I don’t know if I agree with this. You make it sound like the vast majority of pregnancies out there are OOPS babies. As if, if we elimanated all unwanted pregnancies, there would be very few pregnant gals out there. Do you really think this would be the case?
At any given time there are millions of people out there purposely trying to get pregant. Be it by going off of birth control, seeing a reproductive specialist, etc.
etc. Some parents actually “do” want to start a family. Some single women actually “do” want to be mommies.
I don’t want them, have never wanted them, and am clearly decided that I will never have any. I have, however, had a problem finding men who don’t want any kids. I have met a lot of men who think that it’s just another de facto part of life. You graduate high school, go to college, get a job, get married, and have kids. Some of them seem to think of it this way because they have a rather detached role in it all - they don’t have to be pregnant or go through labor. This makes many of them completely unable to understand why I don’t want kids. I’m not willing to be pregnant or take time out of my career for it. Limits the dating pool.
Many women think this way, too, I’ve noticed. I often wonder about those that can’t have babies and want to - if we didn’t have so much *pressure * on our women to have babies, maybe they could relax about it. I don’t mean that they shouldn’t, or shouldn’t try, but from what I hear it is enormously stressful not to be able to bear children when you want to, and I am sure a lot of it comes from all the people who keep asking “When are you having children? How come you’re not pregnant yet?” etc., etc. Some of whom are immediate family! And it’s perceived as a failure when you can’t make them.
If it was as **Kalhoun ** said, entirely up to the individual, I think that would be way better…then people would hopefully choose kids because they really really wanted them. I’m sure the human race wouldn’t die out. As **Hampshire ** says, lots of people do want to have kids.
As for men, I am lucky in that my SO is not interested in them, either. His brother and SIL are currently pregnant, we’ll make the bestest auntie and uncle ever.
What an interesting, polite debate on a minefield of a subject! Way to go, Dopers!
I just want to clarify a point made way back on the first page by Sam Stone - not everybody has the biological imperative to reproduce. My husband and I are both completely lacking that imperative. If that makes us genetic mistakes, I have no problem with that label.
I think there is a heavier pressure on women to have children than men. My husband says that he is hardly pressured at all; people rarely ask him, and when he says he doesn’t plan to have kids, the discussion ends there. In my experience, women who find out I don’t want to have kids take it as a personal affront to their own life choices and grill me on my choice.
I also think it is disingenuous to say there is no problem with overpopulation in the world. This thread has given me things to think about and research, but I don’t think we’re in the clear for everyone on the planet to have as many kids as they possibly can. Population explosion might be a loaded, sensationalized term, but the fact remains that 6 billion people can have a whole lot more babies than 3 billion or 3 million can. That is called exponential growth, and we would be fools to ignore what that means to the future of humans on earth.
Dammit, I forgot my last point - those of you who are single and not interested in having kids might want to look for a local chapter of a No Kidding group. (In spite of all the rainbow graphics on the site, it’s not just for gay people. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
A couple points:
- I’m not sure it’s disingenuous to frame the debate as between the folks warning about population growth and others saying that “everyone on the planet [should, can, may] have as many kids as they possibly can.” Nobody is calling for mandatory babymaking–or, at least, those who are are very rare. The anti-overpopulation stance is that overpopulation is not an issue we need to take seriously, not that it’s a moral necessity.
- What you’re calling exponential growth simply isn’t happening, and it doesn’t happen in nature. Natural populations (I exclude humans because our self-awareness makes these equations funky) grow slowly at first, then grow exponentially under ideal conditions–but then, as they start reaching an environmental limit (territory and food supplies being the big limits), population growth slows down. When food is scarce, fertility drops; when territory is scarce, stress goes up and fertility drops. It’s rare in nature to see boom-and-bust population cycles.
In our world, human populations are declining in many areas; we’re not seeing the explosion that was predicted in the 1970s. It’s pretty well debunked.
I say this as someone who was an overpopulation enthusiast during the early nineties, and who received several lectures from highly-educated ecologists during the mid-nineties explaining how flimsy were the scientific explanations of population.
To reiterate, though, this doesn’t mean anyone has a moral imperative to have kids.
Daniel
Dangit, I meant to end this sentence as, “…but it’s definitely a little misleading.”
Daniel
Sorry, I read it differently, I thought your post had an underlying implication that since New Girl isn’t as old as you her opinions are less valid. Thats not what you were trying to say, so I take my criticism back.
I’ve had conversations like this (on the I do want kids side) except that 1) I didn’t ask their reasons for not wanting kids, and 2) When I did say something along those lines it was more intended to convey that I could empathize with how they felt than to point out that they might grow out of it. In retrospect, I hope it was understood as I intended it and not that I was trying lecture. Just a different perspective…
I don’t know if there’s any other way a ‘When I was your age…’ story can come off than as a statement from the story-teller to the younger that the younger doesn’t know what they want and won’t until they become older and wiser.
The thing is, I’ve been hearing that ‘different perspective’ for a long, long time. I’ve been hearing it for ten years, every time the subject comes up and I say that I don’t want to have any kids. I always get at least one person who says ‘When I was your age…’
Occasionally, the person who says it has actually been younger than me, and just assumed that I had to be younger than I am. I don’t look my age, so I get a lot of words of wisdom from ‘older’ people than me who aren’t actually older than me.
I have thought about that, but I would not want to raise a child without a partner. And I don’t have the financial resources right now to do it anyway. If both those things are true in the future, I will definitely consider fostering. And I’m not necessarily discounting adoption, though I would rather adopt an older child or one with special needs as I’d rather not go through raising a baby anyway and it feels like the “more appealing” (god I hate that phrase when it is applied to humans, it makes adoption feel like a slave auction) children should be “saved” for the infertile couples.
I mean, kids do look like a lot of fun, and I don’t think I’d be that terrible of a parent. I just don’t feel right adding to the Earth’s population or contributing to its genetic legacy.
Thanks–it’s always good to have folks in a conversation understand what I’m actually saying!
Yeah, people come at it from different perspectives. But just as it’s wrong for adults to talk about how dumb teenagers are, it’s wrong for teenagers to consider their perspectives the only valid ones. If there were a little more sympathy for the other generations, things would go a lot smoother.
Daniel
I’m 42 and I don’t wan to have kids. I’m not totally opposed to the idea–I enjoy my friends’ kids (in small doses)–but I know from experience that I am too selfish and emotionally distant to be a good father. And I do not want to be a bad father. Better to be no father at all that a bad father.
It took me 15 years to work my way out of the effects of my own father’s emotional distance (among other things). That dysfunction stops with me.
I haven’t had a lot of people asking me about it, though I think that people are used to who I am.
I’ve never started off a statement/conversation with “When I was your age…”. I still feel like a 20 something so that just seems weird. 
I just meant a conversation in general on this topic. I just hope hearing some people’s perspectives here that it was understood as I intended.
I’m very aware that those are valid life choices, and are entirely personal and up to the individual. Goodness knows it’s not up to me to tell someone how to live their life. I just meant it from “I know where you’re coming from”.
I know how frustrating it can be to have everyone asking when you’re going to get pregnant, have kids, etc… I certainly wouldn’t presume to do that to anyone else. In fact, I usually don’t even ask if someone has kids when I first meet them anymore, if they do they’ll usually say so. 
I was just trying to say that there are some of us out there that aren’t trying to lecture or pressure. And that I hope that I never came off that way, it hadn’t occurred to me that it could have.
I think it can be taken simply as some advice passed from someone with more life experience to someone with less. It would of course depend on the tone of delivery, and the receptiveness of the advisee. If the topic is a hot button issue, like this one clearly is for you (and we all have ours), then I think that people have a tendency to read the worst intent right from the beginning.
Think about it. Can you truly say that there is nothing you have changed your mind about over your years as an adult? And that if you met someone, say, 10 years younger who held the same view that you used to, that you wouldn’t try to at least share your change in perspective?
As to having children, my mind has definitely changed over the years - but in the opposite direction. I’d been in a long-term relationship that I thought would end in marriage, and I had always thought I would be a parent by my mid-30s. Well, life didn’t quite turn out the way that I thought (as with some of Jess’s friends). While I’m still very much open to marriage if I find the right guy, and I enjoy kids, I feel that the window of opportunity for having my own children has past (single motherhood is not a consideration). Besides, my nephews and friends’ kids give me enough opportunity to exercise my maternal instinct.
Like Sunspace, no one says much about it to me (at least, not any more). But I agree that a “doesn’t want kids” stance thins the dating pool noticeably, because a lot of guys around my age, both single and divorced, still say they want to start families.
I’m sorry. I wasn’t as clear there as I should have been. My husband and I definately did discuss how we would raise our kids, approximately how many we wanted to have and so on. What was never brought up was whether or not we wanted to have kids. Neither of us ever said, “So, do you want kids?” We each just assumed that the other did want kids – we were getting married and forming a family and, to both of us, having kids just seemed like the logical next step.
The vast majority of pregnancies throughout the existence of the human species have been unplanned (although not necessarily unwanted or “OOPS babies”). That’s simply a historical (and prehistorical) fact due to the evolution of human reproductive biology and the very late development of reliable birth control. And there are still large segments of the human population who don’t have access to, or cultural sanction for, the use of reliable birth control.
I don’t actually know how many “pregnant gals” would be out there if we eliminated all unwanted pregnancies. That’s why I was asking about it. If reproduction was controlled voluntarily throughout the whole human population, what would our reproductive rates look like?
Yes, I know, and I said so at the beginning of my previous post. My question wasn’t “do some people really want to have children?” I already know the answer to that one, and it’s “yes”. My question was more difficult and more interesting (IMO): namely, “what proportion of the human population actually does really want to have children? And if only those people were reproducing, what would be the effect on our future population and ultimately our survival?”
The fact that there are “millions of people out there purposely trying to get pregnant” is a much smaller deal than you seem to think it is. After all, there are nearly seven billion people currently on the planet. If only “millions” of them were reproducing, our population would shrink very quickly.
The question is, again: if reproduction were totally voluntary for everybody, how many people would choose to reproduce, and how many times? And what would be the consequences for us as a species?
The point in this case, ISTM, is that even to “start reaching an environmental limit”, although it might not pose any serious threat to humans’ ultimate survival as a species, could have some pretty drastic effects on a number of aspects of the developed human civilization(s) that we’ve grown rather attached to.
Overpopulation in the sense of “we’ll run out of room and run out of food and die like rats in a crowded cage” is, as you note, not realistically likely to be a serious problem. However, overpopulation in the sense of “we’ll get ourselves and our descendants into some painful and expensive environmental-stress situations that it would be better to avoid” is definitely a realistic threat.
Anthropogenic climate forcing, as far as we can tell, would not seriously threaten humans’ ultimate survival as a species. Rising sea levels would not seriously threaten humans’ ultimate survival as a species. Local overcrowding, diminishing arable land quality, resource wars, severe fossil-fuel shortages, increased transmission of disease, more severe weather extremes, sudden habitat changes—none of those is even remotely likely to knock Homo sapiens out of the game altogether.
But that doesn’t mean that they’d be a whole lot of fun to live through. Human beings do have an aggregate impact on the global environment, especially those of us in the high-consumption, high-waste developed world, and the more of us there are, the bigger an impact we have. And those impacts are likely to have future costs and consequences that will be expensive and difficult for us (that is, our grandchildren) to adjust to. If we’re not all going to suddenly switch to a much lower-environmental-impact lifestyle (and I don’t see how such a thing could happen in a very short time, even if we all wanted it to), then it makes environmental sense to keep our numbers down.
That’s the sense in which overpopulation is a potential environmental problem that we do “need to take seriously”.
As I said, though, human populations work differently from others, due to our ability to make deliberate changes to our environment and to think in abstract terms.
I suppose that’s true, and I can agree with that. The question, though, is whether population is the best way in which to address these problems. I used to be convinced it was; I’m no longer so sure.
Especially given a book I’ve been reading that lays out a case that political leanings may be at least influenced by genetics; if this is so, there’s a chance that we could literally breed for anti-environmentalism, which is kind of a scary thought.
Daniel
Plus, once one started talking about how to deal with the offspring and the other one didn’t freak out, the “do you wanna have any?” question was already answered.
Btw: I don’t have kids and probably never will, but that’s one of the things I have brothers for. I’ve got the cutiest godson ever 
and I reserve the right to educate him in those aspects of life where his mom will never thread (because she doesn’t get it) and his father won’t either (because the wifey doesn’t get it).
I’m 35, and I have no intention of having kids. There are lots of reasons, but the real story is that I’m just not that interested. I have too many other things I’d rather do. (Yes, we have pets–4 cats. No, they’re not our “children,” although we do love them and take good care of them.)
I think the next biggest barrier for me (after “I just don’t wanna”) is that it’s the one major life decision you can’t undo. You can get divorced, sell your house, change careers, but if you can’t decide that being a parent isn’t for you once the kid comes.
As far as my relationship with my parents goes…my dad died when I was 18, but he was a good guy. My mom is good person too. They weren’t so hot as parents, though, and my g’parents weren’t so good at it either. I don’t know if that has anything to do with my decision, but there it is.