Waiting for the right guy equals no baby

[Chiliconcarneplease]

I'm going full force with this - I hate how many people on here say about waiting for the right guy before having a baby (you had a baby in your situation???) Etc but between 30 to 40% of women are expected to end up childless (involuntarily) because they were searching for the right guy.

We have to accept women having babies in less than ideal situations, or we're fucked as a race.

And it will, if only because overpopulation is likely to lead to major wars and megadeaths.

This.
And remember genetics
Your child could be just the same.
And if you divorced- could even go live with dad.
A friend of mine lost both her sons and she was lovely
Go it alone if you can afford it , but please don't settle.

Why are you singling out British men!

I don't think they are any worse than Irish men, French men, American men.

I sort of agree. I think if you want to have a baby , you, as a mother to be, need to be self-sufficent and have a steady income and be able to provide a safe upbringing for your child. You need to be able to feed, clothe and keep a roof over their heads without recourse to public funds /assistance. So if you wind up with a bad egg partner, you can throw him out of the carton and carry on. I think you need to wait for the "right man", if you can't manage alone and you are not independent.

Women can still have babies alone if they want to via a sperm donor.

This

We have to accept women having babies in less than ideal situations, or we're fucked as a race.

Humanity is fucked because of overpopulation, the opposite of involuntarily childless women.

@febmayjune87

Agreed. It's not just British men.

Where did you get your stats from that 30-40% of women will end up involuntarily childless because of waiting for the right man? The current rate is that 18% of women have no children by menopausal age, yes this is rising but you're assuming it will more than double? And that all of these women are childless (a) involuntarily and (b) because of waiting for the right man rather than because of medical/clinical infertility, lack of suitable donors or not wanting to use a donor for ethical, personal or religious reasons or the many other factors behind involuntary childlessness. I don't know that there are any reliable stats on why women don't have children, but I take a guess that it's a lot less than 40% that it's purely cautiousness about their partner or lack of a partner without there being many other reasons in the mix too...

Or is this '30-40%' figure purely anecdata? Because lots of people if asked by (rude, intrusive) acquaintances or strangers why they don't have kids will answer something along the lines of 'oh the time was never right' or 'didn't meet the right man'. That's often not the real reason, but they don't want to spill their heart out about their ruinous and horrible struggles with IVF and infertility, or their abusive partner, or their worries about the climate and the future for kids, or their inability to afford childcare or whatever other very difficult and personal things lie behind involuntary childlessness. Or indeed people don't usually give the more 'selfish' reasons like 'I just don't like kids' or 'I prefer to prioritise my career' because if you say the latter to people that do have or want kids you tend to get a patronising headtilt-y 'oh you just don't appreciate the magic of babies until you have them' at best or an angry/judgmental/misogynistic argument at worst...

I somewhat agree. I was born in less than ideal circumstances, out of wedlock, dad married and living with his wife, mum in mid twenties with no job or place to live. Yet I went to uni, got a good job, ended up a happy person, have two children who I hope I am doing a good job parenting. It's harsh that people just write off children not born to two parents who are married, middle class, professionals.
That said, there is a chapter in Freakonomics about the crime rate dropping massively due to abortion being legalised. But I would take that to mean no good can come from forcing women to be mothers. Rather than children who aren't born to two perfect parents. One good parent is enough. Although she is probably exhausted,

Why?

There is more to life than reproducing.

I do understand where you are coming from.

But the difficulty and stress of being a single parent is something you just cannot comprehend until you have done it.

No, we are not f##kd as a race because women wait for 'the right man'. We are fucked because we allow men to treat us like shit, get us pregnant and fuck off, or stay together and have affairs.
At least this is the case on MN apparently.

Some women do have children in ideal circumstances. They picked a good, if not perfect man, and got on with it. Strangely there used to be this quaint idea that a man should be able to support a family and they wouldn't get married till they could. There is something to be said for this view - it saves women from wasting their eggs and time on dating useless men.

I think the "fucked as a race" comment may be a bit ott, there are roughly 600k born in the UK each year and a similar number of deaths.
Worldwide 62m die each year and 132m born, so you don't need to be concerned over much about bringing a baby into the world with a duff dad because there are plenty others breeding regardless. Better to give the kid a chance with someone up and together.

I'm one of these women.

That is such a horrible view! I believe that if you're not safe and are not confident the father of your child will be a good dad, then don't have kids with him. Even if that means going for a sperm donor and be a lone parent, or not become a parent at all. You do not have the child's best interests at heart with your thinking. Alarming.

About 30 years ago, I watched a really lovely female friend lower the bar further and further until she found someone who would commit to a long term relationship and have a child.

She eventually found him (he was punching waaaaaaaay above his weight) they married, had a baby and she was happy for a good 15 years. He wasn't perfect, but she enjoyed being married and was obviously delighted with her healthy son. They are now divorced but he wasn't abusive or anything, they just grew apart.

But even back then, getting a man to commit before your ovaries had given up forever, was no mean feat.

"between 30 to 40% of women are expected to end up childless (involuntarily) because they were searching for the right guy."

where is this information from?

I actually think it's morally wrong to have a baby with someone who has shown signs that they might be a shitty dad. It's selfish, sorry.
I think the threads on here where a woman is deciding whether to keep a baby conceived to a man who has already shown his true colours are actually disturbing, lots of people going 'go it alone, it's the best thing I ever did' - encouraging a woman to have a baby that means potentially tying herself to contact with an awful man for 18 years? Encouraging a woman to actively and knowingly inflicting an awful man on an innocent child? Its horrible to read.

Obvious disclaimer that I shouldn't have to make: No, I'm not talking about you having a baby with your ex husband was the perfect man until you got pregnant. No, I'm not talking about people in abusive relationships. That's great you don't know anyone in real life whose had a baby with someone they know is shit, but your experience is not everyone's. Yes, society and patriarchy are to blame for this but its damaging to the cause to suggest that women have no agency, and no I'm not bloody victim blaming by saying that, I'm saying we need to stop pretending everything's going to turn out fine because your cousin was, or your aunties husband really stepped up, or your friends ex just disappeared etc etc.

Exactly. It's no-one's right to have a child and I don't think the human race is in danger of dying out any time soon.

My father was not useless, lazy or a half-wit, but still fucked me up by being supremely emotionally absent even though he was physically present. You need a good solid relationship to raise children who don't require years of therapy in later life.

Why are you singling out British men!
Why singling men all together? They are many women who turn out to be very shitty mothers...

I'm sure that there are plenty of useless men out there - they seem to pop up in every other Mumsnet thread. But let's also not forget that women (esp. middle class women) are typically hypergamous, that is they date or marry men of equal or higher social status than themselves.

What's going to happen when you have masses of young men lost to the online world, lost in gaming, doing far worse in school than girls, attending University in far fewer numbers than women, being told that their masculinity is the source of most of societies problems, and then being outcompeted in the workplace by independent and successful women? The pool of available, eligible, attractive men for increasingly successful, ambitious, hypergamous women is shrinking.

Yes, i'm sure British men can and need to do better. But before we demonise them too much, maybe we need to re-think our perception of what Mr Right looks like? Instead of positive portrayals of men who are less outwardly successful than their partners, but still hard working and caring and great partners, we get Kevin from Motherland - played for laughs.

Absolutely, who wants to be the child in that situation. All because mum was so desperate for a baby that the common sense went out the window with the contraceptive pills.

I mean, for the whole of history there has been women having babies with the wrong men. This is not a new phenomenon. There is also a whole spectrum between being so ultra picky that you don't meet a single person who comes up to scratch, and being like a well known fake chested reality "star" whose MO is to have a baby with every casual fling.

A less-than-perfect partner does not have to equal a shite partner, or indeed a deadbeat father.