to form babby, or not to form babby

parents might not like (or even accept as true) being told that they can never be done with their responsibility for the child, which they continue to share in as long as the child shall live

This was always my sense of parenthood from before my daughter was conceived, and as it turns out in my case I have become my adult child's court-appointed legal guardian, so that my responsibility for her is complete, both morally and legally, and will only end if she dies or I become incapable.

j. speaking for myself i actually think far far far too much about all the terrible things that might happen to my children. this is pretty common among parents. it's so common as to be a cliche. so who are you talking to? or about? parents itt? believe me, we've imagined the worst many times.

tracer, perhaps it remains to be seen what parents should make of an argument which i think speaks most forcefully to people as of yet childless. it's clear that just making the argument raises a lot of hackles for parents, since the argument has on the one hand been derided as pointless sterile unemotional nonsense, and on the other prompted people to try to rebut anything it seems to imply about their own ethical status, sometimes by claiming to have anticipated it all already and to not need to know anything only a psychopath would fail to appreciate.

part of the point of the argument is to raise the importance of possibly creating a being who is separate from you in just the dimensions of action, responsibility, and suffering, which separateness is not and can never be overcome by any pains you take to care for the being.

because of the emphasis on separateness, i think anyone who is looking to dismiss the argument or to acquit themselves of anything they think it implies about their choices, has good reason to be doubtful about the value of their propensity to imagine the worst, to be wound up emotionally in the child's well-being, all that affective aspect of parenting. there is a potential there for private emotional theater which however involving is not the same thing as being the child. this is brought out most by just those cases where genuine concern and the agonies of sympathy prove not to be enough to actually help struggling offspring or to alleviate what only they can suffer.

the emphasis on separateness also poses a difficulty for the parent's embrace of total responsibility, however noble that may be. they might in fact be able to say, in the ordinary sense, 'i did everything i could', 'i did the best i could', etc., with respect to their role in assisting the child to live a happy life. but because of the aspects of separateness i mentioned, there will be cases in which the ways in which one's best, or anyone's, does not go far enough, namely as far as what the child can only do for themselves, help themselves out of, suffer themselves. as much as parents might valorize their embrace of responsibility here, their doing so brings them no closer to being the child (and if you don't like that phrasing, note that it is just one of a number of alternative ways i have had recourse to, in order to put words to the fact that the child must ultimately live its own life). i recall that i am not talking about just any old straits into which the child's life might tend, but those circumstances where some children end up badly despite the parents and despite themselves. given the way of the world, that could also be the fate of many well-intentioned and competent parents' children.

I don’t think people need for a child to be genetically theirs to experience parental love

as for loving an adopted kid, the love part doesn't need any genetic component. but the genetic link is actually kind of useful in its own way, in that many personality traits tend to run in families, at least as much as physical genetic dispositions do, so the chances are that you will recognize how your child is developing more easily, whether it's seeing a bit of yourself or some trait of a parent, grandparent or sibling. it's not entirely necessary, but it does help ease the child into the family.

― A is for (Aimless), Wednesday, February 12, 2020 9:04 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Holy everlovin' crow, I can't believe this statement went unchallenged. It's insulting to adoptees, IVF or donor families, step families, and, really, many families without shared ancestry. I know you probably didn't mean it this way, but it's actually a deep gouge.

Love ain't regularly the issue in adoption (or step-families, or foster families or, or, or... ) any more than it is for non-adopted kids – I think we'd agree on that. Love, in families, is often easy to come by. And 'connection' isn't an issue either. Nor are stability, 'fit,' nor opportunities to consider parent/sibling dynamics, the perpetual question of nature/nurture.... none of them are affected by the presence or absence of genetics. However, in the phrase 'love doesn't need a genetic component BUT... ' you have first raised a moot point and, after the conjunction, condescended to adult/child relationships that don't have shared micrometers of DNA. This patronizes adoptees, et al., and implies, in essence, 'you can love an adopted kid, but it's not the same kind of love/appreciation/relationship you can have with a kid who shares your genetics.' Or, more simply: non-adopted relationships are easier/more fulfilling than adopted relationships. As if you can love any two people the same way; as if 'genetic child' and 'non-genetic' child are absolute values.

But I think the idea that there's a primacy or expediency to raising a 'natural born' child is wrong on its face AND somehow misunderstands the terms of a relationship between an adult and a kid. First of all, familial 'love' has a million different valences. 'Love' between parent and child can be a pattern of warm feelings, commitment, loyalty, honesty, mawkish Victorian sentiment, obligation, responsibility, control, attraction, favoritism, comfort, one- or two-way compassion, toughness, abuse, hardening-of-a-child-for-the-apocolypse, etc., or none of these, or all of these ... and entirely confounded by cultural and personal and psychiatric variables. This is obv to say there's no way to essentialize love, and that each connection between each member of each family is irreducible and distinct, and that even /before/ the circumstances of birth/adoption come into play, each person constructs their foundational relationships of different material and to different ends.

The value for parental love from which YOU find fulfillment (e.g. of 'seeing a bit of yourself' in your child and 'recognizing how your child is developing') might strike me, say, narcissistic and invalidating of your child's personhood. And the love I have for MY father (obligatory but warm; draining more than nurturing) would likely seem to you bizarre and passive-aggressive, but there's no reason to judge or weigh the two against each other. There's no ranking, no relative quality, no value to assess. There's just a set of complicated relationships. The same goes for any parent-figure and their relation to any child-figure.

I had more, but I'm gonna stop. Here's what I want to leave with: I am adopted from across the equator and (in terms of genetic ancestry) closely connected to noboy on the planet. I haven't suffered for it, and I've got a family life that is neither more nor less fulfilling, loving, frustrating than anybody else's. When I have a kid – hopefully soon - I could give a rat's ass whose genes the kids has. Frankly, I'd love to find a free kid on the bus ride home. I don't need, nor desire, any biological connection to help 'ease a child into' my family. Please consider this next viewpoint you blithely theorize about this issue.

I feel like I pre-emptively commented on it by calling my parents dicks for having those thoughts about adoption.

j.'s posts should be printed on every tube of astroglide tbh

like Dr. Bronner's

the parents itt may recoil at the implications of the argument on their own retroactive self-assessments, or lol at the natalolism and despair of the childless who just don't ~get it~, but i think it would be more apt to use it to focus their forward-looking responsibilities. as silby says, one's child could go through the worst suffering, not 'worst' in some objective sense but worst in the existential sense, of not being able to extricate themselves from it but in not being able to avail themselves of any assistance anyone else could provide to do so. that's a heavy responsibility to consider! too many people seem to take it on lightly and then later in life engage in all kinds of bargaining and illicit transference of burdens and indifference and emotional distancing from people for whom they are in some inescapable way responsible—generally by trying to re-construe the matter as one of the child now being the one responsible, of the parent having done their part. parents might not like (or even accept as true) being told that they can never be done with their responsibility for the child, which they continue to share in as long as the child shall live, but perhaps being able to acknowledge it would encourage more compassion toward the worst sufferings not just of one's own children but of any others.

― j., Thursday, 13 February 2020 22:21 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i am having a visceral reaction to in particular the second half of this post.

you have a baby. you raise it through childhood. it becomes an adult and you absolutely are not responsible for every single woe they may suffer nor harm they may do.

the premise is utterly false imo. you choose to bring a child into life, but the above position holds that they never develop beyond that, that you as a parent accept that as a given, and that we're not even discussing this as a maybe, a choice or (as id see it) an utter failure of what you accepted as your part. the presumed infantilisation of the offspring at every stage of their lives inherent in this position is abhorrent to me.

offer it as an angle, but as a stance to take from which to argue the general case? ludicrous. every parent here would wish to avoid what is offered here as the standard (even accepted?) outcome.

if the retort is that you always feel responsible for and care for your children, sure. completely different thing.

the other strand coming into the thread- life is suffering and a burden and should we inflict it yadda yadda- is lmbr one of the most self-indulgent takes possible and is, not in the individual cases, which as always can be wildly divergent and im not telling every one "be grateful to live" or anything, but hard cases make bad law and for the purposes of the question we should generally accept that the child born to ilxors is not entering a hideous world of pain, torment and suffering.

in short, treating the entirety of the range of likely possibilities of any given western hemisphere 21st century life is yr business, but its a very obvious one-eyed argument to set out "probably be utter shit, tell em go fuck themselves"

anyway i did note it was a visceral reaction tbf

along w/ a picture of a toddler drinking a bottle of Paco Rabanne or trying to set the family cat on fire xp

astroglide and Dr Bronner's both have a lot of uses?

given the way of the world, that could also be the fate of many well-intentioned and competent parents' children.

given the way of the world, that could be the fate of anyone, right? count no man happy until he is dead?

i guess i'm returning to the "people seem to prefer being alive to being dead" argument. i can imagine terrible scenarios for my future, and some of them are plausible, but i'm not going to off myself. i'm not sure why the argument changes for potential people.

iirc a decent number of ilxors said they'd push the "blip me out of existence if it would cause no one else any problems" button

jfc listen

anyways

if you wouldnt kill a baby and hold it a kindness lets no more of this "awfulness of life" airiness imo

but not definitively like by all means keep arguin it

ilx not exactly a bastion of pristine mental health

J has convinced me. I'm gonna go impregnated my gf. Spite is a powerful afrodisiac.

not reading this thread but i ctrl-f'd silby's posts after coming from the excelsior thread and silby otm

re aimless and adoption i didn't go loud with it cz i took a vow to be kinder to aimless* on ilx but my anecdopte abt my niece was actually a pushback on what he was saying there and why it was wrong

*and everyone else (nearly)

in essence, 'you can love an adopted kid, but it's not the same kind of love/appreciation/relationship you can have with a kid who shares your genetics.' Or, more simply: non-adopted relationships are easier/more fulfilling than adopted relationships. As if you can love any two people the same way; as if 'genetic child' and 'non-genetic' child are absolute values.

I always enjoy being heavily paraphrased and then treating their paraphrase to stand in as the correct interpretation of my actual statements. This 'essence' you've derived seems to have added several components to what I said, which is kind of the opposite of deriving an 'essence'. Instead these are your inferences and inductions. You've taken my statements about possibilities and tendencies and treated them as binary absolutes.

Now, if 25 years on the internet has taught me anything, I now should quietly slip this post into the nearest memory hole, because no one ever considers their paraphrased interpretations as anything less than brilliant, accurate, and if anything much clearer than the statements they have radically reworded. And by objecting I'm just trying to weasel my way out of being caught and exposed as saying horrible, horrible things. Yup. You caught me. Name my punishment.

like drinking and driving it’s insanely risky but it could end up fun and useful, and fuck the keys are right fucking there. it’s a thing we can do. i’m good at at this, it’ll probly be fine.

NB DONT YOU FUCKING DARE DRINK AND DRIVE PPL.

my point is only that the possibility probability is crazily available.

I am not sure what's going on ao i killed a baby just to be safe

i'm going to form babby just to have something to masturbate in front of

form babby if you have a strong desire to do so and feel you can give babby a decent shot at a fulfilling life
do not form babby if the above does not apply

thraed delivers

stork iirc

obstetrician, let's get real here

twist: the obstetrician was a stork!

the stork was an obstetrician!

The doctor was a lady!

the stork was a raven!

the stork used dr bronner's as lube!

THE STORK WAS THE FATHER!

THE STORK WAS LUBING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE

How has no one started a drone company that delivers abortion drugs called The Stork?

wow, the carrying capacity of a drone is a lot more than I thought.

eStork drone adoption agency ftw

don't forget to cancel after 30 days

All these babies mine?

if you don't return the selection of the month we automatically bill it to your account

try raising stewart!
(because you enjoyed raising edwin)

that stork in full

https://www.deltameatdeli.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MIN_9070_EAA.jpg

Use offer code ILXOR for 20% off your first month

Use offer code SILBY for 100% off your first babby

wow harsh

love to spread

Forming a babby and raising it to adulthood is a massive undertaking and I humbly submit that you will learn a lot about yourself and human nature, however that is also the case with any similar scale investment of time and energy so the way the question is framed shouldn’t be forming babby vs not but rather vs whatever else you could do with the massive amount of time and energy you would save. You could go for a PhD or live in a foreign country for a few years or lots of things that would pay dividends in new experiences. Admittedly this overlooks the main reason to reproduce which is to have a child to love and cherish assuming all goes well.

There’s still nobody arguing positively that it’s in a child’s best interest to be born regardless of impact on its parents.

glad you consider your children equivalent to macaroni collage of boats

silby, was this meant to be a piss-take of the quality of specific art I've previously created, or a general assumption that anything I had created would be inherently without value?

if i'm at a party with a friend and there's a good a onion dip, i say 'friend, you have to try this onion dip'. if my friend doesn't like the onion dip, i say 'fuck you, friend, i know a good onion dip'. the earth is the party. existence is the onion dip. my kids have got to try this onion dip. they don't enjoy it? maybe some literal onion dip will help.

that can't possibly be argued convincingly so if that's the condition you need satisfied, you "win" I guess. xxp

consider having kids so that they might win like that one day