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"I received a private apology email from the woman who confronted me".
People can make mistakes, especially dealing with things on the edge that they haven't yet had a lot of experience with. The fact that an apology was made tells me that the person was trying to understand and reflect. That is a good look for any organization.
Agreed
> being a mother is literally the highest calling a woman can have. A blessing and privilege only afforded to women, and they tossed this founder out for no reason.
oh god no. What? "Highest calling" is a personal and subjective thing. Is my highest calling donating sperm for said activity?
Having children is a choice. It's not right or wrong. Someone could even have children and still feel like something else is a greater purpose in their life, and that's fine too, as long as they provide love and care for their children.
Let's not ascribe a biological function as being the primary point of being anything or anyone.
I'm assuming good faith, but this is a very problematic perspective.
* It's reductive, as not all women want to have children.
* It's exclusionary, as not all women can have children.
* It reinforces gender stereotypes.
* It's extremely commonly used to justify systemic discrimination.
Is it problematic to express adoration for the profession of doctors?
These types of expressions can be interpreted without being literally construed and deconstructed to atoms. It's *okay* for people to express positive sentiments about things—it's not necessary to put those sentiments under an electron microscope and describe their internal atomic-level contradictions. Because, we live in pleasenter world if people can freely express positive sentiments about things all the time, without too much worrying about "but what about..."
It's quite simple to avoid this - just recognize that the highest calling of anyone is a personal and subjective matter and trying to ascribe absolute value to it is silly. Talk about your own highest calling, not others.
Agreed!
I define my terms on my blog and github. You can define your terms on your blog and github. Those definitions will sometimes be similar, sometimes be different. We all benefit from the variety. It's a beautiful world.
What do you mean by dismissive?
This is some sexist godddam bullshit.
Yes, motherhood is important - for all of us, and people raising families are something we need to do better to accommodate society wide, but implying the most important thing a woman could ever do is be a baby factory is stupid regressive thinking.
Which makes a more meaningful impact to society and the world, raising one child or saving every human on the planet two hours of labor a week?
Ideally, no one should have to chose, you ought to be able to do both of those things at once, and not having to pick.
Without that occurring, society and civilization would soon cease to exist. It's a little difficult to overstate its importance. I would even go so far as to say that the most important thing a man can do is become a father.
If people were trying to disabuse the rest of us of the notion that a woman can't succeed in a career and also be a mother, the actions of the conference organizer undermined that.
> Which makes a more meaningful impact to society and the world, raising one child
Raising 2.1 children, but I'll forgive getting the number wrong. Pretending that this doesn't have a more meaningful impact than having a c-level job title in some company trying to launch a phone app that will sell us pet food more efficiently is asinine.
Not everyone needs to be a parent. We're not in a situation where humanity is in danger of extinction because of a reduction in childbirth. There are more pressing existential threats related to having more people than there are pressing existential threats related to having fewer, even if you don't believe in climate change, etc. We have wars over land and resources today, including powers with the ability to end modern human civilization in a nuclear holocaust.
None of which is to say people should stop having children if they want to, but the idea that the greatest contribution people can make to the world is having kids is absurd. You're being reductive in relegating it to making a phone app to sell pet food, so I'll do the same in the other direction - If an individual were to find a cheap and easily producible cure-all for cancer but remain childless, have they contributed less to humanity than an individual that does raise 2.1 children?
While true in the strict sense, this is false in a more general sense. Yes, everyone does need to become a parent. You're not the 1-in-100 exception that gets to duck this responsibility, and you're definitely not all that exception, people reading the comment.
The more of you who skip out on this, the greater the burden on those that don't. When you don't have you're 2.1 children, someone else has to have those children on top of the 2.1 they need for themselves.
> We're not in a situation where humanity is in danger of extinction because
We are actually in danger of extinction, the math is simple, and only a bizarre form of willful blindness prevents you from seeing it. You can check anywhere you like, find some source that you trust. It will tell you that we have sub-replacement fertility. In the United States, in North America, in the western hemisphere. In east Asia. The latest numbers are highly suggestive that India just recently (within the last 3 years or so) has sunk below the replacement level. There are few countries not suffering this trend, there are none untouched by it. It generally takes about 20 minutes to walk through all the various fallacies, at the end of which the denier then says "but when things shrink down a little fertility can go back up, and things will be fine!"
Except fertility doesn't go back up. No little girl who grows up in a world where all her role models have few or no children will wake up one morning and say to herself "I want 2.1 children when I'm a grownup!" but that's what would have to happen for all little girls. Just for the population to stabilize. If only some of them say that, then we're still on the road to extinction, because the average has to be 2.1. The same ideas that caused people to remain childless will still be floating around. There will still be people telling those little girls...
> Not everyone needs to be a parent.
One of them might even be you, depending on how long you live.
> If an individual were to find a cheap and easily producible cure-all for cancer but
Saving the lives of geriatric people, who will die someday anyway, having made no more children than before they got cancer? Willfully blind.
> Saving the lives of geriatric people, who will die someday anyway, having made no more children than before they got cancer? Willfully blind.
I originally wrote about how cancer impacts more than just geriatric people, and how even from your perspective, around 1800 children die from cancer every year - people who will, in theory, even at sub-replacement levels, produce more kids than an individual making their 2.1 children.
But I realized that this one line shows that we fundamentally have different viewpoints about the purpose of life. If life isn't good, what is the point of having kids? Back when I still wanted children, I had decided not to have them because of concerns about climate change. I believe that it is at the very least human-accelerated, and most likely primarily caused by us as well, but even if not, we have clear trends and data showing that there is a very real risk that huge portions of humanity will have their lives significantly disrupted by it in my lifetime, much less that of my children. I don't want to force someone to have to live through that.
But if the prevailing opinion of people in the world was "Let's not cure cancer because it's just saving geriatric people who won't have more kids anyway," then that's not a world that doesn't match my value system and not one I want to subject my children to living in. I think the existence of humanity is an amoral thing - there's not fundamentally any specific reason we need to exist beyond us wanting to, and if as a collective whole we decide that existence has not been a thing wonderful enough to bring new people into it and we no longer desire to exist, then, well, that's fine.
If we want humanity to continue, let's make the world a place where people want to bring children into it, and incentivize them doing so.
If we want humanity to continue, let's make the world a place where people want to bring children into it, and incentivize them doing so.
i agree, but at this point we are really very far away from that.
I used the number 2.1. It does not result in population growth. It gives you a nearly perfect population stability. It neither grows, nor shrinks. And if that's not good enough for you, if it happened right this moment, the population once stabilized would be a bit smaller than it is now.
> But I realized that this one line shows that we fundamentally have different viewpoints about the purpose of life.
"Purpose of life" sounds religious, or ignorant. Instead, let's talk about whether you like humans and think humans are positive. If you do, you would dislike any trend or event which would make them extinct. If the extinction is proceeding, and you're whining about how it's unfair that women are treated like babymaking machines (which all humans are, male and female), then it seems that quite without knowing it, you think humans are a negative thing. Not so negative maybe that they require being wiped out immediately, but negative enough you will do nothing to halt the slow-motion extinction that is coming.
While there are the occasional individuals I dislike, I like humans in total, and I would be sad if I were forced to believe that they will be extinct 1000 years from now. But there is a growing sentiment that they are bad, and maybe this dull, unintelligent rock would be better off if humans were gone. A sort of death cult.
> I don't want to force someone to have to live through that.
My ancestors survived famines and disasters that would shock all of us into disbelief. Horrors and terrors. Predated upon, eaten alive. Suffering with diseases unknown to modern man. Much of the time without even understanding what was going on, it's no surprise they imagined and invented gods doing that to them, evil gods. For them to have gone through all that, and to give up on what we've all been doing because my children might have to figure out some engineering... naive or blasphemous, I don't know what to call it. My children could solve any problem, will solve them.
> then that's not a world that doesn't match my value system and not one I want to subject my children to living in.
So be it. The world always belonged to my children, and their children. I guess I should thank you for realizing yours were not fit to inherit it.
> If we want humanity to continue,
You've already made your choice. I see no reason to consult you further.
I find it bizarre that I'm being accused of cultlike thinking by someone who has distilled humanity down to just reproducing. We're not single-celled organisms, man. We can aspire to things greater than just having kids.
> So be it. The world always belonged to my children, and their children. I guess I should thank you for realizing yours were not fit to inherit it.
Making a value judgment about theoretical children based on a few online interactions is such a deeply weird thing to do. This whole interaction is one of the strangest I've had on the internet in several decades of using it.
It's difficult to explain counter-intuitiveness to the unclever. But yes. Overvaluing the geriatric to the exclusion of children and pro-procreation is equivalent to not valuing human life. It seems like some people should be able to get that, given how the old are so close to death, that it's about valuing death.
> I find it bizarre that I'm being accused of cultlike thinking by
Many cult members report similar sentiments if/when they are deprogrammed. From the inside, they're pretty sure they're the normal ones, and everyone else is weird.
> We're not single-celled organisms,
So some claim. They're sure, somehow, that they've transcended their biology. That, descending from an unending lineage nearly 4 billion years long, that they are the specific individual that all of that happened for, and things need not continue beyond them.
But you're just an animal.
> We can aspire to things greater than just having kids.
You absolutely cannot. When you do this, you die having achieved little and having left no one to replace you on planet Earth to continue whatever work you thought so important that you skipped making children. All your works will, within two centuries or less, be for naught.
> This whole interaction is one of the strangest I've had on the internet in several decades of using it.
That tends to happen when you chance upon someone not promoting the status quo.
This is a weird take. Women can be more than just baby factories. They can have a far more reaching impact on the world beyond just adding to its population.
Yes this is the entire point of TFA and the parent comment.
That's a weirder take. Women who do a good job caring for the next generation are more valuable than most of the other impacts you're likely to make in a business career. Most people overestimate the impact of their work and underestimate the impact of their family and personal relationships. It's one of the most common deathbed regrets.
I know I will regret not spending as much time with close friends as I could have - I already do. Some of them I no longer have the chance to do so. I regret not traveling more when I was younger - and I traveled A LOT! Still do. But there are some things I'll never get to experience. I'm sure I'll regret some aspects of focusing on my career.
Career and work are almost certainly not the most important aspect of your life. But that doesn't mean that you have to have kids, either, or that you'd regret not having them. I find it weird to suggest that the most meaningful form of interpersonal relationship has to be that of parent and child instead of whatever an individual finds to be the most meaningful.
I think it's wonderful to find purpose in creating and nurturing a life, but framing it as the best makes people who cannot or choose not to do the thing seem inadequate.
We can create life de novo in a laboratory [1]. We’re approaching the point where we can replicate a womb artificially, and do a better job at that than natural ones. (Interstitial attachment in humans is evolutionarily recent and inefficient [2]. The size of the human brain, too, is evolutionarily recent, which makes human childbirth evolutionarily recent and uniquely deadly among primates [3]. These aren’t difficult to improve on, which is why IVF, C sections, NICUs and lactation inducement are a thing.)
Parenting is rewarding, necessary and noteworthy. Calling it miraculous in literal (versus figurative) terms puts it on a glass pedestal. That’s dangerous if you believe parenting should be respected.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology
There is constant feedback between mother and child, and any mother will tell you how they got cravings where their body/baby told them exactly what it needed. The baby, still in the womb, gets to hear the parents and experience their life. This all carries into the child's life and is inherently unable to be replicated in a lab.
What are you basing this on? Children conceived through IVF already have nearly identical long-term outcomes to naturally conceived babies. (You have to adjust for income and intent. Otherwise, the IVF babies do better on some measures.)
I tend to agree that we won’t be able to create an arrival womb that outperforms a natural one under ideal circumstances in our lifetimes. But most circumstances aren’t ideal, even when the parents and their doctors have the best intentions.
> haven’t even figured out how to make formula that will leave children as healthy as a breastfed child
Formula isn’t trying to replicate breast milk, it’s trying to be cheap and convenient. Lab-grown breast milk is still decades away, but it’s in the same vein of biochemistry. (The joining factor being our increasing ability to control immune factor production.)
Again, I don’t think it will be better than the best natural breastmilk. (It won’t be fresh, for one.) But OP didn’t say a perfect mother is doing her highest calling. They created a paragon for all women.
Except for the dozens of fetuses that are not brought to term and flushed because they would not survive to birth.
One, zygote or blastocyst; it's not technically even an embryo until the amniotic sac develops [1]. Definitely not a fetus.
Two, "at least 40% of [natural] human pregnancies are lost before implantation" [2]. With assisted reproduction, that's 75% [3].
But "total loss from fertilisation to birth is 40-60%" in natural births [4]. About 65% to 80% of IVF implanted embryos result in a live birth [5], or about a total loss of 80%. (And improving.)
When ART results in a lower total loss from fertilisation to birth than natural conception, would you argue for banning the latter?
[1] https://www.medicinenet.com/embryo_vs_fetus_differences_week...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6053685/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7670474/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5306416/
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5306416/
[5] https://www.pfcla.com/blog/frozen-embryo-transfer-success-ra...
> most circumstances aren’t ideal
Yes when women are forced to treat having and raising children as a disease (no children allowed in "professional" settings, dont take time off for family, etc) instead of a normal part of life to be celebrated and encouraged.
Doctors don't have the children's best interests in mind. They need to avoid liability at all costs, which largely means 'avoid death and disfigurement even if the kid isn't as well off long term'. As a bonus, doing unnecessary things gets them paid more.
> What are you basing this on? > we won’t be able to create an arrival womb that outperforms a natural one under ideal circumstances for some time.
Ever. Because factory made, lab grown, and mass produced products have never and inherently can never have the biodiversity of the real thing despite what the marketers might tell you. Even our 'natural' food mass produced in monoculture fields is devoid of nutrients compared to small farms.
> Formula isn’t trying to replicate breast milk, it’s trying to be cheap and convenient
Junk food for infants.
IVF replicates a critical part of making a baby, conception, and artifically steers another, implantation. From a miraculousness perspective, conception is high up there. Certainly one that a hundred years ago someone would have similarly scoffed at being able to be done in a lab not only at all, but almost as well as in nature.
> Even our 'natural' food mass produced in monoculture fields is devoid of nutrients compared to small farms
Sure. What do you think most mothers are eating?
Parenthood is a wonderful thing for people that want it. Not everyone does and ascribing absolute value to it for a whole sex is weird.
OP describes a “blessing and privilege only afforded to women.” That describes the biological process of having a baby. Not parenting and child rearing broadly, whether that be by the father, adoptive parents or extended family and community that help nurture a child.
(I’m hopeful this was mis-phrased by OP.)