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Please don't take this as a personal criticism.
A few threads back I said the following:
I got some good pushback on that post, but ... here you are making my point for me. Having kids is an imposition on the way you want to live your life. Raising children requires putting the good of others above your own in a way that requires serious effort and self-sacrifice and that doesn't sound so appealing to the folk who inhabit modern times.
I suspect the data above about women who want to have kids but aren't is falling prey to known issues with polling -- women say they want to have kids, revealed preference says they actually don't. My own guess is that having kids maybe seems like a nice idea and it costs nothing to say you want them, but by and large at any given moment it's too daunting and difficult and hard. People don't want to do hard things anymore without obvious benefit to them.
What more is there to say, really?
I missed the initial thread but this sort of attitude is exactly why I continue to maintain that utilitarianism is fundamentally evil/incompatible with human flourishing. For the umpteenth time, utility is not fungible and the moment you start acting like it is you're fucked because utilions and qualia don't exist.
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Isn't the trick to want to live your life to facilitate and optimize for children?
Adding one child to our DINK lifestyle was just about possible. Child care was expensive and when he was small the extra stuff when traveling or out was a pain. Once we had two, something needed to change.
Now single income with 4 kids, my wife is a homemaker. We only travel where we can drive. We're we are now in New England this hasn't been terribly limiting.
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