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Cake day: December 4th, 2024

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  • This is one of those philosophical questions that have no “correct” answer but heres my take on it. Also sorry, this turned into an essay but I was on a roll

    The main thing is that having a child isn’t something the parents do for the child. You can’t do anything for a child that doesn’t exist. Having a child is something parents do for themselves; they want a child so they have a child. Plus an unborn child can’t possibly consent to being born. Put those two things together and you have two people doing something that they want to do for their own benefit which fundamentally changes the state of being of another person who can’t possibly consent to it.

    When you have a child you are also taking a gamble on how their life will turn out without consulting them. They could wind up being the happiest person in the world who lives a full perfectly fulfilled life. Or they could wind up absolutely miserable for the rest of their life wishing that they have never been born. Both of those things are largely up to random chance.

    For example my brother in law was born to a homeless single heroin addict and grew up on the street even after his mom died. He is now a professional engineer with a doting wife, a loving family, and a large house with a white picket fence in a fairly nice neighborhood. He now literally lives the steriotypical american dream except he has a cat instead of a dog. Sure he worked for all of that but even he will tell you that it also just required a lot of luck. Meanwhile my foster brother was born to a happy, healthy, loving, and even relatively wealthy family but due to a freak illness when he was barely a toddler he now has next to no motor function. He can only slightly move one eye and eyelid but even that is taxing for him. He can kind of control a tablet with eye tracking for brief periods of time before it exhausts him and he likes to wink at people to say “hi” but that is the extent of agency he has in the world. He will almost certainly be like that for the rest of his life.

    When you have a child you are taking that chance without consulting them. Some people see the chance of their child living a good life as being worth the risk, which is a perfectly acceptable opinion to have. Don’t take this as me saying people need to be ashamed of having children. Like I said, there is no correct answer here. Other people (myself included) see it as unethical to take that risk for someone who can’t consent to it. I obviously lean that way due to personal experience. I also don’t see much point in creating more children when there is even one child that doesn’t have a happy home. My genes aren’t anything special, why make a new child when I could even possibly help an existing child have a better life.


  • Weird, you need to find yourself a new doctor. I got mine at 23 and the first time I ever spoke to any doctor that seemed like they were against it was actually only a few months ago, I’m 28 now. Even then they didn’t really seem like they were against it so much as they didn’t seem to understand why anyone would want one so young.

    When I first asked my gen prac about getting snipped he said it was a little unusual for someone as young as me but he said that while actively putting in the referal so it isn’t like he was trying to talk me out of it. At the urologist he just asked the standard quick questions of “you understand that it is permanent?” And " you’re sure?". Then he put me on a table and got to work.

    As a humerous side note, there is one thing I didn’t like about getting mine done so young. My urologist (and likely urologists in general) are used to performing vasectomies on much older guys who have a fair bit more scroral droop to work with. Young perky me didn’t have that much droop. It also didn’t help that the sterilizing wash the sadists used was ice cold and the room where it was done was freezing. So my poor frozen bits were trying to ascend to party with my tonsils meanwhile this doctor was pulling on them like they were excalibur and he was itching to be crowned king of england just to try and get some slack to work with. Definitely did not enjoy that part. Still worth it though.





  • Chemical castration is not birth control. Firstly, it rarely actually results in complete sterility. Secondly, it’s whole purpose is to remove sex drive and the ability to feel arousal. Chemical castration in men is closer to women taking an estrogen blocker than it is to hormonal birth control.

    I guess if you consider abstinence to be birth control then you could call it birth control because it enforces abstinence. But ultimately the issue is just that sperm production is far less dependent on hormones than eggs being released. Hormonal changes in men can can easily result in a large reduction in fertility but it is very difficult to cause complete infertility short of physical means. Even trans women who are several years into hormone therapy (without srs obviously) can remain fertile.


  • But you’re forgetting the key rule of capitalism. Line must always go up forever. That means population must always go up to make more workers and consumers. Birthrates are dropping pretty much across the board. The earth is currently projected to hit it’s peak population around 2086. Developing countries eventually become industrialized nations. Eventually there will be fewer reasons to emigrate from those countries. Both of those things combined will lead to fewer available migrant workers in “first world” countries.

    Sure, this isn’t likely to be an issue any time soon but within a generation or two it will start to become an issue. When you’re running a country then you really should be planning for the future like that.

    Of course the correct fix for that issue isn’t to force people to have more children; it’s to fix capitalism so that infinite growth isn’t a central element. But fixing capitalism would mean billionares wouldn’t be able to afford to buy every politician so the politicians won’t let that happen.






  • Tampons have been used to manage menstruation for thousands of years. In the 1800s they first started trying to used them for bullet wounds. So they weren’t invented for bullet wounds.

    Also, just to be clear, don’t stick a tampon in a bullet wound. They are not at all an effective dressing. In all cases you are far better off just holding a wad of gauze or similar over the wound and applying pressure. A tampon isn’t large enough and doesn’t go deep enough to do any good as packing.