pretty wild the kind of calculations you have to do and decisions you find yourself making that you never thought you would, when things go suddenly sideways into the land of serious domestic violence. And it makes no sense at all to actually want to get pregnant, if you are very uncertain about your own safety and likelihood of survival, if you feel constantly in danger and under threat.
There are several reasons why I'm averse to having kids:
1) Financial. With cost of living skyrocketing, many people are just able to get by alone. Adding 1-2 kids on top of it makes it harder.
2) Time. It's a 2nd job. You give up a lot of leisure and it's harder to fit things into your schedule
3) Having kids makes it harder to travel. Harder to move, if you want a better; you could still move, but displacing your children. (If you and your partner separate, you may have to be in the same state for 18+ years so that both parents can see the child).
4) Genetics. One may have illnesses (mental and physical) in their family's DNA that they don't want to risk passing on.
5) Is this a world we want to raise kids in? Granted, people have expressed this sentiment in past generation and still had kids anyway. Maybe the future will be much better, but the past few years, at least for NA/EU, it doesn't look good at the moment.
6) There's a possibility that once your children grows up, they all move to the other side of the country and rarely visit. Imagine starting a family just to be alone 30 years later.
7) It makes separation much more difficult. People may need to stay in bad marriages longer than they need to. They may have to pay child support for 20 years for a child they only see 1 day a week.
8) Sleep deprivation, and mental exhaustion in general.
Each of these reasons are self-contained. They are not interconnected where fixing 1 of them improves all of them. Even if 3-4 of these reasons aren't issues, that doesn't erase the other 4-5.
Imagine 8 tiny little ants in the grass.
Now imagine a giant elephant standing nearby, an 8 ton bull towering over everything.
The ants are your "reasons to not have kids".
The elephant is the summation of having a kid... the hard work, the patience and forbearance you learn, the sheer joy and satisfaction.
There's been much painful bleating in the press in recent years about a "birth dearth" and lower TFRs, etc., while pointing out how dire this is or unpatriotic or unholy or a dereliction of duty to avoid motherhood. I've provided a number of links to such articles in my critiques.
"...we tend to talk about not having children as a late-20th-century phenomenon..."
"...you’d think being childless was invented by millennials as another way of shirking our duty to society."
"“Today, we see a form of selfishness,” Pope Francis said last year. “We see that some people do not want to have a child.”
"To Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, it is an alarming development, possibly even a sign of America’s impending collapse, “for the leaders of our country to be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring.” (He blamed the "childless left" for this. Politicians like Vance always run the fear game on gullible voters, the old game of 'bad things will happen if you don't vote for me...because only I can fix it.')
"History is full of women without children: Among white women born in the last third of the 19th century in the United States, the norm was for one in five to have no children; among Black women that number was closer to one in three." (Why would women risk the dismal state of medicine by dying in childbirth or having infant after infant die of diseases prevalent in that era? Why would black women want to have children only to have them subjected to Jim Crow and other racism?)
"Matt Schlapp, the head of the influential Conservative Political Action Coalition, reportedly suggested last May that he supported abortion restrictions not just on moral grounds but also out of concern for America’s population numbers." (I'm rather certain his concern is for America's WHITE population numbers as this has been a fear of white nationalists for decades.)
"When studies ask women today why they’re not having children, their answers are pretty consistent: They don’t have the support networks, money or jobs that would make children possible; they worry about the effects of climate change on the next generation; and some of them simply want lives that prioritize other experiences." (This is a key item driving women's reticence to having children. Not explicitly mentioned is the impermanence of marriage in today's world and dire economic straights and massive workloads many single moms find themselves in.)
There we have it. There's always been a lot of women who did not want to become mothers, and didn't. Senator Vance, the Pope, and many others are telling us what they'd have us do, and trying to force women to do by overturning Roe and denying birth control products.
Plenty of women have looked at the issue of becoming mothers and have declined. Women with subscription access to the NY Times may want to fill out their questionnaire about why they chose to not having children. They state: "A selection of responses will be used in a future project. An editor will contact you before publishing your submission."
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Last edited by Mike from back east; 05-06-2023 at 11:00 AM..
Here's a recent article in the NY Times titled "The Lies Mothers Tell Themselves and Their Children" which is of interest to this thread. It gets at the issue of women who wanted more out of life than being dedicated to raising to children. As often the case with the NY Times, comments from readers are worth reading as much or more as the article itself.
The article is about a woman who found out that her mother never really wanted any children, married well and subjugated her life to her husband's career (a widespread occurrence for millions of women). She later learned that her mother wasn't really wanted by her mother either (the author's grandmother).
The comments are nothing short of amazing. Select the Reader's Pick to get the better comments first.
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There we have it. There's always been a lot of women who did not want to become mothers, and didn't. Senator Vance, the Pope, and many others are telling us what they'd have us do, and trying to force women to do by overturning Roe and denying birth control products.
Plenty of women have looked at the issue of becoming mothers and have declined. ..
What we frequently hear from the pro-natalist camp is that, first, the main problem isn't that too-few women are having children, but of those who do become mothers, too many have only one child, or perhaps two children, instead of the more canonical 3+. This is often ascribed to economic causes: kids are expensive, so families can only afford one or two, instead of more. Second, of those women who have aged out of their child-bearing years without having become mothers, it is asserted, that some 80% have thus become, not from explicit choice, but from confluence of pressures and obstacles. They are thus "child-less", rather than "child-free".
The number of the avowedly child-free, who knew from their own teens that they'd rather not become mothers, and who cleaved to this view throughout life, is small. It may be growing, but it remains small. If at one time it was 2%, and now it's 4%, that's a doubling... but unless the number doubles again and again and again, it remains insignificant. Instead, the child-free movement has become a lighting rod for religious conservatives, cultural nationalists, populists and the like. Whereas those who wanted children, but didn't end up having them, are excused as victims, those who never wanted kids, are panned as traitors to the Nation, or even, to what it means to be a woman.
To quantify the argument, I do wonder: do we have actual numbers, on what percentage of women in America, in Europe (even better, delineated by country) are avowedly child-free? And how has this number been growing?
What we frequently hear from the pro-natalist camp is that, first, the main problem isn't that too-few women are having children, but of those who do become mothers, too many have only one child, or perhaps two children, instead of the more canonical 3+. This is often ascribed to economic causes: kids are expensive, so families can only afford one or two, instead of more. Second, of those women who have aged out of their child-bearing years without having become mothers, it is asserted, that some 80% have thus become, not from explicit choice, but from confluence of pressures and obstacles. They are thus "child-less", rather than "child-free".
The number of the avowedly child-free, who knew from their own teens that they'd rather not become mothers, and who cleaved to this view throughout life, is small. It may be growing, but it remains small. If at one time it was 2%, and now it's 4%, that's a doubling... but unless the number doubles again and again and again, it remains insignificant. Instead, the child-free movement has become a lighting rod for religious conservatives, cultural nationalists, populists and the like. Whereas those who wanted children, but didn't end up having them, are excused as victims, those who never wanted kids, are panned as traitors to the Nation, or even, to what it means to be a woman.
To quantify the argument, I do wonder: do we have actual numbers, on what percentage of women in America, in Europe (even better, delineated by country) are avowedly child-free? And how has this number been growing?
Well, I don't particularly like these people and don't/won't hang out with them. So if they don't like me for being child-free, I really don't care. Growing up in the South, I was already exasperated with Bible-thumping nitwits before I was 12.
I saw the compromises my parents made because of me and my sister, and while they would have insisted these were "worth it", to me it did not seem to be so.
For me, again, a "triad" :
1 Never had any desire to be a father.
2 Not expecting to be truly wealthy, I wanted to use my adequate but limited funds for other purposes
3 Not being willing to make the compromises in lifestyle to "do it right" I preferred to not do it at all.
So there you have it,
Of course for me personaly, at 65 years old, this ship has sailed long ago anyway. But I have no regrets on my choice.
9) The world has more than enough people. I'm not even one of those global warming alarmists. I just don't see the point of cities with millions of people. Maybe if I lived in the country or a small town I'd feel different.
10) I know many people who have a bad relationship with their grown adult children. Some don't even speak to each other. All that sacrifice raising a kid for nothing.
11) If you need children to make your life "happier", more "worthwhile", or "fulfilled", maybe it's you who are being "self-gratified".
It can go beyond a bad relationship.
I've seen some horribly sad examples where the child stuffed the parent in a nursing home and ran off with the money. When one neighbor was in the hospital, his daughter drove up in a van and tried to steal his belongings.
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An Epidemic of Violence We Never Discuss
