stratozyck wrote:
You got people in really poor countries who have kids like they are going for the record
That's either a cultural vestige of a recent past, or reflection of an ongoing horrible reality, of sky-high infant mortality. When infant mortality is high, cultural practices that encourage fecundity are not themselves discouraged. So over history people have lots of babies, but only some survive to adults. And then at some point child mortality starts dropping much faster than a fecund cultural practices changes, so there is this generational moment where families are huge, reflecting both the high infant morality of the recent past and the much lower infant mortality today. My father's farm family, eg, had 6 kids, which made dollars and cents and was normal on the farm; was nothing but liability and expense when they moved into town. Maybe I'm explaining something everyone knows? Culture is a bunch of inventions born of necessities (some of which aren't necessities anymore).
To the OP, I don't think even maybe a full 1 percentage point of all homo sapien that ever existed were "planned pregnancies." It hasn't been a (reliable) thing for very long and I don't suspect human history will hang onto it long, either (I'm a bit of a doomer about complex socities' prospects in the living future). I think when people have either the foresight/education and/or luxury to really pause and contemplate child rearing, hardly anyone decides to do it. Most kids are born under mothers' duress. Always have been. Most empowered women world over want few or no kids.
One maxim about modern nation-state "development" is that as education for women and rights of women increase, the nation-state's fertility plummets, perhaps fast. Traditional-conservative values sometimes get enforced even violently, I'm sure you know -- so. And when they aren't enforced violently, they are still encouraged through traditional cultural channels. It's something like "keeping up with the Joneses" but I think that phrase points at more elite competition for displaying wealth and success and yes kids come in here a bit. I think it's more just that kids is what you do; what else rae you going to do in life? Be some spinster hippy (/s). Most modern cultures have, so far, by my accounting, done a weak and poor job of developing widely accepted and massively popular explanations to "Well what are you going to do if you DON'T have kids?!" Of course there are many answers, but the key is that they are all personal, queer or perceived as bizarre still today.
12 Jun 2023, 8:56 pm
