PS: The point here is NOT that poor people shouldn't have kids, it's that no one should be having kids without having the basics of childcare covered, which necessitates widespread systemic, societal, and economic change so that no parent needs to worry about those basics, and kids can grow up in secure, healthy environments. I completely forgot to mention this when I originally posted it, and that's my bad.
The community could be a place for people to find validation for choosing not to have children in a culture that's still largely hetero-normative and pressures young people to get married and have kids. It could even be a place for DINKs to jerk each other off about the cool shit they have money for instead of children. It sucks that it's mostly full of doomer anti-natalists and soft-genocide ecofascists. Y'all need therapy and antidepressants.
Have you considered that DINK and non traditional families also have multiple motivations and are multi-faceted individuals? I would never condemn anyone for having children but I am sad for children being given a bad life they didn’t choose by parents who knew better. I’m more of the mind that should I want children, I will probably end up adopting or fostering one day, but I am not compelled to breed or to spread some bloodline legacy when there are more than enough unloved and suffering children in the world — but even then I have qualms with the ethical implications of a society that takes children from poor families it refuses to provide for and pays others to raise (however poorly) those same kids whose mothers were deemed undeserving of that same social welfare.
You call me a doomer and anti-natalist, but you agree with how shitty everything is so what’s the issue? That I’m realistic about it and not relentlessly optimistic that life will find a way so I should just cheer up about it? Is it anti-natalist to believe we have a resources and population issue and that declining birth rates, however bad for an economy, can only be a longer term boon for the sum total of our species’ destructive capability? I don’t hate children, but I don’t feel qualified to make a better world for them and that grieves me. People are supposed to want their children to prosper, to live a better life, and if I can’t imagine that possibility, my personal ethos is that I shouldn’t create a living being that gets to watch what’s coming play out.
I am depressed. It’s depressing. Everyone is depressed. Therapy only does so much, but my problems are only internal insofar as I choose to look at the world without blinding myself to very real problems. Sure, I could chipper up if I choose to be ignorant and delusional about everything, but that’s not who I am and never has been. Whatever soft-genocide or economically-driven eugenics you think I support because I am fearful for the poor and what their children will suffer, since they will always suffer the most, I can tell you that I would rather these marginalized groups had access to thorough sex education and safe birth control options because historically it has only helped those communities, both economically and socially. If you disagree with that despite factual evidence in cases like quantifiable improvements in marginalized communities a generation after Roe v Wade was decided, then you ignore reality to create an enemy that doesn’t exist, while trivializing real issues.