That sounds rhetorical, but I'll bite anyway.
Some women really long for the experience of childbirth. This may not be entirely psychological. Giving birth has significant impact on a woman's physiology. In addition to changing the shape of the hips and often other details like that, it leaves a woman a chimera for many years. Because her blood and the blood of the baby mix, she carries cells from the baby for many years afterwards.
I have a genetic disorder. I have two biological sons. I was not diagnosed until they were about 12 and 14 years old, so I didn't (consciously) know about my condition at the time that I was making reproductive choices (though I did know I was always "sickly").
My first pregnancy significantly impacted how I eat. I removed a number of things from my diet to cope with my difficult pregnancy and many were never added back into my diet. I have reason to believe this did my health a lot of good. For example, it cured the chronic, sever vaginal yeast infections I had for more than two years prior that pregnancy. I never again had chronic, severe yeast infections.
I have read up a bit on pregnancy-induced chimerism and talked a bit with people online about it and talked a fair amount with my sons. I have come to think that some women long for a baby because it can have a profound impact on a woman's body in ways we don't fully understand and perhaps sometimes that longing is rooted in some subconscious awareness that going through the process of carrying a child to term may alter their body in ways that are potentially for the best.
This would be really hard to prove. We have no means to see what the biological outcome would be for the same woman with and without the pregnancy experience. But I am in remarkably good health for someone with my genetic disorder and I credit my two pregnancies with some portion of that fact.
Artificial wombs are coming. I was under the impression that women considered pregnancy as a burden which carries risks, is painful, causes all sorts of negative hormonal / physiological effects, etc.
I think that artificial wombs will initially be challenged by feminist and conservative groups, but will end up being accepted, first with wealthy Western women, but eventually by everyone else.
I have never considered that women might choose to carry a child, if they weren't required due to technological and scientific advances.
It does that, and is also something many women desire. Some thigns are both really hard and painful, and also very rewarding.
I really doubt you are going to get any challenges from feminists, or at least not very many. Feminism is all about empowering women to be able to do what they want, which includes having a baby using an artificial womb. Conservative groups might be against it, but it will depend on which group. Not all conservative groups are against IVF, which is similar in the sense that it allows a woman who would otherwise not be able to have a child have a child.
I can see feminists, evangelicals, and quite a alot of people opposing humans grown in labs.
The types of feminists that you'll see negative responses from, are those that use feminism as a platform for controlling others. For example, the kinds of feminists (some people would call them fake feminists) that get upset when a woman chooses to shave her armpits, or likes to wear lipstick or heels, etc. etc. Those types always look for opportunities - no matter how absurd - to proclaim something is the latest attempt to enslave women to their biology, and so on and so forth.
It is one of the reasons I spend so much time on Hacker News. Most men are less aggravating for me to deal with.
It is also part of why I do not self identify as a feminist.
My wife who is also a homemaker and stay-at home mom. She has heard remarks from family, acquaintances and even random parents playing with kids at the park how she was throwing her university degree down the drain and how somehow she doesn't "need to stay home" and can do whatever she wants. They don't seem to understand that what she wants to do currently is to raise kids.
Any feminism that cannot honor, respect and support the importance of full time parenting is an ideology I want no part of. To my mind, the only good feminism is one that insists that full time parenting should be an equally legitimate choice for either parent, not just the mother.
I'm hoping that we'll be able to work towards a world have a world where stay-at home dads, stay-at home mums, surrogate pregnancies, same-sex parents, dual parental leave, etc, are all valid choices for bringing up children.
This is not true. If the baby had AB blood and the mother had A, then the baby's blood cells would be attacked by the mother's.
Your experience of self proclaimed feminists and full time motherhood is very different to mine, and it's not just a generation gap because my mother was a full time parent and a feminist (still feminist, but spends less time parenting these days) and my sister is both as well.
I am also pretty skeptical of the interpersonal understanding and self awareness of women who explain that they just never get on with other women because of the issues those other women have, and men are just so much nicer - it's usually as much about their issues as anyone else's.
Carrying a child is often a very emotional experience, and it makes sense that reactions to those emotions would vary pretty wildly between different people.
Feminism is about empowering women to make their own reproductive choices. Giving them MORE choices is a positive not a negative for feminism.
Women who work outside the home get rude comments, women who stay at home get rude comments and you can't even avoid it by opting out of childbearing entirely, those women get rude comments too.
I fail to understand what that has to do with feminism or much anything else.
BTW, staying at home is the more socially acceptable choice.[1]
[1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/04/08/after-decades-of-d...
I love this quote.
In this day and age? Does that still happen? Asking because honestly that’s so far from my personal experience.
Imo: that goes to show that mother and baby share feelings during the childbearing process. If negative feelings are pushed down to the baby. Then it would make sense that positive feelings are too.
Plus it’s always in continuous change. Example: currently in the U.K. there’s a hot debate between (some) feminists and trans women [1] but who knows in the future, it would be 100% feminist to accept all self-identifying females as valid females.
Slightly off topic: Feminisim is a bit of a messy subject (imo), I wonder if one can have a clearer picture if it’s expressed in logical terms :o
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/26/transgender-...
The question of longing for a baby is mostly a first world problem. In most parts of the world, they still have more traditional issues, like shot gun weddings for out-of-wedlock pregnancies.
It is sort of like saying "we crave oxygen." You only are aware of that in its absence. Otherwise, you breathe because that's what you do, not because you sit around writing odes to the wonderfulness of oxygen, oh, how I long for thee.
This is part of why people are weirded out. The default state is that women are trying like hell to not get pregnant most of the time. Then you have some weird edge case where they can't just get pregnant, you discover this matters enough to them to be willing to go to rather drastic lengths to achieve it and it flies in the face of our expectations.
Feminism is all about empowering women to make choices that are right for them, especially with regards to reproduction and childrearing.
If your wife wasn't a stay at home mom she'd get rude comments about working outside the home - it's called the "Mommy Wars"- ever single childrearing choice gets criticized by someone.
I get a massive amount of criticism and nasty comments, from everyone including strangers, for my reproductive choices as well, even though they are firmly "progressive" - I'm a married woman whose voluntarily opted out of childbearing. I also get nasty comments about not taking my husband's name.
It's become fashionable, in the Trump era, to use feminism and liberalism for some sort of scapegoat, or reason for bad things, no matter how absurd. I was at a BBQ and one kid hit another kid and, very seriously, the mom blamed feminism. Yep, feminism caused a minor dispute between siblings.
Which is to say, I have the highest respect for SAHM moms because it's a damned difficult job.
Sure it's risky and is painful and it makes me scared sometimes, but the thought of some artificial womb producing my baby gives me the shudders.
Would it even be "my" baby, if I didn't carry it? Similarly, I don't think I could have the same kind of love for an adopted child as for my biological. I'm sure you can love it just as much, but differently.