>There are also ethnic considerations - many Hispanic
>girls want to have a big family because they come from a big family -
>even if they are citizens, even if their family has been in the US and
>California for generations. This desire to start young and have a lot
>of kids isn't going away for that ethnic community, which is a
>burgeoning part of our population.
I say
Is there like a law or something that requires the claim of alarming
fecundity in various minority groups during discussions of population
growth? I mean, Ted Turner and his kin breed like mice; he alone has
had five kids and there's no reason to think he's stopped, despite
which I seem to be the only one agitating for a humane or at least
humane-ish capture, neuter and release program for the Turners. What
is it about them that makes people comfortable with the Turners
spilling out over the long suffering Earth like an all consuming
flood of pink, smugly entitled meat but nervous about Hispanics? What
could that subtle factor be?
(various spelling errors fixed or at least altered)
Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are
You inherit it from your children.
But no one is generalizing from Turner because we know he is not typical of 'Americans' in this respect, so we don't know how many children to expect from the (of unknown size) Turner sub-group. And his choice isn't motivated by some cultural factor common to most 'Americans'.
IF Catholic Hispanics is a group of a known size, and if they're following the RC anti-contraception stand, then we can have a reasonable expectation of the number to, er, expect.
Is your first sentence missing a word or something?
That's an absolutely enormous "if". Most Catholics are quite happy to ignore the Church's official position on birth control.
For example, in the list of countries by birth rate according to UN statistics ((http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=contraceptive+%22the+factory+is+closed%2
Edited at 2012-06-16 04:13 pm (UTC)
So I'm surprised quite a lot of the time, is what I'm saying.
Our young women are having fewer children than their parents, across the board. The number of women who have large families is more than balanced by the number of women who have small ones. The single-child family, yes even among Hispanic women who have their first child young, is not rare any more, and is getting less rare, while the two-child family has replaced the big family as the ideal for most people. Also, California has one of the lowest teen birth rates of all the states.
I can't help but feel, whenever I come across this kind of alarm is that what I'm really seeing is a cry of "Help me! I'm surrounded by brown children!" and that's really deplorable.
This is only personal anecdote, but I'd really like to go on record with a general impression of my families. Generally, the young women in my program are fifteen to eighteen when they get pregnant, relatively sexually inexperienced when they get pregnant, and commence birth control afterwards. They are committed to graduating from high school and community college. They breastfeed their babies on the whole for more than three months, they rarely have another child before they graduate from high school, they take weekend and summer jobs, they read to their children and are on the whole reasonably good parents.
Later, I see them with jobs, usually semi-skilled, and their children are doing decently in school. Some of our girls who would go on to community college or even University, who have the skills, the energy, and the work ethic to make it through while working and raising children, can't do it, because they were born in other countries and don't have the proper papers to get financial aid. But that's the only barrier for some of them.
We have tragic stories to tell too, but this story I am telling now is the characteristic one of girls who are in teen mother programs with childcare support built in.
I used to think that, on the whole, it was probably better for most women to wait until they were into their twenties before having their first child. I am no longer sure that is so clearly true. Of course, it depends on many factors.
Yes.
Wow. That's amazingly positive.
One of my sisters has been working in breastfeeding programs in Albany, NY. The hospitals are awful about support.
Here's the donations page of our website! Thank you for thinking of us!
No, you're talking about what you are noticing, which is different.
I love this.
>fixed or at least altered
ISWYDT.
I find it interesting though that many so-called liberals are all about free will and feminism until it comes to women having children; suddenly, it's "this is an unethical medical procedure" and "there should be a law preventing women from doing these things" all over the place. That might be why people didn't realize you were deploying satire, they'd heard it as a serious argument before.
I mean, I know they didn't realize it because it's Usenet and that's just what Usenet does, but you get my meaning. Hopefully.