41–50 of 77 posts
Really beautiful and as others said really heartbreaking how hard it’s been for her. One thing I’ve thought a lot about as I’ve gone through a similar experience is that a generation ago infertility still happened a lot and was a thing many couples just had to accept. I am wishing all the best for the author
I get that in the West we are generally conceiving at a later stage in life than before, and that this does not improve odds of conception. However, with fertility, just as with so many things, we are individualising the problem. Here too the focus is on age. Just get kids when you're younger! What's the big deal. Let's set aside that there are deeper sociological reasons on why young people start with kids later in…
You’re correct. All this talk about when people choose to have kids over-intellectualizes that what is a biological function. My wife and I have three kids. I’m not sure you can say any of them resulted from a rigorous analysis. We had our first in law school as a happy surprise. We theoretically planned our second and third, a six year gap after the first. But that the timing coincided with moving from an apartment…
This is a very well-done piece in a good cause, but it would have been nice for the author to acknowledge the very obvious inspiration from Monument Valley - https://www.monumentvalleygame.com/mv1 - particularly given they're asking for tips.
More like MC Escher, Monument Valley isn’t an original idea.
Dont have any kids. They reduce your freedom. I need to emphasize this.
To be fair, once I stopped having freedom, we went hard obviously.
If you already have 1, might as well go wild.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that was with success on the first try of the first round (which is very rare). This very much depends on the patient history (age, cause of infertility, …) and the clinic. Live births per intended retrieval can vary from 10%-60% conditional on the above.
In our case, it was suggested that the first transfer of the first cycle had a 15% chance of success. Whether that's "very rare" is perhaps a matter of perspective. It was low enough we assumed it would be a failure and we were surprised when it succeeded, but to a doctor it's a frequent occurrence.
I get that in the West we are generally conceiving at a later stage in life than before, and that this does not improve odds of conception. However, with fertility, just as with so many things, we are individualising the problem. Here too the focus is on age. Just get kids when you're younger! What's the big deal. Let's set aside that there are deeper sociological reasons on why young people start with kids later in…
Maybe countries could tackle such problems twofold: - first, implement a nationwide social freezing program, where women in their 20s are offered to freeze their eggs at a young age for free. Such a large-scale program would probably also improve the tech and might make egg collection less intrusive. - combined with this program, let the women who freeze their eggs opt-in into an egg donation program, where some of t…
There's many reasons why this piece wasn't made for me, so I don't want to begrudge anyone, but I wonder how much we can do to alieve this as a society by normalizing childlessness. I never wanted to have kids, but if I did, I doubt I would've been willing to endure what the author did for it. You can (and honestly I think most people should) live a long and fulfilling life without having kids. Myself and so many of…
I get that in the West we are generally conceiving at a later stage in life than before, and that this does not improve odds of conception. However, with fertility, just as with so many things, we are individualising the problem. Here too the focus is on age. Just get kids when you're younger! What's the big deal. Let's set aside that there are deeper sociological reasons on why young people start with kids later in…
You’re correct. All this talk about when people choose to have kids over-intellectualizes that what is a biological function. My wife and I have three kids. I’m not sure you can say any of them resulted from a rigorous analysis. We had our first in law school as a happy surprise. We theoretically planned our second and third, a six year gap after the first. But that the timing coincided with moving from an apartment…
It's not like fertility rates just started dropping in the 1960s. TFR in the US 200 years ago was over 7. Wealth and fertility are anti-correlated almost universally, at least at the population level.
Why did people centuries or millennia ago have so many children? Partly economic reasons: they can work your farm, and they can support you when you're old. Partly because sex is great and children are a frequent result of it.
The economic reasons fade as wealth grows, and the connection between sex and having children gets decoupled by technology. That leaves innate desire, which just doesn't seem to be that strong. We don't need to posit some recent drop in innate desire to explain the drop in fertility rates. The historical behavior we see fits just fine with innate desire being constant, and just not that high.