Conception, Not College
The logic of pregnancy over "education"
I am not exactly the ideal poster child for pro-natalism. Fifteen years ago, I identified as a child-free vegan -- a child-free vegan is a person who deliberately avoids bringing children onto this planet and who avoids eating animals and their secretions for ostensibly moral reasons. I remain happy with my choice to be vegan and much to the chagrin of certain traditionalists, I have never regretted my choices both to avoid having children and to have myself sterilized in my early 30s.
I consider myself lucky because I never had to make difficult choices concerning pregnancy. I have never been pregnant to my knowledge. Nevertheless, I know something about the fear of getting pregnant. Though I would have chosen to be asexual if the choices had been presented at the beginning of my life as a buffet, I was once a sexually driven, red-blooded young person. Fear of pregnancy ruined most o my romantic life for the majority of this incarnation.
My decision not to have biological children was solid somewhere around age three. All of the other girls wanted to play with baby dolls. I had a couple of them. They were my least favorite. One doll was made of soft plastic and you could put water into her bottle that came out the other end as ersatz pee. (Gen X toys were weird.) It wasn't my thing.
Though the girls of my generation were conditioned to see themselves as future mothers from toddlerhood, we were told in many ways that pregnancy before the age of 26 at the youngest would wreck our lives. My own birthmother, a third generation Japanese American whose grandparents on both sides were put through the American internment camps, had me at age 22. I was the mistake that trashed her college career and expelled her into the lower middle class. I did not know this growing up. I was told a lie that she was 18 (Quelle horreur!) when she had me and that the guy who signed my baby release papers was not my actual birthfather but some dude helping her out.
In the back of my mind, I grew up trying to avoid her mistakes. By the time I married at age 26, I viewed sex as something I wanted, but also as a frustrating, icky necessity that required drugs and prophylactics EVERY TIME to avoid dreaded STDs and even more-dreaded pregnancy. At age 28, the surprise combination of hormonal birth control and genetic wild cards resulted in the loss of my gall bladder. I came within thirty minutes of dying because it nearly exploded. Hormonal birth control is the absolute worst. In my case, it didn't help my moods, it failed to alleviate the pain of my periods, and it nearly killed me. It did one job at a hefty price: helped me avoid getting pregnant.
In my own case and nobody else's, I think pregnancy would have destroyed my young life and much of my potential as it seemed to destroy my birthmother's young life despite her putting her child up for adoption. There were contemporaries of mine who got pregnant in junior high and high school. One got pregnant at age 13. She was a Jehovah's Witness. I will always suspect the father of her baby was a family member as I don't remember her dating anyone. There was a popular girl who we will call Heather who got pregnant by a popular boy of the same age. Heather's parents helped her obtain an abortion. They pulled her out of school the same year and moved away. Nobody from my school heard where she went.
Why Do We Do This To Ourselves?
People of the modern age have been plagued with a collection of psychotic detachments from the way things work. Detachment from food production has resulted in children who think hamburgers magically appear at McDonalds. Celebrities and influencers get their bodies and faces carved and injected, never putting it together that the facsimile of youth is scarier than aging. Everything is supposed to be convenient, including time.
The time to have biological children is from ages 16-30. This isn't just about the female, her eggs, and her carrying capacity. Sperm quality and quantity are better in a young man than an old one. If you're going to make babies, you must strike while the iron is hot. Instead of making babies, we have conditioned several generations to stumble halfheartedly through the salary class formula of high school + college + marriage + job = think about having children. I plan on expounding upon this phenomenon in an essay in the near future, but for now, I will state this is a recipe for mentally-compromised and disabled children.
The Borgia Were Freaks
The Borgia were a Spanish royal family that produced not one but two Popes in the Renaissance. The first Borgia patriarch, Alfons, was elected cardinal and later became Pope Callixtus III in 1455. As leaders of the One True Church of its era, the Pope had more power than any king and his influence was felt far and wide. Alfons appointed his up and coming nephew to a cardinalship and that nephew, Rodrigo, became Pope Alexander VI. Alexander's children were all the result of his affairs with prostitutes: Giovanni, Cesare, Lucrezia, and Gioffre were the alleged products of a long-standing relationship with one of his favorites. He had other children from other lliasons. Rodrigo's favorite baby-mommy, Rosa Vannozza de Catanei, was actually the daughter of his favorite mistress-prostitute who supposedly "helped" her mother out with sex duties and opened her legs during one of Rodrigo's marathon romps at the right time.
The Papacy was hilariously depraved: Rodrigo's orgies were epic and lavish, featuring naked young men and women preening with their bodies coated in gold leaf, fifty prostitutes at a time, and naked mosh pits. OK I made up that last part but I doubt it was beyond them. Rodrigo the Pope loved a themed orgy.
He also enjoyed diddling his beautiful daughter, Lucrezia. Though we would call it abuse in our current era, Lucrezia seemed to revel in being a sexual freak from a tender age. By age 13, her father had her married off to Giovanni Sporza, who supposedly never touched her because she was so busy taking it on all sides from both her dad and her brothers on the regular. Her dad married her off several times for political reasons and annulled her marriages when they no longer served family ambition. Lucrezia had a child, Giovanni Borgia, who was either her own brother or nephew. So fond was Lucrezia of getting it on with her male family members, she wasn't sure whose it was, and two papal bulls were issued to protect the child. These telling documents both identified him as the son of Cesare, her brother. The second papal bull pinned him as the son of Alexander himself. Oh, Western Civ, we barely knew ya!
At Least We're Not the Borgias
Our own culture has reached an extreme where older people think they're finally ready to have children once they've finished grad school and amassed its attendant crippling debt. At the other end of the civilizational spectrum, the Borgia were orgiastic freaks who weaponized fertility and displayed blatant moral hypocrisy to rub in who was in charge.
Can we find a middle ground here? Can we please de-stigmatize teenage pregnancy? Can we finally just not care if a 16 year old girl gets pregnant by an 18 year old guy and not claim she was groomed? Can we give them a safety net so we can normalize young people raising their babies in peace?
The current generation has been made docile -- I call them Generation Cuck -- and will likely be shepherded into whatever traps the State and Big Media has in store for them. At this point, we all know college is a racket and the salary class into which it is supposed to guarantee entry is a rapidly-shrinking pie. There are tiny factions of Generation Cuck for whom I have hope, but these are the few who can survive dopamine addiction and manage an attention span longer than that of a fungus gnat. At this point, we are well set to lose three quarters of Generation Alpha to the same subsistence upon porn, gaming, and irresponsible listlessness that passes for an adult life these days. We are on track for yet another chunk of forty-year olds who will regret their expensive, useless college degrees.
Instead of an education, Zoomers and Alphas get an indoctrination to whatever shades of broken wokeness are still stabbing at relevancy. Perhaps if large groups of young and old alike were to stop freaking about about respectability, upward mobility, and other people's sex lives, we could give young people the breathing room they need to live their best lives.
We had our three children who are in their young 20’s in our 20’s (married at 22) and I am so thankful for it. I never felt judged or looked down upon, however, we grew up and continue to live in a smaller, Southern town where almost everyone we knew had a church upbringing so perhaps that helped. You are correct that it is important to encourage young Mothers and Fathers. I can think of several with gratitude who did that for us.
well, this is a good conversation starter, it's a false choice. schooling as it exists now is grossly wasteful of time. (see john taylor gatto and charlote iserbut's books) women are the backbone of life, and need a solid understanding of every arena. ignorant women make terrible mothers and often raise weak broken people. women need a different education than they are offered, to be sure. but the more disciplined mentally they are the better mothers they will be. children should have the best we can give. A mother is the last line of defense against insane vaccine schedules for example. Naive women will not protect their children well. suggest drawing - it proves you can observe correctly- the trivium, quadrivium, and anatomy, basic nutrition, self defense, understanding of predator grooming behavior, home finance, resource management, time management, age appropriate communication and learning. so, i think girls need MORE and demanding education. a powerful mind will combat the insecurity that is planted into girls about their looks.