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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28496 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I think it's good women have the right to control their own reproduction.

Women have far fewer children than they want and have lower life satisfaction though. Are they really getting what they want? Are they really in control?

I'm not convinced that you have to limit access to contraception to get birthrates to replacement rates but the current situation doesn't even seem preferable to the situation where access was more limited.

I think those studies are severely flawed, not that they're being fudges or anything but in that they assume those numbers women say are what they really want in their heart of hearts. Like, I say, I want to lose x pounds, but you know what I continue to do? Eat donuts and burritos because they're yummy, and I care about that more than losing weight. I think a lot of women say they want say three babies, and may even continue to say that after they have a kid, but when they faced with the mental cost of doing so, or other changes they'd have to make, they say no, even though they still might say they want three kids if asked in a stufy, but they also don't want to give up x, y, and z about their current life either.

After all, the American people claim they want a smaller deficit, but a majority is against any kind of specific spending cut. Note, as a dirty leftist I'm fair about this - the American people also want a larger welfare state, but no rise in taxes on anybody but very, very rich people.

I think if you did everything reasonable pro-natalists want - you might push things up .2 or .3. But, short of massive restrictions on women's contraception, you're not getting any massive shifts, because has been pointed out, a lot of the actual change over the past 20 years is a massive drop in teen pregnancy that 90% of society was behind at the time.

As far limiting access, I'm not a woman whose ability to control her own reproduction would be affected, so I'm going to claim what would be better for that woman, even though I'm aware much of this site thinks they know what's best for women and shockingly, it lines up with their general political beliefs.

I think a lot of women say they want say three babies, and may even continue to say that after they have a kid, but when they faced with the mental cost of doing so, or other changes they'd have to make, they say no, even though they still might say they want three kids if asked in a stufy, but they also don't want to give up x, y, and z about their current life either.

I agree that the current TFR rate matches women's revealed preferences. I also recognize that those preferences depend on the social structures that make the choice of having children far too costly. So there are lots of women who would like to have children sooner, or have more children than they do, but who choose otherwise.

I used to work at a small liberal arts college in Southern California. Student body almost all traditional college age (18-22), 2/3 female. All lived on campus by default, with but a handful of exceptions. Many of the students planned to teach elementary school at least for some time (Teach For America or JET program), many of the female students said they planned to get married and have children themselves.

In my two decades working there, only a handful got married by the time they graduated. One gave birth towards the end of her senior year, and all the girls went ga-ga over the baby.

So here were a bunch of young women who wanted children, who biologically were in their prime for having children, who were mature and responsible enough to take care of children, but who overwhelmingly did not have them. And it's reasonable to ask: Why?

Why? Maybe because our college was not at all set up for families, or for women with children. We didn't even have a day-care on campus. The handful of women who married, and the one who gave birth, got dispensation to live off-campus and paid through the nose for rent, whereas our college gave generous means-based subsidies to students living on-campus.

Maybe it was because our bachelors program was clearly aimed for unattached young people: everyone had to take a semester abroad, impossible if you have a young child.

Maybe it was because it simply wasn't done. These were smart, responsible young people, and they have internalized the ideal pattern of college--then career-- then family.

Maybe it was because these women themselves come from parents and grand-parents that followed the same pattern, who therefore have older parents and even older grand-parents, with few siblings or cousins, and the idea that your mother, aunt, or sister looks after your toddler while you finish your education and start your career is no longer a viable option.

(As an aside: ever since I was fifteen, I worked hard to hide hangovers from my mom. She got way too excited whenever I threw up in the morning. Really wanted those grandchildren.)

(As a second aside: yes, I shoplifted booze. My older over-18-but-under-21 friends assured me that it's better that I do it rather than them, because at worst I would have juvenile detention.)

My point is that revealed preferences of women regarding children depend on the institutions that those women inhabit, and currently those institutions make it very costly for young, smart, responsible women to have their desired children during their peak fertile years, even though those women really want to have children.

Again, I'm sure stuff like lack of day care or the current housing situation and so on is the reason for some of the current drop in fertility rate. I just think it's a much lower percentage than people want to claim. Because again, there are European countries who support women having children much more and it hasn't made a dent either. Sure, all of what you said is why were' a 1.65 instead of 1.82 or whatever, but it's not why we're at 2.3.

Immediate happiness / life satisfaction is not the only scale on which outcomes should necessarily be measured. As I have said in the past, a 10 year old boy who believes in Santa Claus and has everything provided for him probably has more life satisfaction than the average 30 year old man who has to work for a living, but that does not necessarily mean that it is a bad thing for the 10 year old boy to become the 30 year old man. As women acquire more freedoms and responsibilities, naturally they will also in some ways become less happy. That is not a good argument for why the freedoms and responsibilities are a bad thing. There are so many men who understand this easily when it comes to other men, and even enjoy valorizing the idea of a sterotypically manly man sacrificing his happiness for some higher purpose, but then when they talk about women they make the argument that women should focus entirely on immediate happiness / life satisfaction delivered by things like pregnancy, without reaching for something that might be a maximum higher than the merely local maximum.

But that is exactly what is happening. People are going for immediate happiness over long-term satisfaction.

They're reaching for the local maximum by not having children.

While it might be true that for a majority of women, having children is actually the global maximum of satisfaction, there are also clearly many women for whom that is not true. It makes sense to support women's right to control their own reproduction so that women can make the choice on their own.

It also makes sense to pay attention to women material and social conditions so that they can do things that both make them satisfied and that is critical to the continued survival of society.

Just throwing our hands up in the air and saying that this is women's choice when it both seems contrary to their wishes and hurts society seems strange to me. Its not like we're asking people to give up all other pursuits and dedicate their entire life to just raising children, we're asking for 2-3 children per couple.

I mean, you still need to convince something more than a small sliver of the population that women basically choosing when they have children is hurting society. The problem this argument, societally, isn't so much left-wing college students at NYU, it's sorority girls at Alabama & LSU who are putting off kids almost just as much. Look at how quickly even an Alabama legislature had to scramble when one judge made that ruling on IVF.

Probably because the Alabama Republican's were hearing from their very own Trump-voting, pro-life, very conservative aunts, wives, and daughters to fix it, now.

Incentives decide this. Change the incentives and the behaviour changes. It could still be women's choice, just under a different incentive structure.

I think we should change the incentive structure so that conservatives no longer advocate for the limitation of the economic and personal freedoms of women. It would still be the men's choice, just under a difference incentive structure, so they no longer talk about how women just need to have fewer options than men for the good of society.

Do you believe I'm a conservative or that I'm arguing for any of that?

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I agree, but supporting women's having better material and social conditions is not incompatible with granting them more freedom to control their own reproduction. One can do both.

On that we agree then. What I object to is the framing of this being the result of what women "want", I don't believe it is.

That people are less satisfied than even under the previous bad system should be a massive wake up call.

That's only if you believe either reporting of life satisfaction in 2024 or 1954 (or whenever you think women would be happier if they just accepted it was their lot in life) is actually good data.

Instead I should just invent data that conforms to my preferred reality?

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