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Six women speak about their fears of bringing a child into a world that feels like it’s teetering on the edge of collapse - and why they’re choosing to do it anyway
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- Title
- The World Feels Like It's Falling Apart. These Women Decided To Get Pregnant Anyway.
- Word count
- 3289 words
I feel this fear too -- my wife and I have been talking about starting a family, but besides us not being quite financially ready yet, the whole world is falling apart, seemingly, before our eyes... it's a tough moral situation, I think. We have considered adoption, as well, and I very much want to adopt -- but I think she wants to carry one child to term, at least. It's complicated!
This article also made me think of friends of ours, who just had a baby a few months ago after trying for years, IVF, the whole nine. We haven't seen them, obviously, because of Covid. I can't imagine what it must've been like.
I think the whole feels like part is mostly overlooked here. Yes, we have problems that we're facing, but as far as I know, the status quo is still improving every year. Ultimately you can never know what the future holds. We might overcome the issues we have, and then you'd have denied your potential children life in paradise.
It's not denial if they are never brought into existence this is absurd.
I do appreciate your optimism though - paradise is a strong word.
I'm simply following the logic of the people in the article. If they are keeping their potential children safe from danger, then you can view from the other side and say that they are also denying their potential children the joys of life, completely ignoring the fact that having the priviledge of even being born in North America or Western/Central Europe.
In what ways is the status quo improving? The climate is visibly more apocalyptic every year. Wages are stagnant. A floundering United States, an increasingly aggressive Russia and the continued rise of China make for a grim geopolitical outlook for the near future. The fallout from COVID is likely to be felt for many years if not decades in many countries (just as the fallout from 2008 was still being felt in many ways in the US before the pandemic).
And the above is my attempt at a somewhat globally neutral take. The US political situation is absolutely precarious and scary right now, even if Trump loses the election.
I'm in a relatively phenomenal position with a stable, well paid job that lets me live in a low cost of living area, and I struggle to see how my status quo is improving, much less the case for the average person.
I'm too tired to source my comment right now, so please forgive me. But I'd wager that violence worldwide has been decreasing steadily, as well as disease and illness. You need to understand that a large portion of the world lives in areas that still heavily profit from the advancements that western civilization has made in the last 100 years. We're still actively, and sucessfully eradicating disease around the globe. We've signifinicantly advanced the rights of women and marginalized groups and are still advancing them in areas where this hasn't happened yet.
I'm not claiming that the issues you listed are not real, or serious, or that they don't need to be dealt with, they do. But society will always face problems. Simply stopping procreation isn't going to get us anywhere.
The question of violence on a global scale isn't one I'm particularly well equipped to comment on. Some brief research suggests that it's not a field with readily available and easily digestible graphs handy. The first site I found with hard numbers suggests that violence is in fact trending up. While we may be eradicating disease in the third world, we're also spending tremendous amounts of money on end of life care in the first world, with dubious real benefit. I will concede that there does seem to be a very positive trend in terms of acceptance of all people as they are.
Simply stopping procreation isn't going to solve everything. But (and I know this is a deeply controversial opinion for some reason) having a lot fewer people on this planet would make things a whole lot easier in a huge number of ways. I'm not advocating for forcing anyone not to procreate, but I'm certainly not going to complain if people chose not to of their own accord.
It's great that health care and civil rights issues are getting better in lots of places, but if we don't wake up to what we're doing to the planet soon (if it's not already too late), it's just not going to matter, and as climate issues get worse it's going to magnify our current economic and political issues by many orders of magnitude.
I was going with this, but your data is more recent.
Most definitely not. But if you look at where human population is growing, you'll find out that the more advanced a country is, the more it's population growth stagnates. The UN is already estimating that the 10th milliardth person is never going to be born. We're still growing, yes, but not at rates that the planet couldn't support (if we used the resources we have more wisely). Overpopulation simply isn't as much of a problem as people want it to be.
But you don't know that. Even if the worst case scenario enters, and global population collapses in a third world war and we got into one of those post-apocalyptic scenarios YA novels seem to be so obsessed about, more young people are great, because their rate of survival is definitely going to be higher than the rate of old people.
From perspective of individualist and environmentalist, the status quo has been getting worse consistently for about 100 years.
I strongly disagree with that. A hundred years ago, rivers regularly burst into flame due to all of the unprocessed toxic waste that was freely dumped into them. A hundred years ago, human rights were basically nonexistent for anyone but cishet white men in western countries, and even they had to deal with things like working in sweatshops and being abducted by the state and forced to die in wars to maintain the empire.
I'm no wide-eyed Pinker acolyte, but while the progress in individual rights and environmentalism over the past 100 years has been patchy, uneven, and fragile, it's also been significant and real.