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Comment by unsupp0rted | Hacker News Reader

As a non-parent, this is why I’m a non-parent.

Even though mother and child mortality is minimized, there are 999 life-altering things that can go wrong.

Take the simplest ones: what % of the population has the kind of mental illness that’ll destroy your relationship with them? E.g. borderline personality, sociopaths, etc.

Easily 5% or more.

That alone is a 1 in 20 chance of your kid ruining a significant portion of your life, not to mention you bringing a kid into the world with an inevitably ruined life.

And then there’s physical disability, not to mention financial burden.

It’s not worth it.

I’m very glad other people roll those dice: I’m happy to live in a populated world. But I don’t touch the dice myself.

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i also feel my children ruining my "pleasant calm" life all day and night every day, but when you see them discovering the world, learn how to speak, making their own language by their unconstrained little logical mind, marvelling at the world's tiny wonders which you can't remember ever deemed other than ordinary and given, first connecting the dots themself, acting exactly the way as you did when you were in their age yet completely uniqly, or independently developing the same lovely habits as your long dead grandma... is priceless and worth all the fatigues of sleepless nights for me.

You rolled the dice and won. You had a 17/20 chance of winning and you did.

Sleepless nights and fatigue? That’s the least of the associated worries.

People who rolled the same dice and ended up in the 3/20 group usually don’t comment.

Sometimes they do:

Some subset with a damaged life shrugs and says it was all worth it.

it looks like gamblers sustain the world's human population :)

I think 1 in 20 is a bit too high. 1 in 100 maybe to have a significant impact on your life. There are lots of tests now that so you have the chance to abort.

16% of the world population has a significant disability according to the WHO. Most of them are not born with it: age related (dementia, blindness,..), serious work accidents, lasting effects of diseases,...

Loads of them can get treated or won't alter life as much in the western world.

If your family history has no cases of mental illnesses, chances are very low to get them.

For a serious learning disability (not able to attend normal school), it's probably 1 in 20. Most of these kids will still live a fairly normal life in the western world.

Also, chances of disabilities also increase with the age of the parents. Best to have your kids between 20-35 to keep the odds down. Above 40 is a lot more dangerous than under 30.

> In 2021, there were an estimated 14.1 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States with [Serious Mental Illness]. This number represented 5.5% of all U.S. adults.

https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness

That's more than I expected for sure. But I do wonder how 'concentrated' these are. I'd think (mental) illnesses are really tied to genetics.

And social-economic factors play a big role too in food, stabile stress-free upbringing and healthy activities.

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