[derektank]

>People aren't born not wanting to have kids, since all their ancestors did.

What evidence do you have that all their ancestors wanted to have kids? I can think of a lot of reasons why people may have had kids without necessarily wanting them. They wanted to have sex in an era before birth control. They were pressured into it by the social norms of their local community. They were raped. Etc.

I have a lot of criticism of the childfree movement but I think it’s pretty disrespectful to assume they’re not being honest when they say they don’t want to have kids and that they’ve always felt that way.

[chmod775]

Birth control is older than the Bible[1], it just wasn't as effective. Humanity as a whole was very aware how babies come to be.

Ways to have fun without coitus aren't a recent invention either.

Human reproduction and raising children is an unusually taxing, time-, and resource-intensive process, which is why we've applied our considerable intellect to plan for that since forever.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_birth_control

[ordu]

I've read that wikipedia article, and I got the impression that to say that birth control just wasn't as effective is an understatement. One more my finding: the idea of planning your family is relatively modern: Malthusians promoted it widely. It doesn't mean people were not thinking along these lines before, but our widespread understanding of how important it is is mostly a modern phenomena. Like the idea to postpone a marriage and reproduction was not very popular before modernity. We've applied our considerable intellect to invent these things and to make not so smart people to be aware of our findings, but these are very recent ideas. In agrarian world you need a lot of people to feed your armies, so any attempts at birth control would be deemed illegal, amoral or whatever. Kings and popes would do anything to stop people from slowing down their reproduction. Which they did, witch hunt clearly stated that witches are guilty of killing yet unborn babies, ie abortions.

[chmod775]

> Malthusianism

Weren't these more about "human population planning"?

> the idea of planning your family is relatively modern

The term "family planning" is. The general concept is not, which is why we have two thousand year old papyrus talking about birth control.

Note that at no point I used the word "family" - because just our modern understanding of a family will muddy any attempt to compare to historical fact.

[margalabargala]

Involuntary reproduction has been a tiny tiny minority of births for the past few millenia at least. It happens and is awful but it should not be construed to constitute a large part of any person's ancestry.

[remarkEon]

They may be honest when they express themselves initially, but their revealed preference later ends up being very tragic. I know several women, and others who are friends of my wife, that did the "I don't want kids" routine only to realize that this was a huge mistake and enter the dating market at 37 to find nothing but a wasteland. People can pretend that their own reason can override their biological reality, but only to a point. "I don't want to have kids" means you die alone. Eventually people realize this.

[gblargg]

So true. "No eggs" https://youtu.be/9he_ZRnZDlk

[inigyou]

Having kids just so you won't die alone sounds tragic too.