There is a massive cultural pressure on women in America (and in many countries) to have children. Its in the movies, magazines, and comes up amazingly often in casual conversations. Regardless of what people say, it also comes with a social stigma in different cases.

The point of this type of attention is to highlight the validity of making this choice in the hope that it might reduce the cultural pressure. I'm sure many men don't care, since the pressure is generally placed on women.

> I'm sure many men don't care, since the pressure is generally placed on women.

As a man with a mother who asks when she'll get grandchildren at every opportunity, I'm going to have to disagree with you there.

As an almost 30 with my s/o, her parents my parents asking the same, and my male friends who are 30 or over and dating getting fuzzed about kids on their 4th date I can also attest to that.

While women have a cultural and physicall biological clock that ticks men aren't really in the clear. Society needs procreation to survive and women still haven't mastered asexual reproduction.

It's funny how often it's brought up even before marriage.

Also, men have a huge legal disincentive to have kids anymore. If the relationship doesn't work out, you're on the hook for ~18 years of child support payments, and that whole system is designed to make men out to be nothing but a paycheck.

On that I some what agree, men that pay child support should get joint custody / visitation rights unless there is risk of harm to the child, it's pretty bleak that men are still forced to pay child support and the mother can claim that they have no rights to ever see the child.

I also believe that child support should be for the child, the mother should not be able to use it for anything which isn't directly related to childcare, and it should be in it's base a flat amount based on living costs rather then a percentage of your income (unless you willingly want to pay more).

That said men have very easy way to avoid children and that's to use a condom or to pick a partner who does not want them, if you are both willingly make one or take on the decision to keep it own up to it the child should not suffer because of that.

Forcing women to have an abortion will never happen, forcing them to give the child up for adoption will never happen, men and women are not identical and so will never be truly equal in every regard, it's not like women can force sperm out of you without assault or rape.

And if there's some extreme case when fraud has actually been committed e.g. she intentionally sabotaged contraception or went "Satisfaction" on you taken your sperm while you were unconscious (which is technically rape) you should be able to sue for a weaver.

> That said men have very easy way to avoid children and that's to use a condom or to pick a partner who does not want them

That's not nearly as easy as it sounds, as condoms are not 100% effective and the partner may not be truthful when they say they don't want children. Women hold all of the power in these situations, as if contraception should fail they have the opportunity to abort or give the child up for adoption, meaning they can change their mind at any point. Men don't have such "second chance" options, as they are completely beholden to the woman's choice from conception on.

In an ideal and fair system, a man should be given adequate opportunity to declare their intent not to support the child, after which the woman will then have the opportunity to abort or put the child up for adoption, or know that if they keep the child then they will be raising it alone or with a different partner.

Life isn't fair, this will not ever be possible biology and modern values make it so. You have other options, get a vasectomy or RISUG, use a condom and wait for the male contraceptive pill to come to market if you still some how manage to reproduce then you'll be the unluckiest person on the planet. You can't force a woman to give up a child anymore than you can force her to bare one, most things in life have some risk associated with them,so does sex.

The problem is that there won't be a system that will allow for men to say "I don't want it" which won't be exploited, and children suffer, it suck yes, but we should rather focus on ensuring that both parents will have fair access to the child and act in it's best interests.

BTW if the woman gets another partner who becomes the legal parent of the child then you are in the clear for child support in most cases.

Life isn't fair, but justice ought to be.

> The problem is that there won't be a system that will allow for men to say "I don't want it" which won't be exploited, and children suffer

Exploitability holds less weight to me than legal fairness. "Think of the children" is more often than not used to justify facilitating unfair actions, in my view.

> It's funny how often it's brought up even before marriage.

What do you mean by this? Do you mean that the topic of children should not be brought up before marriage between two people in a relationship? Or do you mean that the topic gets brought up by family members before you're married?

I mean how often the subject is brought up by friends and family before marriage is. It's more often I get asked about kids than "when are you going to pop the question?"

Within a relationship, though, discussing kids and such are definitely something that should be done well before marriage.

Ah okay, I figured that since the rest of your argument seemed reasonable, but I wanted to verify since it struck me as odd.

As for your actual meaning, that is definitely a weird yet amusing trend. I haven't really heard much of either from my family

Asking potential partners if they want to have children is a normal part of dating, and not at all the same as a pestering relative asking "when, when, when?"

(I am over 30, single and dating, and I expect it to come up naturally after you've spent enough time talking. Fourth date sounds reasonable.)

I'm not saying it shouldn't I'm just saying there isn't some magical barrier that protects men against pressure to have children. Both men and women have a biological clock, women start to produce less eggs and those that are produced are of lesser quality, same thing happens with sperm. There is direct correlation between health problems, IQ and various other factors to the age of both parents not just the woman. At least as far as Europe goes from my personal experience having kids trumps marriage here, you'll see far more unmarried couples in a long term committed relationship (2-3+ years) with kids that are not married than in the US.

You make a valid point, but I don't think the example I responded to falls under an example of unfair pressure.

Men and women get some pressure to have kids, but women get more of it, for pretty obvious reasons.

Is that pressure illegitimate? People "opting out" of having kids aren't opting out of social instruments that presuppose other peoples' investment into raising kids. Not just the obvious stuff like Social Security, either. Facebook stock would be worth a lot less if every tweenager that will ever live had already been born.

The only unfortunate part is that the pressure falls disproportionately on women.

> Is that pressure illegitimate?

imo, yes. saying there are "social instruments" just adds another ring around the kernel.

more economically developed countries tend to have lower birth rates. could be causal?

funny this was posted around thanksgiving when many people in the united states -- both male and female, albeit in different forms and degrees -- will be feeling it.

If it's causal, it's a problem with the system of economic development, because outside of Logan's Run, economically developed countries need to replace their populations in order to fund retirements --- not to mention drug discovery, ever-increasing Internet bandwidth, and new PS4 games.

Pretty much the whole of western civilization is organized around and dependent on families having kids.

Drug discovery is an unfortunate example, as we've gotten steadily worse at it as our population has grown.

It's odd that everyone believes we have developed a lot of miracle drugs in the last 30 years.

We're discovering fewer, but not none. For instance, there are forms of leukemia that we have almost cured in the last 15 years. HIV seems like another good example.

HIV is the other good example. I'm pushing back against your argument that we need to make more people or we'll stop finding teh drugs. We were far better at finding them back when we had less than half the current population.

Do you really think there's a correlation between population and drug discovery effectiveness? I know part of the hypothesis here is that we generate huge amounts of data and not enough analysis, but analysis parallelizes too, right?

No, I don't think there's any correlation. I'm poking a hole in a tangential part of your argument, in the finest tradition of message board pedantry. We used to search for drugs differently, it was about 80x more effective, and therefore we could make way fewer people and still come out ahead if we just switched back.

I admit that the drug discovery thing was unnecessary filigree for an argument that could have rested with "we need more children so that old people don't end up starving to death".

That is a dark and satisfying way to put it. The elderly hunger for tender young flesh.

God you are the worst.

s/worst/best/

> If it's causal, it's a problem with the system of economic development

yep. i'm glad someone else said this. i deleted several sentences of rant about it from my previous post.

I think it falls on men and women differently. Women have a clock with regards to children, so it is more visible like that. Men are definitely pressured to be successful so they can provide for the presumptive family.

And to that I say, so what? Grow a thicker skin. We need to write articles because someone's being needled by their mother into having children?

Oh, the irony.

You're asking him to "grow a thicker skin" about close relatives bickering him (and the related social pressure), when you can't even hold from expressing your annoyance about mere ARTICLES that you don't have to read and can simply skip.

I'm not starting a movement. Or a subreddit.

Did you not read the article? The issues described here were one anecdote about one woman fighting to be allowed to have her tubes tied at 30 and another talking about the various cultural pressures involved by being a childless woman in Iran. It's obviously more systemic than someone's needling mother, and the fact that systemic pressure exists is interesting enough to write articles on.

>Who cares?

Parents, co-workers, friends, discriminating employers, even random acquaintances...

> Who cares?

Everyone trying to pressure these people into having children, apparently.

I doubt many of these people are experiencing real "pressure". They're just annoyed by other people's opinions about how they should live their lives.

Be a grown up and tune it out.

A lot of people care, as described in the article.

"Desperate" does seem like a bit strong of a word to describe a goal that is achievable with 0 effort.

I think the point of the article is that, while it should be achievable with 0 effort, in practice it is not. They are constantly having to justify themselves to others, which does take effort.

But they don't "have to" justify anything. They aren't forced to come up with any explanation, and "I just don't want to" is roughly 0 effort.

Constantly having to justify yourself to others is called life, at least life in a society.

You must live in a really judgemental environment :-(

No, I think you just too used to it that you don't see it. People judge you and you judge every other person on the planet based on every action they made, making and will make in their life.

Not zero: It is effort to argue with people that try to convince you to have children. And if they're e.g. family it's not always possible to avoid them.

"Desperate to not drink socially"

"Desperate to not volunteer for military service"

"Desperate to not eat meat"

These are all things that to varying degrees (and varying by locale) run contrary to social expectations and will be met with external pressure. I still don't see anyone writing up the grandiose titles above with a straight face.

Made you click, though!

(You'd think the BBC needed advertising revenue, the way they carry on at times...)