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Notes -
Orphanages???
This exists, it's called surrogacy, there are couples who will pay for it, and there would be more if it were subsidized, as there's a waiting list for adoption of young children, though 20 sounds excessive. There probably isn't any way to make giving birth more than a couple of times for someone else not extremely low status. There was a thread a bit ago on DSL where a poster was talking about considering surrogacy so that his hot young wife doesn't lose her figure, and there's no way for the relationship between him and the surrogate, or the well off gay couple and the surrogate not to be pure power dynamics at scale.
Pumping out 20 children would be their career, they’d be comfortable. Just wombs essentially; artificial ones would also work. Our bottleneck is in the production of children, yet paradoxically, in resources, children are not costly, and we are swimming in resources. It should be easy to lift the barriers and ramp up production, provided we do not take an exceedingly sentimental stance on where children come from (“when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much….”) .
Then, if most women would rather have status than children, that’s not the state’s problem. It gets its taxpayers anyway, and children are brought into the world, which I find morally good, while still not forcing anyone.
I’m saying both that your allusion to “orphanages” suggests that you don’t know what you’re talking about, and that even the underclass doesn’t want to be “just wombs” professionally for 30 years. Not that you aren’t in good company, Socrates suggested it on the Symposium, just there are reasons you’ll mostly see that system in bleak dystopian novels.
Why not? I would consider it a nice career were it possible. Most middle class jobs are way more dull, burdensome and meaningless than professional womb-woman.
The average modern woman, who holds the future of humanity in its hands, appears overwhelmed by the responsibility; and incapable of reproducing, like the panda. So while various people want to take the responsibility away from her, I just propose to circumvent her. My solution, being entirely voluntary, is far softer than that proposed by “incels” and “trads”.
I think "trads" propose things like making it easier to raise children on a single salary, and harder to get divorced.
Partly because they couldn't use drugs or alcohol for the majority of their adult life. And most women would be having maybe 6 kids -- not that nobody has ever had more, but many women shouldn't for health reasons.
But, also, a good job is, in part, something that structures people's days and weeks, gets them out of the house even if they're feeling a bit depressed and it's cold and dark outside, gets them to interact with other people, and ideally offers some amount of "autonomy, mastery, and purpose." So the gamification idea makes sense. Parenthood can offer some of that, since the parent needs to find a way to care for their children, and will go do things with them, and can generally find some sort of rhythm to the day, week, and year that works for the family, especially as the babies get a bit bigger. Eventually, they can talk and expect different days and holidays and so on, and it's actually pretty fun to decorate with them, or garden together, bake together, and so on. So, as jobs go, stay at home mom is a bit unstructured, but it makes up for it somewhat in progressing in an interesting way, especially with several children. Surrogacy does not offer that. And if some government were to try to institute something like the military, but while pregnant, then it's probably better to join the normal military, and do support stuff while not pregnant.
I thought that was Elisabeth Warren.
That seems a very low estimate. Reading wikipedia, you often come upon variations of “they had 14 children, 2 of whom survived”. Some entire countries' fertility rate is higher than 6, like Niger, 6.6.
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Is being a professional surrogate mother for Western gays and infertiles not a popular job in poorer countries, such as Ukraine?
Apparently the best Eastern European place for surrogacy has moved from Ukraine to Georgia, due to the war. A quick search leads to, for instance, this, where at least one woman came from another Central Asian country by lying to the husband she doesn't like, and at least some women are having up to six babies for the agency.
I can't tell based on a short search how popular it is, but the four to six number sounds about what I would also expect from a woman who was into motherhood, and had found a husband to support her. I've heard of exactly one woman in my personal sphere who had 20 children, and then shortly died, leaving them to raise each other. You can get families like the Duggars by some combination of good health, religious belief, and media attention.
I'm not so much saying that there aren't women who are willing to have a basically normal amount of children, some of whom they sell. Just that having 20 and leaving them at an orphanage is too far.
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