Baby Making

The mess, the chaos, the disruption, the expense, the loss of personal space! So why do we do it! Getting pregnant and having children is for many people the single most important experience/event of their lives. For many prospective parents it is an irreplaceable part of how they want their lives to be. It may bring great joy and personal fulfillments or it may bring challenges, conflict and sadness at times.

For some, the prospect of children is daunting and certainly not an inevitable choice: to have children will be a decision they consciously make after much exploration of their feelings and motives. For others, pregnancy is a situation they collide with an unexpected event possibly in a less than an ideal situation.

For increasing numbers of people today, children will arrive with a new relationship itself where the partner is a single parent. More and more people today are seeing childrearing as a choice and not a biological inevitability. For those living in the wealthy nations of the world, parenting has become a lifestyle choice. Having children and getting pregnant has enormous financial, emotional and social implications. Whatever the position of prospective parents, whether married for years, a single person, teenagers, or a pair with infertility troubles, all will find out themselves economically inferior, psychologically disputed and having to leave many of the social pleasures that make life manageable.

Clearly, deciding to have children and getting pregnant is not a rational decision and if we sat down and calculated the financial load, the heartache and the sleepless nights, then most people would probably decide against reproduction. So why does it continue to be a choice that the majority will make?

It is here because it is a subject that many people spend hours thinking about. My aim is not to give the impression that there is a right way to decide or a list of questions that you can go through and come up with the right answer:

‘Yes, it's for me' or

‘No, I'm better suited to my career'.

At its most basic, deciding whether to get pregnant is about weighing up the balance between our adult needs and our perception of the needs and demands of any potential children. However, it is almost impossible to predict the ‘costs' of children for any particular individual. One might begin to reckon up the specific financial burden but it is difficult to predict the emotional costs, especially as these are specific to each individual.

Even after the initial decision to become pregnant, the decision-making continues. Having had a first child, it is still a big decision for many parents about whether and when to have number two . . . or three . . . or four.

One might argue that it is perhaps a reflection of a more ‘responsible' society that people are sitting down and thinking about whether they would make good parents.

There are few people left who still believe that' God decides' whether a baby is born but there is an alternative view that we have become incredibly omnipotent and unrealistic about how much control we actually have over life and making new life.