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by abcde666777 94 days ago
Just going to poke you a little for the statement about not having children ;). It strikes me as a little elitist and I'll tell you why:

You don't need to have had children to have loved people and to have lost people, and to fully understand the depth and weight of those things.

3 comments

I didn't mean to imply that you hadn't cared, or felt loss. That would definitely be presumptuous.

I was only commenting on the "easily produced" comment. I don't think I've heard someone describe pregnancy and childbirth that way ;)

The "not having children" part of the comment was clearly marked as a footnote attached to the quote about how children are "easily produced".
I believe they were trying to push back on the easily word in "easily produced". While, thank god, modern medicine makes birthing dramatically safer than at any time in history, it is still an incredibly taxing process on the human body and still fundamentally dangerous. It is not "easy" per-se.
C’mon now, let’s not be intentionally obtuse to try and sound smart adding “yes, but” to a perfectly solid argument. Children are easily produced, that’s a fact. The process of child bearing is not in question, but rather the availability of willing partners (hell, even unwilling, if we’re getting that dark) and how little effort it generally takes to get the conception process going.

They were making a point that it’s much easier to generate a human being than it is actually generating economically meaningful value. One needs a few minutes of your time and gets you feeling really good at the end of the process, and the other can (and often does) require years of effort, toil and sweat (all of which can catastrophically fail rendering your efforts moot).

Generating a new human is, indeed, comparatively easy.

> One needs a few minutes of your time and gets you feeling really good at the end of the process

Ah yes, and after the intercourse the child spawns, I remember. And then it just leaves and goes somewhere and starts it's own life. No pain, work, food, time or whatever involved. Just having sex and feeling good.

> years of effort, toil and sweat

Would be a shame if that would be needed to produce a human being.