How did you decide how many kids to have? - Page 4

[Piglet68]

Originally Posted by Gendenwitha

97% still sucks, lets get more birth control options for men.

Uh...no THANKS.

I like having control over the situation, and quite frankly I wouldn't trust the man to be responsible for the birth control.

If I get pregnant ... I"M the one who has to deal with it. Sure, the guy can be noble, do the "right thing" and stick around....but he is physically capable of walking away any time it gets too much for him. For a woman to "walk away" from a pregnancy means a trip to the abortion clinic, not an easy decision even for the most pro-choice of us. It is the woman who must carry the child, nurture it at the expense of her own physical freedom, plans to diet, plans to start that rock-climbing course, plans to eat cheesecake every night for dinner....not to mention all the minor but potential health risks of pregnancy up to, and including, death. Then there is a birth to go through, and care for the baby from that day forward.

I don't care how many forms of birth control are available to men, I knew myself and I will teach my daughter that SHE must take responsibility for her body and her reproductive activities...no matter what the guy says, it's her body and the only person she can rely on 100% to work in its best interests is her.

[mamawanabe]

double post of sorts, sorry

[mamawanabe]

Originally Posted by eilonwy

At least 8. Probably more, if I stop to think about it. Ask your friends, it happens more often than you might think. When Mike and I had only been together a year, I really wanted to have a baby. It would have been very easy for me to get pregnant then, but I knew that Mike didn't so I did all of the responsible, pregnancy-prevention things that I could do. You would be totally amazed at how many women said "Why don't you just have an 'oops'? He'll never need to know." I know I was annoyed by their attitude, but I wasn't surprised; an awful lot of women think that way.

No I know my friends well (have been blessed with amazingly close relationships) and know this isn't the case (further many of the women had or considered having abortions - they didn't want these pregancies). Like I said, I must just have found some odd set of non-decieving-their-mates women . . .

[Gendenwitha]

Originally Posted by Piglet68

I like having control over the situation, and quite frankly I wouldn't trust the man to be responsible for the birth control.

If I get pregnant ... I"M the one who has to deal with it. Sure, the guy can be noble, do the "right thing" and stick around....but he is physically capable of walking away any time it gets too much for him.... I don't care how many forms of birth control are available to men, I knew myself and I will teach my daughter that SHE must take responsibility for her body and her reproductive activities...no matter what the guy says, it's her body and the only person she can rely on 100% to work in its best interests is her.

The flip side of that though is once the baby is concieved, the father has no control over the situation. My dh (who was using condoms) broke up with his ex because of her drug use and 9mos later got a phone call--oh by the way, I'm pregnant--and his son lived only two weeks because of her habit.

If you're pro-life, you better make sure she is too before you sleep with her, because you have no control over if and when she decides to have an abortion. I watched one friend fall into a deep depression because of his girlfriend's abortion.

Another friend of mine tried to get custody of his daughter, and paid to have a DNA test done to prove it was his shortly after his daughter's birth. DSHS said that's not acceptable because you paid for it, it could be biased, we have to do it. Took them four months to do their own, and go back to court, by then the judge said the child had "bonded" with the mother. He was already raising another daughter from a previous marriage, is now re-married and has two step-daughters, has a good home & job, she's still on welfare, daughter constantly has lice, nearly half her school days are absences, but he still can't get custody. Not to mention she could choose to move to Zimbabwae at any time and there'd be nothing he could do about it.

I've actually advised men who's relationship I thought was doomed anyway, to get married so that they'd have more legal rights to their children once it was written into a divorce paper.

Sure, a man can walk away from raising it, but he still has a legal responsiblity for child support. And if he WANTS something to do with it, but the mother only wants the checks, good luck. Family courts are very biased against men. If the mother isn't proven positively unfit you can just about guarantee she'll get custody.

I'm not suggesting that we give men birth control then take all other forms off the market, but why would you be against men having more say in if they become fathers? I think every person should have the ability to take responsibility for their reproductive activities.

[EnviroBecca]

ON THE ORIGINAL TOPIC: Both my partner and I were raised with the idea that a responsible couple does not have more than two biological children. We find it hard to imagine that we could ever deviate from that principle ourselves. (Accepting other people's choices is another matter.) Our plan is to have just one child. My partner is an only child and very happy with it, and while I have a sibling whom I love very much, I don't see his role in my life as being more crucial than that of certain friends. Lots of research indicates that only children fare as well as or better than kids w/siblings in most areas of life (the book Maybe One by Bill McKibben is a good summary). Now that we know what the first trimester is like for me , we have real incentive not to go thru another pregnancy, esp. when our child is young. We have not 100% ruled out the idea of having a second child, because we don't know how we'll feel about it after this one is born...but we're pretty sure we'll have just one, and we DEFINITELY will not have more than two.

ON THE TANGENT TOPIC: Mamawanabe, it's great that you get to hang out with honest, reasonable people exclusively! While all of my FRIENDS are in that category, many people I know in other contexts are not. I've had several female co-workers who bragged about their clever "oops" tactics and several male co-workers who had been tricked into fatherhood earlier than they wanted. I have a relative who, before he even finished college, had ended TWO relationships after finding out that the women were lying about birth control in hopes of "catching" him; he had a vasectomy at 23 to make sure he'd never be "caught" that way! And in the year-and-a-half that I was hanging out on the TTC forum of these very boards, I saw two women openly admitting that they were charting and seducing their husbands on fertile days and talking them out of using condoms, when the one husband had made it clear he was not ready for another kid yet and the other had said he didn't want any more ever! It does happen. I wish it didn't, but it does.

[eilonwy]

If there was a male pill on the market, I would absolutely trust Mike to take it. We're in a committed relationship and we discuss these things together; I know he can be relied upon to do something like this at the same time every day, and I know that if *we* got pregnant while relying on his pill that it would truly be an accident. It's a matter of trust and respect for one another.

[mamawanabe]

Originally Posted by EnviroBecca

ON THE TANGENT TOPIC: Mamawanabe, it's great that you get to hang out with honest, reasonable people exclusively! While all of my FRIENDS are in that category, many people I know in other contexts are not. I've had several female co-workers who bragged about their clever "oops" tactics and several male co-workers who had been tricked into fatherhood earlier than they wanted. I have a relative who, before he even finished college, had ended TWO relationships after finding out that the women were lying about birth control in hopes of "catching" him; he had a vasectomy at 23 to make sure he'd never be "caught" that way! And in the year-and-a-half that I was hanging out on the TTC forum of these very boards, I saw two women openly admitting that they were charting and seducing their husbands on fertile days and talking them out of using condoms, when the one husband had made it clear he was not ready for another kid yet and the other had said he didn't want any more ever! It does happen. I wish it didn't, but it does.

Well, like I said earlier. If this is common and commonly known to be common, then men have NO excuse not to wear condomns every single time they sleep with thier girlfriends and wives (I'll alert my DH tonight ).