What to Expect When No One’s Expecting

At last, a book on demography that talks about its relation to sexual culture.

I was talking with a Catholic college student who is enrolled in a graduate level demography class on fertility at a major state university.  She said that when her classmates make snarky remarks about "those Catholics" and their large families, the whole class nods knowingly in agreement.

However, the professor confessed that every female professor she knew had some sort of fertility problem, and had one or at most two, children. She went on to tell the mostly female class that this is what they too could expect, if they continue on doctoral paths. The general reaction of the class was a combination of "No duh" and feeling slightly cheated.

My young informant reported a sense of vertigo around about that time.

Fertility treatments, miscarriages, and small families -- these are just the costs women are routinely expected to bear as the price of "having it all".

This is inhuman. 

We insist that young women educate themselves for an independent financial future, because they cannot count on a husband to support them. We insist they follow an educational and career path designed for and by men. But, by the time they are socially ready for children their peak fertility will almost certainly be behind them. If they do want to have children, they must resort to degrading, dangerous and impersonal artificial reproductive technologies. These technologies further alienate the woman from her own body, from her child's father, and place her health and her child's health at unknown (because largely unstudied) risks.

And this is called "feminism".

I call it a structural injustice against women to pit their bodies against their educations.

Read More at Mercator.Net.