Hacker News Reader

Comment by panglott | Hacker News Reader

U.S. society has decided that it must be very costly for young women to have children—having children makes it very difficult to obtain the education and career experience necessary to effectively support young humans. So young women are under immense pressure to delay child-bearing as long as possible, delay it to the very border of infertility. But that's an example of the inhumanity of our society, its lack of humane-ness and human-centered priorities.

It's as conceivable that we could adapt by making it socially and economically feasible for young women to have children at the height of their fertility, rather than normalizing surrogacy, eugenics, and mass abortion. Those things are fine in limited circumstances, of course—even if each is under legal limitations in most Western countries (I hadn't realized that surrogacy was banned in most of Western Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogacy ).

View on HN

>U.S. society has decided that it must be very costly for young women to have children

I'm pretty sure U.S. society isn't the one responsible for the fact that raising a child consumes significant resources and makes obtaining other goals much harder. The time spent caring for a baby makes it harder to complete higher education. Even if offered help, a baby takes a lot of time.

Also, this isn't something that only applies to young women. A single father has to sacrifice a lot of time to raise a child. While the initial pregnancy is not as bad for the single father to deal with, the time spent with a child that could be spent on anything else is a significant factor for the next 18 years.

Human children require lots of care. But high US inequality raises both the consequences of not investing in your individual human capital and the cost of investing in your individual human capital.

> U.S. society has decided that it must be very costly for young women to have children—having children makes it very difficult to obtain the education and career experience necessary to effectively support young humans.

Do you have children?

The challenges that are brought on by children aren't unique to the US. Getting an education and/or performing at a high-level at your job are very difficult to do if you are raising children. Doubly so for women who are typically the primary caregiver for infants.

The U.S., relative to Europe at least, has family leave policies and child care institutions that are uniquely bad for young families, especially families at the low end of the economic scale. Not that Europe has solved this either. A society that was organized to allow young people to complete their life cycle when they are most fertile would look very different indeed. There's certainly a tradeoff between investing in the human capital of adults vs. investing in the human capital of children. But the main coping method of young Americans is to delay childbirth as long as possible, which becomes a tradeoff between fertility and infertility.

There is more to life than one's pursuit of education or career aspirations.

Europe has lower birth rates than the US[1], despite having more friendly vacation and parental policies.

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/11/birth-rates-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com