Artificial wombs are coming. I was under the impression that women considered pregnancy as a burden which carries risks, is painful, causes all sorts of negative hormonal / physiological effects, etc.
I think that artificial wombs will initially be challenged by feminist and conservative groups, but will end up being accepted, first with wealthy Western women, but eventually by everyone else.
I have never considered that women might choose to carry a child, if they weren't required due to technological and scientific advances.
> I was under the impression that women considered pregnancy as a burden which carries risks, is painful, causes all sorts of negative hormonal / physiological effects, etc.
It does that, and is also something many women desire. Some thigns are both really hard and painful, and also very rewarding.
I really doubt you are going to get any challenges from feminists, or at least not very many. Feminism is all about empowering women to be able to do what they want, which includes having a baby using an artificial womb. Conservative groups might be against it, but it will depend on which group. Not all conservative groups are against IVF, which is similar in the sense that it allows a woman who would otherwise not be able to have a child have a child.
> Feminism is all about empowering women to be able to do what they want, which includes having a baby using an artificial womb.
The types of feminists that you'll see negative responses from, are those that use feminism as a platform for controlling others. For example, the kinds of feminists (some people would call them fake feminists) that get upset when a woman chooses to shave her armpits, or likes to wear lipstick or heels, etc. etc. Those types always look for opportunities - no matter how absurd - to proclaim something is the latest attempt to enslave women to their biology, and so on and so forth.
I am a former homemaker and full-time mom. Most self proclaimed feminists I have interacted with have been virulently hostile, disrespectful and contemptuous of me. They seem to not see full-time motherhood as a legitimate choice at all. It sometimes feels to me like they wish a man would take care of them, but they don't know how to make that work, so hating on me is de rigueur.
It is one of the reasons I spend so much time on Hacker News. Most men are less aggravating for me to deal with.
It is also part of why I do not self identify as a feminist.
My wife who is also a homemaker and stay-at home mom. She has heard remarks from family, acquaintances and even random parents playing with kids at the park how she was throwing her university degree down the drain and how somehow she doesn't "need to stay home" and can do whatever she wants. They don't seem to understand that what she wants to do currently is to raise kids.
There's impolite people everywhere. If your wife worked outside the home she'd get impolite comments from family, acquaintances, and random strangers about working outside the home instead of being home with the kids.
Women who work outside the home get rude comments, women who stay at home get rude comments and you can't even avoid it by opting out of childbearing entirely, those women get rude comments too.
I fail to understand what that has to do with feminism or much anything else.
BTW, staying at home is the more socially acceptable choice.[1]
If your wife worked outside the home she'd get impolite comments from family, acquaintances, and random strangers about working outside the home instead of being home with the kids.
In this day and age? Does that still happen? Asking because honestly that’s so far from my personal experience.
Ha! Yes, of course. I get this all the time. Shocked reactions from people when I tell them our baby is in daycare. Sometimes it's more subtle and framed as "oh, it's too bad you can't afford to stay home with him," as if it couldn't possibly have been my choice.
Which is to say, I have the highest respect for SAHM moms because it's a damned difficult job.
There is some statistic showing that every dollar invested in our small children saves multiple dollars down the line for things like the prison system.
Any feminism that cannot honor, respect and support the importance of full time parenting is an ideology I want no part of. To my mind, the only good feminism is one that insists that full time parenting should be an equally legitimate choice for either parent, not just the mother.
"To my mind, the only good feminism is one that insists that full-time parenting should be an equally legitimate choice for either parent, not just the mother."
Children are a resource that creates our future. It would be super nice if society stopped acting like investing in our children is a waste of resources while wondering why the world is going to hell.
I homeschooled my 2xe sons. I served as Director of Community Life for the TAG Project for a time. This was support for my ability to homeschool my kids in a situation where no school, public or private, was qualified to adequately accommodate them at both ends of the spectrum at the same time, which was what they needed. My oldest has two conditions which can each lead to a neurotic relationship to food severe enough to require in patient intervention. He has a healthy relationship to food because of my approach to handling his issues.
There are an awful lot of things that can go wrong in a child's life that can potentially lead to a need for enormous resources at state expense from medical to mental health to behavioral, which can go very differently if there is a sufficiently knowledgeable full time parent to handle it before it goes so very wrong.
You are in error. More education is not wasted on raising kids. Your opinion sounds incredibly ignorant to me.
What baffles me is the amount of people in the US, usually in parochial cultural settings, who lack significant formal education or pedagogical background and are nevertheless deemed fit to home-school their kids. How is this legally possible? Now can a high school drop-out single mom (absent some extraordinary characteristics) possibly provide a well-rounded and adequate curriculum in a variety of general education subjects, ranging from math to literature, to world history, to biology?
If anything, the problem is that there aren’t nearly enough PhDs teaching kids.
Absent abuse, in the US we allow a very large degree of freedom in ways people are allowed to raise their children, no matter how unconventional and ill advised.
You're legally allowed to mess your kids up in many ways, such as by not teaching them life skills, encouraging teen marriage and pregnancy, teaching them bad manners, withholding critical information from them, giving them misinformation, disallowing them to be around unapproved peers, having tons of kids, raising them to be hateful (Westboro Baptist Church, KKK,...) etc, etc, etc.
BTW, I actually know of a high school dropout single mom who homeschools her kids. Of course, since she's unemployed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a stay at home mom so shes entirely dependant on her own mom for every single thing, there's no father in the picture. She's a 35 year old child. Her kids are going to be so screwed up and entirely ill prepared for adult life, but it's legal, her "homeschool" is registered with the state.
For better or worse in the US individual liberty is valued over almost everything else.
The online high schools these days are varied and pretty good. If you have a child with special needs or just doesn’t fit into the box the public education system is designed around then homeschooling is the best option. You don’t need a PhD to teach grammar to an 8 year old. There’s also a wealth of incredible videos and teaching materials to help too.
If anything I think parents are best suited to teach their own children until high school given the parents have a reasonable IQ.
Yes, but a certain level of literacy, cultural development and education is still required on the part of the parent in order to make effective use of all those resources. One still has to make sensible judgments about how to appropriate them and to supplement them with intelligent pedagogy.
Doubtless, some parents who home-school their parents have an adequate foundation for this. However, some of the greatest proponents of home-schooling I've met most definitely do not, and it boggles my mind.
This is true. I’ve seen it. I’m not sure this is such a bad thing. I know this sounds crazy but I kinda want to see how this plays out. Maybe some education diversity will have positive impacts we can’t forsee
For reasons better addressed in PG's timeless "Nerds" article (http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html) better than in most other places, I don't think many children, least of all intelligent children, really "fit" into the box of public school.
But that's part of the point, as I see it. Lots of modern institutions are a bit unnatural and require some contortion for humans to squeeze themselves into. Public school is valuable in teaching that, or at least it was to me and many other people I know, as we reflect upon it years later.
We have the worlds okayest public education system. I’m glad I have the freedom in my state to offer my children something better at home, because the system utterly failed me (or I failed to adapt to it).
Well, yes, a high school drop-out single mom may be able to do a fine job of homeschooling. Or may not. And that will depend on a lot of factors beyond their formal education.
I am not comfortable with the suggestion here that a parent needs advanced education to successfully homeschool. There are support systems for homeschoolers. I was involved with that at one time.
If you homeschool gifted kids, even if you have a lot of formal education, you can find yourself really challenged. You can find yourself dealing with a child who knows more about a subject than you do, even though you have had college classes in the subject.
One way to handle that is to become a resource person for the child. Instead of instructing them, you participate on email lists and what not, learn what books and other materials have a good reputation and make sure the child has access to such materials. There is no reason a high school drop-out cannot take a similar approach.
A bigger problem in my mind is that when women go to college and have difficulty with a subject, they are often actively steered towards early childhood education. One outcome of this fact is that a high percentage of elementary school teachers are not only bad at math, they are math phobic. They pass this math phobia on to impressionable young children and may not be really qualified to teach math.
My oldest son likely has dyscalculia. By the time I pulled him out of school, he feared and loathed math. When he asked questions in school, his teachers often read him the explanation in the book. He read well above grade level. If the book explanation were going to help, he didn't need the teacher for that. It never helped him.
Fortunately, I had more college level math by the time I graduated high school than most people with non STEM bachelor's degrees have. I also have a background tutoring it and I can find novel ways to explain it. I was eventually able to get my son over his fear of math and give him a solid grounding in the subject.
When men struggle with subjects like math in college, they are not encouraged to give up and "go do something easier, like teach small kids." My ex is not good at math. I tutored him when he took college math classes. No one suggested he give up. They expected him to man up and do what it took to meet the standard to complete his goals.
This is very much a gendered difference in student outcomes and it has all kinds of negative consequences for not only both genders -- because men don't get support for making other choices if they genuinely can't do something -- but for the entire fabric of society.
Thank you for your feedback; it was quite interesting.
One thought:
I am not comfortable with the suggestion here that a parent needs advanced education to successfully homeschool.
I did not mean to make that suggestion, either. I deliberately chose the language of my comment to leave open the possibility of pedagogical experience or aptitude without the corresponding formal education. Perhaps it is my mistake that this did not come across as emphatically as I had meant it.
However, I still harbour a great deal of scepticism about the capacity of many parents I've seen take up home-schooling, simply on the basis that they don't seem particularly knowledgeable, curious, or educated themselves — whether formally or informally.
Well, unfortunately, I think that is sometimes due in part to people in authoritative positions having no respect for their "lessers," whether that is children, women, people of color, poor people, underlings at work or some other category. So a lot of things that get framed as "instruction" or "education" is really about enforcing an unhealthy pecking order that is actively harmful to whomever is framed as "lesser."
There are no easy solutions for that situation. But I think it starts with having a high degree of respect for individuals and their right to choose, even under circumstances where it is challenging to feel real respect for them. Or, perhaps, especially at such times.
For what it's worth, I'm a university drop-out so I have no personal dog in any credentialing fight. :-)
But despite what I'd like to believe is a generously well-rounded upbringing in a university family, I have serious doubts about my ability to home-school my son to anywhere near the same effect as an average public school—and that's bearing in mind the variation in quality among them. I wouldn't dare try.
Then there's the sheer effort and energy involved in juggling multiple subjects. My knowledge on certain subjects doubtless exceeds that of most public school teachers, but certainly not all the core subjects! And knowledge alone doesn't translate into effective teaching ability or experience with presenting information in effective and compelling ways to kids.
One parent went and surveyed what their child did all day in school. They concluded that most of the school day was spent changing classes, queing up, calling roll, etc. They estimated that only one to two hours a day was spent actually learning.
California laws allow for tutors as a valid education option. They specify 3 hours a day, not 8. One-on-one teaching is much more intense, relevant and information dense than a one-to-many teaching situation. Most teaching in school relies heavily on the kids reading the material provided. A homeschool parent can similarly provide good materials.
Learning comes more naturally than teaching. ;)
Anyway, it isn't intended to try to convince you to homeschool. It is only intended to say that lots of parents have felt the same way and then found it was more do-able than they expected.
I tried to enroll my son in college when he was 13 to get him out of my hair. His knowledge of some subjects has long been over my head. That did not work out and I had to woman up and figure out how to keep being a resource for him. So I am no stranger to feeling like "This is something I am not qualified for." But a parent with a sincere interest in supporting their child's education can be an excellent resource, even when they can offer no further instruction.
So, ideally children should be taught about life and how the world works, helped with homework, and/or home-schooled by people with little to no formal postsecondary education?
It's obviously hard to be feminist if you think women are worse than men.
Your experience of self proclaimed feminists and full time motherhood is very different to mine, and it's not just a generation gap because my mother was a full time parent and a feminist (still feminist, but spends less time parenting these days) and my sister is both as well.
I am also pretty skeptical of the interpersonal understanding and self awareness of women who explain that they just never get on with other women because of the issues those other women have, and men are just so much nicer - it's usually as much about their issues as anyone else's.
There are many shades of feminism. Some women believe that modest clothing such as headscarves are empowering, shifting the focus on character rather than physical appearance, while other feminists will strongly disagree. For me it’s easier to accept that feminism is just an umbrella term for women’s right to do anything as she pleases just as easily as men can.
Plus it’s always in continuous change. Example: currently in the U.K. there’s a hot debate between (some) feminists and trans women [1] but who knows in the future, it would be 100% feminist to accept all self-identifying females as valid females.
Slightly off topic: Feminisim is a bit of a messy subject (imo), I wonder if one can have a clearer picture if it’s expressed in logical terms :o
My wife has said the same. In addition feminists have been hostile to me over the fact that my wife is a SAHM as if she’s my prisoner in some sort of Handmaid’s Tale conservative dystopian fantasy.
Once again, people being rude has nothing to do with feminism and why do you assume people making rude comments are "feminists" rather than just "assholes?"
Feminism is all about empowering women to make choices that are right for them, especially with regards to reproduction and childrearing.
If your wife wasn't a stay at home mom she'd get rude comments about working outside the home - it's called the "Mommy Wars"- ever single childrearing choice gets criticized by someone.
I get a massive amount of criticism and nasty comments, from everyone including strangers, for my reproductive choices as well, even though they are firmly "progressive" - I'm a married woman whose voluntarily opted out of childbearing. I also get nasty comments about not taking my husband's name.
It's become fashionable, in the Trump era, to use feminism and liberalism for some sort of scapegoat, or reason for bad things, no matter how absurd. I was at a BBQ and one kid hit another kid and, very seriously, the mom blamed feminism. Yep, feminism caused a minor dispute between siblings.
I wish it didn't have to be one or the other. I guess it's human nature to tend towards thinking that choices have to be binary - I've often been guilty of it myself. Whenever somebody makes a choice that is different to our own we fear that it might dilute the possibility of us making our own choices, and so we become hostile. But it's important we work against this tendency.
I'm hoping that we'll be able to work towards a world have a world where stay-at home dads, stay-at home mums, surrogate pregnancies, same-sex parents, dual parental leave, etc, are all valid choices for bringing up children.
Some women hate it. Some feel a sense of wonder (my mother was like that, when carrying my younger brother). Some face it with resignation (that was more like my wife). My wife's biggest issues involved her blood pressure and fear about actually giving birth. One friend I have no doubt would still have carried her child naturally, even given another option. Another friend, I'm not sure about.
Carrying a child is often a very emotional experience, and it makes sense that reactions to those emotions would vary pretty wildly between different people.
You might be surprised to learn that there is a whole segment of the population who view bringing new lives into the world as a sacred undertaking. Some women of this persuasion consider growing a new person inside of themselves to be the highest calling. Also, pregnancy and childbirth can be incredibly fulfilling experiences, for both parents. After all, modern life doesn’t have many rights of passage on the same level.
Why exactly do you believe feminism would be against artificial wombs? (which, btw, is not even what we are talking about - these are transplanted natural wombs not artificial).
Feminism is about empowering women to make their own reproductive choices. Giving them MORE choices is a positive not a negative for feminism.
I'm a woman, and I absolutely agree with the OP. There is nothing in the world like the mother-child bond!
Sure it's risky and is painful and it makes me scared sometimes, but the thought of some artificial womb producing my baby gives me the shudders.
Would it even be "my" baby, if I didn't carry it? Similarly, I don't think I could have the same kind of love for an adopted child as for my biological. I'm sure you can love it just as much, but differently.
Artificial wombs are coming. I was under the impression that women considered pregnancy as a burden which carries risks, is painful, causes all sorts of negative hormonal / physiological effects, etc.
I think that artificial wombs will initially be challenged by feminist and conservative groups, but will end up being accepted, first with wealthy Western women, but eventually by everyone else.
I have never considered that women might choose to carry a child, if they weren't required due to technological and scientific advances.