Here's an article that's, um, mildly confused.
Look, if you're fighting an uphill battle against gravity and you're losing, maybe you should just change your mind? You know, stop. fighting. gravity.
Background:
- no political "fixes" work for fertility, every initiative that's been tried in every country end up wasting taxpayer funds and amount to about zero additional babies.
- IVF is hard af, with something like 7 cycles for every live baby. Having real babies, in real partnerships, when your body is maximally ready for it (= in your 20s) is a much better, evolutionarily consistent idea.
This one is mildly infuriating:
Although cultural commentary often suggests otherwise, many Gen Z women, including myself, deeply want children. We’re simply trying to navigate a world where the timelines of our bodies and the timelines of our ambitions rarely align.
If two things don't align, where one of them can be altered and another is fixed by reality, how is it even a conversation about what "solutions" there are? Just, you know, change your mind. Yes, I understand that that doesn't jive well with girlboss and feminism and equality etc, etc, but maybe -- just maybe -- that's a good indication that those ideas were not so great ideas to begin with.
"If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get," etc.
Last month, President Trump announced his new set of I.V.F. policies, and many hoping for a genuine path out of the labyrinth of inequities and inefficiencies that plague fertility care in America were underwhelmed. The president’s plan offers discounts on a subset of I.V.F. medications and clarifies existing ways for employers to voluntarily offer fertility benefits, but overall does little to lower the barriers that keep I.V.F. out of reach for most people. And yet, Mr. Trump’s announcement made me optimistic. Here was a Republican president, speaking from the Oval Office, declaring that “you can’t get more pro-life than this,” in reference to I.V.F.
Try as you may, and laudible it is, but like... come oooon.
The difficulties that women face when undergoing I.V.F. are not inevitable; they are the result of policy failure. Women’s health, and reproductive science in particular, is chronically underfunded.
No, that's not the reason; the reason is it's freaking difficult to fertilize an egg outside the womb and trick the woman body into accepting it as her own!
Kind of sympathetic to this attempt, mindless and misguided as it is:
Call it a fertility abundance agenda — a plan to help women build the families they want, and on their own terms, by expanding access to fertility care and modernizing the systems that support it. Such an agenda should represent priorities across the political spectrum. For conservatives, it would reinforce pro-family values and respond to their growing alarm about declining birth rates. For progressives, it would advance the goal of making high-quality reproductive health care more affordable and accessible.
"What we’re asking for is hardly radical: a system that treats fertility as a legitimate part of health care, and recognizes that building a full life and building a family are goals that coexist for most women."
Yeah, nah, you are. My god, sometimes I just want somebody to end the experiment that is Western Civilization (#1281328). It got derailed, maybe let's start over?
archive: https://archive.md/5KDZa