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Comment by jeremysmyth | Hacker News Reader

It's way off. If not wanting kids was the norm, we'd die out pretty quickly (feel free to disagree if you have stats, author!).

The author (editor?) of the headline is mistaking "normal" for "acceptable".

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Terrible article. It lumps together all the following scenarios and more:

1. A woman forced into motherhood by a partner who refuses to allow her to terminate the pregnancy

2. A forced mother (rape, abandonment) who was unable to opt for termination for whatever reason

3. A stay at home mother who thinks its too much hard work (as compared to...? We never find out what their expectations are)

4. A resentful mother with the wrong or unsupportive partner and whose anger and resentment towards said partner may now be directed at everything related to them (e.g. children)

5. Women who had children "too early" and feel resentful missing out on youthful freedom

6. Women who miss their youthful freedom

Etc. Some of these are quite understandable, some appear to be naivete, and some appear to be pure laziness or a lack of responsibility (i.e. deficiencies in moral character).

All of the things you listed are experiences that women who have children have. All of these issues are related to one another - women are denied access to birth control, esp. abortion, and are often primary care givers to children whether they have that child voluntarily or not. The cultural narrative for women in the US is that you leave behind your life and identity as a sacrifice in order to support your child/children, which is something that may lead someone to feel that having children is not fulfilling.

People do not live in a vacuum and cultural messages and images about child raising that women see and experience shape how they approach having a child (if they even plan their pregnancy, which the article shows is not true for a lot of people). The author of the article, Jessica Valenti, is a feminist author and that forms the background for this piece, which is why this piece takes a look at many different experiences that women have in regards to having children.

The thing I fear even further is encouraging people who read articles in the NYT to not have children. Or, people who read hacker news, even.

I don't care what your views are, or if you want or don't want children, but I do consider it at least partly a responsibility of capable, intelligent people to reproduce. It's almost in-line with the article's generalizations, but I'd apply it to both sexes fairly.

It's a sad paradox: the people who have the rationality and conviction to consider not having children are—evolutionarily speaking—the ones we want to have children.

Ah, eugenics.

>> It's way off. If not wanting kids was the norm, we'd die out pretty quickly (feel free to disagree if you have stats, author!).

If 60% of women don't want kids, but the remaining 40% all have at least three each, population would still grow.

Anyway, I think you're discussing semantics here. Saying something is 'normal' does not necessarily imply the converse is 'abnormal'. In general 'normal' does not mean 'the norm' or 'according to what the majority of people think', just that it's not completely crazy to think in a certain way.

I definitely consider not wanting to have kids to be normal, no less than wanting to have them. There are very good reasons for deciding you don't want to have kids, maybe even more so that the opposite. In fact, most reasons for wanting to have kids are pretty egocentric if you ask me, and the number of kids growing up under terrible circumstances kind of seems to confirm that.

The problem with the article is it lumps together a whole bunch of different reasons for not wanting kids as if they're all equally reasonable reasons. It also doesn't address "normal" within any objective framework.

It's an interesting question in evolutionary theory whether there is an advantage to have a split of "breeders" and "non-breeders". Non-breeders, people who don't mind being e.g. soldiers and mine-technicians, seem pretty useful to society (actually a necessity once a large enough population of violent "non-breeders" evolve to threaten the breeders).

However they don't really contribute much genetically unless perhaps the "breeder" vs. "non-breeder" flag is entirely random and therefore allows for certain individuals to randomly specialize without negatively affecting the genetic potential of a family of mutations.

Intuitively, the value of "non-breeders" would seem to be very... expendable. I doubt people who are against having kids would enjoy that label, though. I wonder what other evolutionary value non-breeders bring to a species.

Perhaps having non-breeders who divert all their energy towards science and progress produce such an important species advantage that even if they don't necessarily contribute to the genetic pool they do contribute to the overall preservation and extension of the underlying genetic code.

You're leaving out the most important factor. Since females are the limiting factor in animal reproduction (for most species, but importantly including humans), there is tremendous selective pressure, both biologically and culturally, for males to be the expendable ones. The specialization of individuals into breeding and non-breeding roles is the entire purpose of gender.

I'm familiar with the theory that men are more expendable [1], but I don't think you can take that to imply that men don't have a breeding role. Men are critical to the family unit. Beside that, I'm suggesting that even on top of gender roles there is a breeder/non-breeder split. Otherwise all women AND men would have an urge to raise families, which is clearly not the case.

[1] www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

You're right. Unmarried and childless men are more expendable than married men with children. But not even unmarried or childless women are expendable. Even married men with children are more expendable than unmarried or childless women.

I think your math is off.

Imagine that you have a population of 200 humans (100 male, 100 female). Only 40% of the women want kids, which, in this case, means that 40 women want kids. They each have three kids, for a total of 120 kids produced by the population of 200 adults. I don't think that this would lead to population growth.

You're right, unless you would somehow ensure that of the 3 kids every mother has, 2.5 are female ;-)

Anyway, looking at the worlds' population right now, I don't think we have to be afraid mankind will go extinct anytime soon because not enough children are born.

The article is specifically talking about constructed normality for women in regards to motherhood. Certainly it is totally OK to want or not want children, but mass media messaging and cultural assumptions about women and how they interact with children (their own and others) are a factor in how people make decisions for having children, hence the section in the article about rates of unplanned pregnancy and attitudes of mothers in an unplanned pregnancy.

You're assuming that people do what they want. This is a similar argument to the idea that homosexuality can't be genetic as if it were then the gene would have died out.

That's not true because basically for as long as culture has existed there has been pressure to conform to a societal norm which generally involves male / female relationships and children. As a result of that many (though not all) people instead of doing what they want have done what society expects of them.

As it goes I think you're right that it's the norm in as much as I think there is a biological imperative there (anecdotally having kids I can vouch for this), but I think your logic supporting the argument is off.

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