Conception, Not College

[kimberlysteele]

I am not exactly the ideal poster child for pro-natalism. Fifteen years ago, I identified as a child-free vegan -- a child-free vegan is a person who deliberately avoids bringing children onto this planet and who avoids eating animals and their secretions for ostensibly moral reasons. I remain happy with my choice to be vegan and much to the chagrin of certain traditionalists, I have never regretted my choices both to avoid having children and to have myself sterilized in my early 30s.

I consider myself lucky because I never had to make difficult choices concerning pregnancy. I have never been pregnant to my knowledge. Nevertheless, I know something about the fear of getting pregnant. Though I would have chosen to be asexual if the choices had been presented at the beginning of my life as a buffet, I was once a sexually driven, red-blooded young person. Fear of pregnancy ruined most o my romantic life for the majority of this incarnation.

My decision not to have biological children was solid somewhere around age three. All of the other girls wanted to play with baby dolls. I had a couple of them. They were my least favorite. One doll was made of soft plastic and you could put water into her bottle that came out the other end as ersatz pee. (Gen X toys were weird.) It wasn't my thing.

Though the girls of my generation were conditioned to see themselves as future mothers from toddlerhood, we were told in many ways that pregnancy before the age of 26 at the youngest would wreck our lives. My own birthmother, a third generation Japanese American whose grandparents on both sides were put through the American internment camps, had me at age 22. I was the mistake that trashed her college career and expelled her into the lower middle class. I did not know this growing up. I was told a lie that she was 18 (Quelle horreur!) when she had me and that the guy who signed my baby release papers was not my actual birthfather but some dude helping her out.

In the back of my mind, I grew up trying to avoid her mistakes. By the time I married at age 26, I viewed sex as something I wanted, but also as a frustrating, icky necessity that required drugs and prophylactics EVERY TIME to avoid dreaded STDs and even more-dreaded pregnancy. At age 28, the surprise combination of hormonal birth control and genetic wild cards resulted in the loss of my gall bladder. I came within thirty minutes of dying because it nearly exploded. Hormonal birth control is the absolute worst. In my case, it didn't help my moods, it failed to alleviate the pain of my periods, and it nearly killed me. It did one job at a hefty price: helped me avoid getting pregnant.

In my own case and nobody else's, I think pregnancy would have destroyed my young life and much of my potential as it seemed to destroy my birthmother's young life despite her putting her child up for adoption. There were contemporaries of mine who got pregnant in junior high and high school. One got pregnant at age 13. She was a Jehovah's Witness. I will always suspect the father of her baby was a family member as I don't remember her dating anyone. There was a popular girl who we will call Heather who got pregnant by a popular boy of the same age. Heather's parents helped her obtain an abortion. They pulled her out of school the same year and moved away. Nobody from my school heard where she went.

Why We Do This To Ourselves

People of the modern age have been plagued with a collection of psychotic detachments from the way things work. Detachment from food production has resulted in children who think hamburgers magically appear at McDonalds. Celebrities and influencers get their bodies and faces carved and injected, never putting it together that the facsimile of youth is scarier than aging. Everything is supposed to be convenient, including time.

The time to have biological children is from ages 16-30. This isn't just about the female, her eggs, and her carrying capacity. Sperm quality and quantity are better in a young man than an old one. If you're going to make babies, you must strike while the iron is hot. Instead of making babies, we have conditioned several generations to stumble halfheartedly through the salary class formula of high school + college + marriage + job = think about having children. I plan on expounding upon this phenomenon in an essay in the near future, but for now, I will state this is a recipe for mentally-compromised and disabled children.

Supposedly a depiction of Lucrezia Borgia during the teenage height of her beauty.

The Borgia Were Freaks

The Borgia were a Spanish royal family that produced not one but two Popes in the Renaissance. The first Borgia patriarch, Alfons, was elected cardinal and later became Pope Callixtus III in 1455. As leaders of the One True Church of its era, the Pope had more power than any king and his influence was felt far and wide. Alfons appointed his up and coming nephew to a cardinalship and that nephew, Rodrigo, became Pope Alexander VI. Alexander's children were all the result of his affairs with prostitutes: Giovanni, Cesare, Lucrezia, and Gioffre were the alleged products of a long-standing relationship with one of his favorites.  He had other children from other lliasons.  Rodrigo's favorite baby-mommy, Rosa Vannozza de Catanei, was actually the daughter of his favorite mistress-prostitute who supposedly "helped" her mother out with sex duties and opened her legs during one of Rodrigo's marathon romps at the right time.

The Papacy was hilariously depraved: Rodrigo's orgies were epic and lavish, featuring naked young men and women preening with their bodies coated in gold leaf, fifty prostitutes at a time, and naked mosh pits. OK I made up that last part but I doubt it was beyond them. Rodrigo the Pope loved a themed orgy.

He also enjoyed diddling his beautiful daughter, Lucrezia. Though we would call it abuse in our current era, Lucrezia seemed to revel in being a sexual freak from a tender age. By age 13, her father had her married off to Giovanni Sporza, who supposedly never touched her because she was so busy taking it on all sides from both her dad and her brothers on the regular. Her dad married her off several times for political reasons and annulled her marriages when they no longer served family ambition. Lucrezia had a child, Giovanni Borgia, who was either her own brother or nephew. So fond was Lucrezia of getting it on with her male family members, she wasn't sure whose it was, and two papal bulls were issued to protect the child. These telling documents both identified him as the son of Cesare, her brother. The second papal bull pinned him as the son of Alexander himself. Oh, Western Civ, we barely knew ya!

At Least We're Not the Borgias

Our own culture has reached an extreme where older people think they're finally ready to have children once they've finished grad school and amassed its attendant crippling debt. At the other end of the civilizational spectrum, the Borgia were orgiastic freaks who weaponized fertility and displayed blatant moral hypocrisy to rub in who was in charge.

Can we find a middle ground here? Can we please de-stigmatize teenage pregnancy? Can we finally just not care if a 16 year old girl gets pregnant by an 18 year old guy and not claim she was groomed? Can we give them a safety net so we can normalize young people raising their babies in peace?

The current generation has been made docile -- I call them Generation Cuck -- and will likely be shepherded into whatever traps the State and Big Media has in store for them. At this point, we all know college is a racket and the salary class into which it is supposed to guarantee entry is a rapidly-shrinking pie. There are tiny factions of Generation Cuck for whom I have hope, but these are the few who can survive dopamine addiction and manage an attention span longer than that of a fungus gnat. At this point, we are well set to lose three quarters of Generation Alpha to the same subsistence upon porn, gaming, and irresponsible listlessness that passes for an adult life these days. We are on track for yet another chunk of forty-year olds who will regret their expensive, useless college degrees.

Instead of an education, Zoomers and Alphas get an indoctrination to whatever shades of broken wokeness are still stabbing at relevancy. Perhaps if large groups of young and old alike were to stop freaking about about respectability, upward mobility, and other people's sex lives, we could give young people the breathing room they need to live their best lives.

Comments

[methylethyl]

Probably a lot of this would normalize on both ends if we could end the perpetual-adolescence trap. Everybody thinks they're not really a grownup until they're 35 because school, career, etc.

Any primary education system where it is not completely normal for any normal 18-year-old non-college-track graduate to immediately be able to start a reasonably good job (i.e. not waiting tables or running a drive-thru for minimum wage), is worthless and needs to be scrapped. What the current system is doing is dragging out childhood for the smart kids, and condemning the less-smart (or just not college oriented) kids to more or less permanent infantilization. Don't think. Don't be responsible. Work crap jobs, buy stuff that doesn't matter, and do drugs when that's not fulfilling. Pregnancy is always gonna be a disaster when it's kids who are getting pregnant. The answer is to stop extending childhood until 30.

I submit that it is *currently* possible and preferable in most cases for a motivated teenager with no intellectual handicaps, with the support of parents, to quit normal school at 15, enroll in vocational college, and be trained and licensed for a reasonably remunerative job by 18. In many states, a bit of creative paperwork can do this for free. Not enough people know this is an option. I know at least two young men who've done it, though, and I'm looking into it for my own kids: they completed a 2yr electrical program, and graduated 'high school' as licensed apprentice electricians. They'll be able to support a young family in a year or two. Electrician's not for everyone, but more kids should be doing this, with good advice. So like, our local vo-tech college has a large slate of programs. Some of them, like office admin and pharmacy tech, are totally useless deadends and a waste of time. Somebody needs to be able to talk straight to kids and tell them to stay out of that. But nursing, aviation mechanic, diesel mechanic, and heck even cosmetology are all legit straight-into-a-job things that kids should be encouraged to do. Smart kids should be encouraged to do it *in addition to* college-- why not go off to college with a viable job that can support you, already under your belt?

If the goal is getting family-minded people to form families and raise kids while they're still at the optimal age for it, it's gotta start with raising adults, not perpetual children.

I'm trying so hard to do this for my own kids, and it's not easy because *I wasn't raised this way* so there's no easy roadmap I can look at. Just muddling along as best we can, aimed at that goal.

[kimberlysteele]

Any primary education system where it is not completely normal for any normal 18-year-old non-college-track graduate to immediately be able to start a reasonably good job (i.e. not waiting tables or running a drive-thru for minimum wage), is worthless and needs to be scrapped.

THIS, so very hard. All we get from the primary education system, even the creme de la creme schools in rich suburbs, is lessons in compliance and being a good little office drone. Those b.s. jobs will crumble and we will have lots of people who don't know AC from DC.

[methylethyl]

TBH, compliance isn't even the worst thing going on-- it'd be tolerable if kids could leave school with *any* usable set of job skills accessible to a fifteen year old of average intelligence: bookkeeping, house framing, commercial kitchen cert, nursing assistant competency, welding, veterinary assisting...

[kimberlysteele]

Exactly. One thing that would help is the reduction of years spent in public school: if you are going to waste everyone's time, at least keep it brief. In my own case, I took a "How To Do Your Own Taxes" elective at age 16/junior year. It was only available to students who had fulfilled a huge list of required courses. We are talking basic, everyday skills that everyone needs to do. And as for Home Ec, the cooking classes were taught by someone who was literally a lousy cook and whose house was a mess. I know because I briefly dated her son. It's not the only story I have like that. Interestingly there seems to be a large number of Home Ec teachers who are almost inept at homemaking.

[methylethyl]

For my grandparents' generation, it was totally normal to quit school after 8th grade and get a job. By the time those kids were legal adults, they had at least five years of work experience. Imagine! Yes, child labor laws are there for a reason, but I also think there's an argument for re-examining them. All my older relatives worked real jobs as teenagers (even as young as 9!), mostly in addition to school: bowling-alley pin-monkeys, shipyard weld-checkers, high-school secretaries, telephone operators, store clerks... and none of them seem to have been harmed by it. Like, no we shouldn't let kids work in the mines or around dangerous mill equipment. That really was bad. But we've taken that rather too far in the modern age. One of my great-aunts started out as a teenage telephone operator, and made a whole successful self-supporting career with the telephone company. Was the regional manager at Bell Telephone, when she retired. Good life, no college.

[kimberlysteele]

My mother worked as a switchboard operator for Bell when she and my father were in their 20s. The money she made ended up as the down payment of the house i grew up in. Neither went to college. I know I would have been much better off had I been able to at least shadow a veteran music teacher in my teens. Instead I had to learn most of my teaching and administration skills the hard way.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm of two minds on this.

On one hand, I agree that having children earlier is stigmatized, despite its potential to be a good choice for some people. I think there are a significant number of people who would indeed be better off getting a more practical education, entering the workforce sooner, and becoming parents sooner. And our culture makes this harder than it should be, in numerous ways. This is a problem and it is costing us as a society, no argument.

On the other hand, I know people who really, truly were not ready to have kids until much later, usually less for financial reasons than because they were not emotionally ready, often for reasons having to do with the need to work through their own dysfunctional childhoods first. In some cases it really is better to wait a bit; not everyone can be a good parent until they've had more time to mature. Although I ultimately chose not to have kids, I will say that I think I would have been an okay parent in my 30s, but a total disaster in my teens and early 20s; I needed time to recover from a highly dysfunctional childhood before I could even think about parenting someone else. But your mileage may vary, as they say.

Also, for what it's worth, having children later in life really isn't new. What's new is having one's FIRST child later in life. All of my own grandparents came from large families; my great-grandparents all started having kids pretty young, but they were all (men and women alike) around 40 when they had their last kid (number 8 or 9, or in one case, number 14). Having children later in life isn't quite as new an invention as it might seem!

(And, for what it's worth, I also question the conflation of natural pregnancy is older-but-still-fertile adults with IVF and other artificially-assisted pregnancies in older-and-not-fertile adults, who may have other issues. I suspect the former is less likely to cause problems in the offspring than the latter, but given the financial incentives to sell these services, I doubt anyone wants to break the statistics down and find out.)

[kimberlysteele]

That makes sense -- I come from a good, stable background with no abuse and I personally would not have been ready to parent until at least age 45. I was too vain and childlike at 40, plus I looked young for my age until I hit menopause and my appearance finally started matching the information on my driver's license.

The IVF thing... yeah, where to even begin? Basically you can pay your way to pregnancy, and that makes me think that most people do that will face a karmic wallop in future lives. I have had a great deal of karma like that from my checkered past lives; I'm actually living through some of the nasty bits as we speak. Karma often presents us with two choices: suck it up and take it with grace or act out like a spoiled, entitled brat delaying the inevitable backlash.

One woman I used to know was obsessed with bearing her own genetic progeny and became a brittle, angry hag by the age of 33 when it became apparent her husband was shooting blanks. They started trying when she was 30. They got a divorce (his choice after she made his life a living hell) and she effed off with some new boy who probably also did not get her pregnant. I sincerely hope she never had children, biological or otherwise, because it became abundantly clear that her narcissism and perfectionism would severely damage any child unlucky enough to have her as a parent.

[methylethyl]

My church forbids IVF.

But I do understand people who go that route. Well, some of them. Being obsessed with your own genetic progeny is perverse. OTOH, the US has made adoption all but impossible for most people.

[kimberlysteele]

Good for your church! Finally, someone took a stand! And yeah, adoption is onerous (even in my day) because there are never enough healthy babies available and of course there are all sorts of pesky middlemen inserting themselves in the process.

[methylethyl]

*expensive* middlemen!

From what I've read, you either have to know someone who just really really wants to *give* you their kid (this is possible inside close community such as religious groups, but not much done in practice), but for everybody else... adopting out of the foster care system is a total nightmare, tons of regulations (not without reason, but completely out of proportion) and you're basically submitting your whole family (it can get very bad if you subsequently have biological children) to the whims of social workers forever, and if you go the private route it gets eyewateringly expensive, such that most people who'd make totally OK parents if they could have their own kids... just can't afford to adopt.

They're all baby brokers

[kimberlysteele]

"Adoption" is a shady and euphemistic term for what it really is: baby-selling. White, seemingly-healthy kids are the first to get adopted and extremely expensive.

[methylethyl]

Agreed. It's both. *I* was super emotionally immature, did not have my first child until 31, and that is really for the best.

[kimberlysteele]

At 31 I would not have been remotely ready! I hope that if I am incarnated as someone's parent again that I will have developed the emotional maturity to do a good job of it at a young age. My own parents did a great job and a fairly young age, so maybe in a future life I can return them the favor if they are incarnated as my kids. But as it stands, my spider sense tells me that I will be a gay man in my next incarnation. Of course I could be wrong.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, we ran into this. People think it's just a matter of when fertility typically ends and so, for example, Expecting Better's "bottom line" on age is, "Fertility declines with age, but not as fast as you might expect--35 is not a magic number cutoff." That's true, but kind of overlooks the conditions out there that you can have but not know it that worsen your fertility and that often are more common or worsen with age. When young we didn't know that we both had / were going to develop these. But we also were dealing with grad school, the crash of '08, parents who let us live in their attic on condition we not grow a screaming baby, etc., etc. (Of course later when, once "established," we struggled to keep a pregnancy, then my parents were all "We didn't really mean it, you should've just had babies while living in our attic"... Yeah we should have but no we did not know that then.) So we're late Xers with one toddler whom we are very lucky to have.

That said, in the EEA / traditionally people did both, had their first at 16 and their last at 42. Like, I notice in my family tree that most of the women had their last at 42-43.

Expecting Better also has a chart of Down syndrome risk by age. It has age 20-24, 25-29, 30-34, and then individual years up to 45. It's less than 1 in 1000 for the first two age groups, down to 1 in 30 for age 45.

Miscarriage risk also increases with both maternal and paternal age: https://web.archive.org/web/20160208041234/https://expectingscience.com/2015/09/22/age-and-the-risk-of-miscarriage/

Guess I should add, our parents' generation were encouraged to settle down early and that brought its own problems, so no wonder they wanted to raise us to avoid their mistakes... I'll never forget this: https://fborfw.com/strip_fix/friday-october-12-1979/

I think now that that was better than infertility, but then I would. But infertility wasn't on their radar, they didn't even know it was a tradeoff; they just wanted us to escape the above...

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you for these charts. I am writing another opinion piece for next week that deals with the topic of late-age pregnancy.

Had you been able to move into your own cute little house instead of shacking up with parents, it sounds like it would have been (slightly) easier. Not that raising a kid is ever easy but yeah, doing it in the parental attic and basement sucks.

That comic strip is so sad. It definitely epitomizes my fears, and though a house can be sold and gotten rid of, no sane/good person does that with a kid.

[jdecandia]

There's also been this strange by frication between women who do and do not want have children. I've never wanted children and I found that when I was in my teens in the 90s, this Was thought to be exceedingly strange and that I would change my mind as I grew older. I never did. On the other hand now it is the "cool" thing to do to maintain a lifestyle.

Both of these are pathetic to me.Because I never wanted to have a kid because I didn't want to have one to begin with. It seems to me that the switch in ideology is still about the narcisstic individual pursuit of having their "best life" and the baby is tossed to the side in that pursuit. When babies cost less it seemed they were still used for narcicisstic gain.

A true understanding of yourself - your role in your life and others - never seems to be a part of the "equation".

[kimberlysteele]

Unfortunately, most people's first thought about their own child, well after they've had that child, begins with "I wanted..." The worst narcissists in the world are parents, because they drag children into their narcissism who have no choice about being there. I am really glad I chose to opt out during this lifetime. It is harder to be a decent parent in this era than it was even five years ago.

[jdecandia]

When I did a past life regression I was told I had 6+ children in the actual geographic location I moved to and am currently living in. It was extremely validating to hear because one of my intuitions in deciding if I'd really walk away from having children or not was that I felt I wouldn't learn anything from it. Like I had already learned the lessons I needed to.

In this lifetime in this incarnation it seems there are too many hooks to drive you back to the material. The children you have are not your own especially of they get exposed to cell phones at a young age.