I'd love to see some scholarly essay on just WHY Americans are so obsessed with the necessity of children... both their holy precious right to have as many as they want, and the obligation of every other woman of the proper age to follow suit as soon as they can find a guy to fuck 'em. Or maybe it's the same in other cultures as well, but as I don't exactly live in those other cultures, I wouldn't know.
Sure, once upon a time, you would need to have lots and lots of kids so that at least a few would be left to help you on the farm. We also had a huge expanse of mostly-empty land to the west just begging to be filled with copies of us, which meant more spawnin'. Plus, of course, it didn't used to be as wonderfully optional as it is nowadays. But now we don't have to worry about most of our kids dying before they hit their fifth birthday. We don't have miles and miles of land that "need" to be "tamed" by our descendents; in fact, it's pretty damn full up now. So what logical reason remains? Inertia is not a logical reason.
It's a nasty world out there, full of suffering, OVERfull of people who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground, and yet somehow it's not allowed to say "hmm, I don't want to bring anyone else into this mess".
There are kids in the foster system waiting their whole lives to be adopted, but somehow the logical response to "I just love children" is to ignore all the needy ones that EXIST, and make a NEW one.
There are kids whose parents popped them out and decided they didn't want them; I've met a little girl who's probably going to spend her whole life in The System, because she and her sister were abused horribly by their shitfucks of parents and are now both irrevocably broken at the ages of I think 8 and 10. But by God, their parents just HAD to have them! And indeed they would have been lax to do otherwise!
And of course on a more personal note, my father was a monster and my mom is a good person but made a pretty mediocre mother. I have trouble just getting by myself in the world, let alone trying to teach someone else how to be a functional human being. What kind of parent would *I* be, given that? Gee, I guess I just better get to birthin' and find out the hard way! What could possibly go wrong?!
Basically it is all a giant vat of WTF, along with some other things that technically belonged in the main post instead of this reply to your comment, except that here is where I thought of them.
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Sure, once upon a time, you would need to have lots and lots of kids so that at least a few would be left to help you on the farm. We also had a huge expanse of mostly-empty land to the west just begging to be filled with copies of us, which meant more spawnin'. Plus, of course, it didn't used to be as wonderfully optional as it is nowadays. But now we don't have to worry about most of our kids dying before they hit their fifth birthday. We don't have miles and miles of land that "need" to be "tamed" by our descendents; in fact, it's pretty damn full up now. So what logical reason remains? Inertia is not a logical reason.
It's a nasty world out there, full of suffering, OVERfull of people who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground, and yet somehow it's not allowed to say "hmm, I don't want to bring anyone else into this mess".
There are kids in the foster system waiting their whole lives to be adopted, but somehow the logical response to "I just love children" is to ignore all the needy ones that EXIST, and make a NEW one.
There are kids whose parents popped them out and decided they didn't want them; I've met a little girl who's probably going to spend her whole life in The System, because she and her sister were abused horribly by their shitfucks of parents and are now both irrevocably broken at the ages of I think 8 and 10. But by God, their parents just HAD to have them! And indeed they would have been lax to do otherwise!
And of course on a more personal note, my father was a monster and my mom is a good person but made a pretty mediocre mother. I have trouble just getting by myself in the world, let alone trying to teach someone else how to be a functional human being. What kind of parent would *I* be, given that? Gee, I guess I just better get to birthin' and find out the hard way! What could possibly go wrong?!
Basically it is all a giant vat of WTF, along with some other things that technically belonged in the main post instead of this reply to your comment, except that here is where I thought of them.