A review by bike
The Parenthood Dilemma: Procreation in the Age of Uncertainty by Gina Rushton

5.0

from the book:

"How can we ever win a program that socializes the cost of bringing children into the world if so many liberals still see the desire to have kids as something like a timeshare in Vegas - a costly, foolish, and tacky investment mostly for the rubes"? .... There is a personal and political cost to deciding parenthood is an indulgence (p82)

The UK restricts some benefits payments to first two kids in a family!!!! (p83)

matresence but not word for not having ids. How does cateogrically deciing you will not have children and then experiencing not having children transform you?

women....the person who must start and finish hard conversations

"This guys doesn't actually know me, so it isn't me he thinks he's falling in love with, he just likes how I make him feel" This sense that your value is in your output, not in your personhood, feeds the comparison to mothering. Hayley describes feeling like a kind of hybrid mother-therapist

It wasn't until I found myself in a relationship with a man who wanted but didn't need me that I had to admit how much glory I'd found in my smallness, how much value I'd placed on my expertise. I was wholly unprepared to give up a role that I might not have agreed to be cast in but now excelled at. It threw me off balance and made me feel confused and insecure. If he didn't need me, why did he want me? I had to learn how to trust that I was not defined by what I did for my partner, but for who I was - a scary proposition for a good listener with an arsenal of recipes but a fairly low reserve of self-esteem. 

Is it fair to produce, primarily for myself, a human object of hope to live on a planet I have done little to care for and maintain? Am I drawn not just to their nowness but the sparkle of their newness?

What if having a child wouldn't be a disaster? What if actually I was an imperfect person with a lot of love to give?

...argues that normal models of decision making theory simpley can't be applied to the decision of whether or not to have a child. Unlike other choices where we can assume and assign vlaue to different outcomes based on our preferences, this question deals with what she calls a "transformative experience" one that changes the values and preferences you held before making the decision.....The subjective unpredictiabliity attending the act of having one's first child makes the story about family planning into little more than pleasnt fiction.


Is there anything that so quickly confirms what you love and fear most about the world and yourself, like the question of whether or not have children?