None of that applies to what I asked since I said zero me about other than I cannot understand how people can be so happy about a baby about to be born into a bad situation. I offer no opinions on anyone’s pregnancy to their face, or even to anyone that knows them, because a) it’s none of my business, and b) I am aware I’m biased, which is more than I can say for some.
As for being anti-choice, criticizing a choice is one thing, actively preventing a choice is a completely different thing. What I don’t get is why you seem to think that no pregnancy is a bad thing.
Who are these people of which you speak? My experience has always been that when news of a pregnancy is announced, the mother-to-be is congratulated, maybe with a few coos and ahhs and a bit of maternal advice, and after that nary a thought is given to the pregnancy (apart from close family and friends of course). For the most part, people don’t really give a shit.
Buying gifts for your imminent child and playing around with potential names are normal things to do. Even for ‘good idea’ pregnancies, whatever that might mean.
WTF? Scads of people? Here’s where I call CITE please. The only scads I saw were the critics of her decision to have children. I’m sure there’s some nut-job websites out there who think she’s a heroine or summat, but I’d have to go actively looking for them. Every single response that I saw in the mainstream media was a negative one.
Thanks, I’d read somewhere that 30 is the age when “things” start creeping into the fetus.
That said, others are right - if I was pregnant and didn’t want it (which is a bona fide fact), I would tell nobody. Not even Mister V. Because my first move would be to get rid of it. And I wouldn’t want to burden him with that knowledge unless I absolutely have to. He knows this but I still don’t want him to have the knowledge of it actually happening.
Because if it’s obvious to you that it’s probably an unwanted pregnancy, pointing that out is just going to rub it in. “You mean me getting pregnant is going to force me to grow up immediately, burden me with bills and responsibilities, make it extremely difficult for me to continue my education, and fuck up my life in a million ways I haven’t even thought of yet? Gee, thanks for letting me know. Yeah, all that didn’t race through my head the second I found out. I definitely haven’t stayed up nights scared shitless about what will become of my life. It’s a good thing you’re here to set me straight.”
Now if this is a friend who is telling you this in confidence, or who seems to be looking for advice, by all means let them know what you really think (gently). But if it’s in a social situation with other people around, your best bet is some version of “Congratulations, when is it due, boy or girl?”
Believe it or not, some teen moms-to-be get thrown out of their homes when their families learn that they are pregnant. shocking, I know. I have never heard of a pro-lifer agree to take in a teen mom and her child…despite the strong belief that the baby deserves to be brought into this wonderful life. :rolleyes:
This is moving towards tangent land and I am going to exit this thread before I get annoyed with where I think it’s headed.
I was a teenaged mother. While there were some unicorns and rainbows, there were also lots and lots of people willing to tell me what a mess I was making of my life. Why were some people positive and upbeat? You’ve gotten your answer: because despite what a person may think inside, many people want to be supportive on the outside because they’re not assholes, and because they know that gloom and dooming a pregnant woman is unlikely to get her to change her course of action anyhow. Might as well throw a party and have cake; the baby’s a-comin’.
Plus, y’know, babies are cute. Even unexpected, unplanned and unwanted (not that those three are synonymous) babies are cute and loveable and make people smile.
(30 is when fertility begins to rapidly decline, but over 35 is when we start seriously worrying about maternal age related affects on the fetus, and even in older mothers, most of them turn out fine babies. There is no maternal age when babies are more likely to be disabled than to be normal and healthy, only maternal ages where the babies are more likely to be disabled than babies of younger mothers.)
The sequence I’ve most commonly encountered has been
Pregnant woman: “I’m pregnant… :eek::(:eek:”
Friend: “Oh. What are you planning to do? Do you know?”
P: “[plan/not planned yet]”
F: “[support and/or congratulations]”
This applies to teen pregnancies, pregnancies while receiving treatment incompatible with pregnancy, “I thought it was menopause”, pregnancies from not-the-husband… The other variant is where the pregnant woman explains her plan from the onset, in which case support and/or congratulations are offered straightaway.
I have heard of a girl being kicked out of the house by her father (who then got kicked out of the anarchist labor union, on account of “some anarchist you are”) when she refused to marry the baby-daddy, with whom she’d broken up before finding out she was pregnant, having found him making out with another girl. A friend’s family harbored her, but I don’t know whether the friend’s family were pro-lifers. They were definitely pro-her.
The most common reason I can think of where having a baby would be a very bad choice is a couple having a child to bring them closer together when their marriage is on rocky ground already.
I have a very strong marriage and have been fortunate enough to continue to have one despite some huge ups and downs. But having children - the first especially because you don’t know what to expect even when you think you do - has put the single largest strain on our relationship I can think of.
It’s the big things that get you to the point where you want to have a baby together at all. It’s the little things, especially after the baby is born, that make you want to go for each other’s jugular.
When I got pregnant in college, I only told a handful of people, and the response was universally, “Oh, fuck. What are you going to do?” I suspect this is because I only told people I was close to, who knew that this was very much not planned, and that I wasn’t happy about it. If I had just told a bunch of random people, I would have probably gotten a lot of sunshine blown up my ass, because those people would assume that a) I wouldn’t have told them if I hadn’t decided to keep it, and b) it was not their place to tell me what to do.
That said, when someone tells me they’re pregnant, and it’s not entirely clear that they’re glad about it, I say, “Wow! How are you doing?” It’s nicely neutral and ambiguous, and allows for them to respond with anything from, “Great, thanks!” to “Uh… not so good…(sob)”.
People who are truly happy for a pregnant mother going through hard times usually have a lot of love for that mother and are excited about the idea of having a new grandchild/niece/cousin in the family. Those people will be the ones who will help raise the child and compensate for the problems the mother has in her life. And you can be happy and worried at the same time.
For anyone else, saying “congratulations” doesn’t necessarily mean a person is “happy”. It’s just a polite thing to do when someone announces they are pregnant.
It’s not even that babies are cute. It’s more like…if they are going to come, they are going to be real, and they are absolutely 100% not at fault for whatever bullshit happened to get them there or what is going on in their lives around them. It’d be really shitty to spend 9 months seething at an unborn baby and then continue to be mad at it once it’s here.
I’m by far not pro-life and I don’t want kids myself and I don’t even find most babies to be particularly cute. But there’s a point where you just have to get over yourself and realize that the baby in question is indeed an innocent, real human being and they are going to be a part of the human race and you’re going to be a real asshole if you continue to be angry about its existence because of something someone else did.
My cousin had a kid when she really shouldn’t have (she had to get out of rehab to go to the hospital to have him) and I was pissed at her but I got over it. I mean I still think she’s a dumb bitch and probably a shitty mom but I still buy Christmas presents for her son and post pics of him on Facebook when we have family gatherings. He’s fine, he’s not his mom. And that’s what can be celebrated.
You realize that the excitement might be a facade, right? They might not feel that way, but they know that such excitement is socially expected. Kind of like how you’re expected to say how nice a present is, even if you’re really thinking “WTF am I going to do with this piece of shit”.
Someone who is pregnant in less-than-optimal circumstances presumably already knows that. If you’re in a situation where it should be obvious that pregnancy is not optimal, and you don’t know that being pregnant now is less than optimal, well, you have problems beyond what a casual conversation can fix. Either way, telling the person that being pregnant now is not a good thing is probably not going to help. You’re not this person’s doctor or therapist, and it is not your responsibility to make sure they know the risks of being pregnant now.
I’m over 35 and pregnant, and when I got my CVS, I got a chart showing the chances of chromosomal abnormalities (which is the main thing they worry about in pregnancies after age 35). According to this chart, if you’re going to be 44 or younger at the time of delivery, you have at least a 95% chance of having a chromosomally normal baby. I’m really risk averse, but that’s good enough odds for me.
Also, every coworker/friend created baby shower has resulted in lots and lots of useful gifts, money, vouchers and even food given to the mom-to-be. If she’s in a particularly difficult financial situation, and if the people around her are aware of that, I’ve seen gifts/donations/hand-downs of cribs, strollers, baby clothes for all ages, toys, baby monitors, cases of baby formula and even disposable diapers. Large parts of what the baby really needs can be provided out of the kindess and generosity of the people around the mom-to-be, and that can alleviate a lot of the immediate stress of having a baby. It doesn’t take care of everything, and parenthood lasts longer than the first few months, but it helps, and it helps a lot.
There’s a difference between advising a 15 year old to go out and get pregnant and finding out a 15 year old is pregnant and keeping the child and therefore trying to help in whatever way possible and focusing on the positive side of things. You can bitch about “sunshine and unicorns” but what the hell else are people supposed to say? People like babies, even if the circumstances of the baby’s birth aren’t ideal. The baby is real, the baby will be there - might as well help out and buy a box of diapers.
When people get married, do you remind that that they stand a good chance of infidelity or divorce? When they graduate, do you remind them of rising student loan interest rates and poor employment prospects? When someone gets a new job, do you bring up the fact that they might hate their boss, get fired, or laid off? When someone buys a house, do you bring up the housing bubble, property tax, and the cost of home maintenance?
It’s normal in a society to congratulate people on major life changes, even if they bring some risks. Life is a crazy thing and none of us will get out of it alive in the end. None of us lives an absolutely perfect life where we always make perfect choices and always get perfect outcomes. But most of us make it through an live meaningful, mostly happy lives all the same.
According to my OB/GYN sister in law, age isn’t much of a risk factor at all until after 35. And even then, the vast majority of births are perfectly normal and healthy.
One thing is that you may not know what the mother’s true situation is.
I have a cousin who got pregnant when she was unemployed and unmarried. But she got married (to the baby’s father) within a few months, and then a few months later she got a tenure-track position at a university. She had all this planned out; she just didn’t tell anybody.
Some women really are happily pregnant in awful circumstances.
I’m thinking specifically of a non-traditional student I taught at a local university. She was attending through a state funded program designed to get women out of poverty/welfare and into the workforce. She said she’d never held a job other than babysitting, and was probably in her early 40’s.
She was struggling. Attendance was a problem, as well as her inability to do the assignments. In explaining her absences and the missing work to me, her story started emerging.
She had six children, the two oldest incarcerated. She and the four younger kids had bounced from one relative’s home to another for the past few years, finally staying with a boyfriend and his mother. He got in trouble and was in jail, and his mother kicked them out. She and the kids had gone to a shelter, and had been living there for the past few months, with no money to get an apartment.
My bleeding heart was bleeding profusely, as I tried not to judge and worked with her to get through the class when she did attend.
Then, she came to class one night and excitedly told me not only was she pregnant, but her 15 year old daughter was pregnant! Wasn’t that wonderful? They had due dates only a week or so apart!
I tried valiantly to keep that cheery smile on my face and congratulate her, as she was over the moon with happiness. Inside, I was cringing. Two babies would be born in the shelter, with what kind of future? I was obviously concerned about her and her kids (not to mention her judgment) and considered asking if the school could get involved some way to help her and her family.
A week later, she dropped out. To my knowledge, that was the last we heard from her. I often wonder what happened to her and her family.
Well, I’m not going to name names of course, but co-workers, friends, friends/children of friends.
I was speaking of people other than the mother to be.
Were you living under a rock at the time? Or, maybe the second by second updates were only here in California. Anyway, early on, while some or all of the newborns were still in the hospital, there was a call for them to go straight to child services and at least some of the public response was that they should go to mom, even tho they essentially would have no where to live. Message boards and Facebook were full of posts from people who couldn’t believe she’d been allowed to implant and/or carry all of the fetuses (feti?) and/or take them all home given her circumstances, and responses that said essentially all life is a blessing and she has the right to be a mommy and it’s it wonderful blah blah blah.
I’m sure that the current overwhelming public opinion is negative (finally) and there was certainly negativity expressed right from the beginning but it wasn’t all negative and it may have even been that it wasn’t a negative majority. It’s not like I was keeping track and figuring out percentages, I was just shocked at the number of people who stated they thought she had every right to have 14 kids she couldn’t support, and who sent all sorts of goods and money. And, I said scads - there are millions of people in this state, so even scads doesn’t necessarily mean a majority.
Really? I don’t watch much TV news but the little I saw was more of a WTF reaction or maybe cautious optimism. Not sure talking heads every show real emotions anyway.
Actually, no, that’s why I asked. The ones I refer to don’t appear to be “socially expected excited” - almost always it’s a relative or close friend of the mother-to-be, and she just goes right off the deep end running in six directions at once planning this, that and everything for the upcoming baby. Well, not always that dramatic, but the underlying theme is “isn’t it WONDERFUL that Susie is having a BABY!!!eleventyone!” Susie may be a crack whore but hey, she’s having a baybee!!!
Again, I am not talking about saying anything like that to the pregnant woman/girl, I’m talking about the folks that have the exact same reaction to every pregnancy whether the pregnant person is happy or not.
I remember a friend years ago who didn’t know she was pregnant until around month five due to a medication she was taking. She’d been considering leaving her husband (because he was a lay about who was rarely employed) and now she was pregnant and would have to have the baby due to how far along she was. She’d decided that adoption would be the best thing, her husband didn’t care at all and we all supported her especially since she hadn’t planned on having kids anyway, at least not with this guy. So she goes on with the pregnancy, goes home for Christmas and her mother comes unglued. Our friend didn’t even get the chance to tell her that she planned to give the baby up for adoption before (her words) “the whirlwind descended”, which consisted of her mother, one of her aunts and her grandmother. This wasn’t the first grandkid for the mother or anything like that, and it seemed to us that since our friend hadn’t said anything before going to Christmas at about 7 or so months pregnant, AND her mother knew full well that our friend was seriously considering dumping her husband AND the money problems, that maybe a couple of questions should have been asked before launching into the over the top celebration.
She ended up keeping the baby due to familial pressure (she was easily led) tho she did manage to divorce the husband before her daughter was old enough to remember him. That was the only child she ever had, she was an OK mother from what we could see, tho I moved when she was around 10. Our friends mother never came west (while I lived there anyway) to see her granddaughter tho she did insist they go there for Christmas. After the initial whirlwind and the OMG you cannot possibly give your child up for adoption, the relatives had extremely little to do with the child.
That is the sort of situation I’m asking about. If your daughter showed up at Christmas 7 mos pregnant and you didn’t know about it despite regular phone calls, and you knew things were not going well for her at home, would you immediately launch into celebration?
:eek::(
:eek: