CoL: Worth, Sexuality, Choice, Some Admittedly Cold Calculation

As loosely calculated here, you might notice that I left out the taxes that paid for my very good public education, the roads I've driven, so and so on. And you see, as regards the issue of the choice to reproduce or not, not only my family but my whole community has invested a great deal of its resources in me. Past tense, money already spent on the bet that I will contribute back. I've flipped that into a monster of an education and a vocation of teaching the next generations. But, had I not had a choice about my reproductive ability when both the pill and the condom conspired to fail on me, well, I personally would not have been able to secure to the resources to make back on the investment in me. I was in grad school, poor as a church mouse, going into debt to be in grad school, and graduated to a job that afforded me almost no time or energy to take good care of myself, much less a child under 10.

And the man? His potential in his life and teaching and vocation? He would have curtailed it, stood by me, and we would have raised that child. Really. We loved each other, and we were not ready for this, we were not ready for much more than getting to know each other more deeply. But, we would have tried because he has honor. Asking him to do so would have been the most selfish thing I had then or would have now ever done. I would have been asking him to give up his life too. And way before he was ready to someone's husband or father. Then we would have tried to, in a context in which both our dreams and goals had been massively, unexpectedly, and even disappointingly re-written. Then the stress of creating a new life path for two people, raising the little one through the early years, and I figure we would have made it for a while, and then it would have fallen apart because the beginning was not, well, auspicious. We were humans, who can come to resentment, no saints.

Have no doubt, that was the most serious ethical and spiritual and personal deliberation of my life, affecting the courses of three souls. And doubt not, I know I would make a good mom, and would love a child into an amazing human. IF, I had the resources to do so. Including a partner also fully invested in that little human and our work together to raise her.

Now, I know this sounds calculated and cold and horrible. I am partly joking, but only partly. There are very real material concerns to think about here in issues of choice. I am, objectively and materially speaking, worth over 2mil. What does my society want to get for it's money? A woman struggling her whole economic life, distracted by that struggle from the full well-being of her child, or a woman making full use of the resources invested in her and attending to the full well-being of that child?

Absent serious sexual and relationship education in the public schools system, that would include the effects of pregnancy and child birth on the mother's body, on the couple's relationships, the cost of raising a child, never ever manipulating a man or a woman into sexual activity, how to enter relationship to make the best of the couple and the child, how to make of sex an art that feeds the soul, and so forth: for the last couple of generations choice is the last choice in a series of uninformed and undereducated choices. And that, folks, is a waste of investment capital in our children, ourselves, and the future. --- Never even mind cuts to Medicaid. Never even mind suggestions that no one have sex until they are married, even if they don't get married until they are 35, and just how Mother Nature will not let you get away with that idea, because we are not all priests and nuns who take vows of celibacy in order to serve God. We're just people, and Mom Nature designed us to have sex and figure out how make that an artful form of pleasure.