The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Surrogacy would solve problems related to giving birth, but would add additional complications, and it's also expensive. Still, maybe worth thinking about.
It's worth pointing out that "expensive" is quite an understatement. When my wife and I looked into it a few years back, the IVF treatments and surrogacy all would've been almost $100,000. And at least for us, it was largely not covered by insurance. Even for a couple who is reasonably well off (as we are), that's a shitload of money and out of our reach.
I agree that $100k is expensive compared to other things in daily life, but... even if you're earning $30k/year, three years worth of wages for a second kid seems in the range of reasonable? It seems like less than what you would spend on a kid over a lifetime, for some people it adds a huge amount of meaning to life, etc.
As an aside, it's not distributed over 20 years, which does make it much more difficult. I wonder if you're a stable couple, whether a bank would give you a loan for this, or whether IVF clinics have payment plans? Even if not, this seems like the kind of thing some people could ask friends and family to borrow to do.
Like, in general $100k is a lot, but it seems like it can correspond to the strength of desire and will to have a kid.
That said, I'm viewing this from an odd, detached angle as a pretty young guy, so I'm probably missing a lot of the complexity a couple faces when making that decision for real; sorry.
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100k to avoid pregnancy is a steal. That is cheaper than a porsche.
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