Wow, his view of what makes someone your child is the absolute opposite of what I believe. Any child I raise is “my child”. Anyone who considers me their mom is “my child”, no matter who their biological parents are.

And, thankfully I’ve never been in a position to have to give one up for adoption but if so, I would say the parents who raised them are the parents, not me.

I really don’t think he’s their dad. If he wants to be a mysterious benefactor who gives them money because their moms used his sperm, that’s not an awful thing to do, but saying they are his children is lunacy.

I sure hope he doesn’t have any stepchildren, as presumably they’d be left out of this largesse.

I would like to know how much of the increased risk of hospital vaginal birth is iatrogenic, is it actually safer to cut you open, remove the uterus, cut it open, take out the baby, replace the uterus, sew you up, than to have the baby come out the way most mammals do? Or is it the hospital setting & obstetric interventions making it so? Please know I would never, ever, ever want to go back to when the cesarean section was more risky, and am very happy if it’s safe now.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2742137/

Planned and professionally attended home birth less risky than planned hospital birth, which implies some risk associated with the hospital itself.

I care, because C-section is much more dangerous for both mother and child, much harder to recover from major abdominal surgery than vaginal birth, reduces chance of successful breastfeeding, and because, since it wasn’t so high in other places, does imply they were routinely doing something to cause labor to stall. Which they were. And no, no way is 50% reasonable.

My youngest is 18, oldest 30. So this was not recent. They are down to 37% now, which is still out of line with hospital standards.

3/4 of mine were born at home, but with midwife, 5 minutes from a hospital, and she won’t attend if you don’t agree to be transferred if necessary. Hospital birth when my kids were born really was over medicalized - the hospital by me had a C-section rate of over 50%, literally worse than a coin flip, they had you lay on your back, still, with monitors, it was designed to fail.

I think now the hospitals have come around to some of the home birth ideas, if you are low risk you can walk around, give birth in a position that works for you, eat and drink for longer, better chance of natural uncomplicated birth that way.

Sure but you can’t have an endless increase in population. Whatever the problems of declining or stabilizing the population are, they need to be tackled, not ignored, yes. You can’t fix them by saying just keep the pyramid scheme going.

The real problem is more like how many workers for each retired person. So there are other ways to fix that. Personally I’m down with working more years so that people don’t have to have kids if they don’t want to. I can’t imagine forcing people to have children.

And you know what? Employers having to face a tight labor market doesn’t sound like it’s worse than employees having to find scarce jobs.