Photo by Anna Pritchard on Unsplash

Pregnancy is a complicated issue, and it has only become more so complicated due to technology and social changes that have made the world much more complex than it once was. This is a quick run-down to help people understand pregnancy.

Should I work and have no children? Should I just have children and not work? Work and have children?

This is big. The answer to having 0 children is generally a hard no for the time being. It is simple math, because a woman who works without reproducing will yield at a finite value, her life will yield a hard constant amount when all is said and done. The childless laborer yields at a static value, while a woman who reproduces will yield at an exponential rate, so long as her children reproduce.

Using example numbers, say the childless educated woman yields $100,000 before she dies. The nonworking mother of 4 yields $0, but creates two boys and two girls. The boys, modest men, yield at $10,000 over the course of their life, the girls yield at $0 and each have four children. This cycle continues indefinitely.

Generation : Mother yield ; Laborer yield

1: $0 ; $100,000

2: $20,000; $100,000 (2 son)

3: $60,000' $100,000 (2 son, 4 grandson)

4: $140,000 ; $100,000 (2 son, 4 grandson, 8 great-grandson)

This shows that even at a very modest yield per head on the children, only 4 births per woman, the men making constantly 10% of what the educated woman makes, even with only the men in the family, the mother of 4’s action of producing children still produces a greater yield for society after 4 generations, just by having children.

That being said, why not both have children and work?

The issue here is that it’s generally hard to do multiple things at once. Working while attempting to raise children often means that the children are going to benefit much less from parenting, this is because their parents are absent so often.

This can lead to children without good social and familial support, and these children often perform poorly compared to their peers who do have support. If you live in a community or have extended family that could otherwise parent by proxy, the results of unparented children would be less severe.

Still, as these proxy connections may not be as strong as paternal bonds, this state reduces the amount of time that the child is actively and purposefully reared, meaning that much valuable time that could be taught giving the child general education, teaching them how to behave, and instilling proper social skills is lost to idle time or distraction.

When you work and attempt to have children, this leads to the gambit of whether these children will still become productive members of society. Often this is true. They will be fine, perhaps not as socially or psychologically enriched as they could be by a full childhood, but still perfectly functional and valuable members of society.

Without the strong influence of the parents, then the child will be much more susceptible to outside influences that will affect their behavior. These can often be negative influences such as peer pressure or outside forces such as street criminals, the internet, the media, and other sources that could compel them to pursue things that are contrary to their own best-interests and the best-interest of society as a whole.

So in short, have as many children as possible, so long as you have a high likelihood of ensuring that these children will become productive and beneficial members of society. This is more difficult if you are a non-active or semi-active parent, but depending on the amount of community support, it is still easy to ensure this.

What about my feelings? I have mixed feelings about becoming pregnant.

People’s feelings are seldom valid sources of judgement. Just because a child cries when it gets a vaccine doesn’t indicate that vaccines are somehow terrible for children. Feelings aren’t designed to operate in a civilized society; they are vestigial instincts that are designed to operate only in the feral wilderness.

That being said, if your emotional state may result in children being produced that are of negative value to society, then yes, certainly there is no real reason to reproduce, at least so long as you are tasked with rearing the children.

If there is an option of communal/government rearing of children, then failing to have children is less excusable, at least to whatever degree of consistency that public child rearing produces reliably high quality children. The foster system is a questionable system currently, and I talk about that here.

Aren’t We Over Populated? No.

Here is an explanation of the two states of overpopulation. We exist nowhere near either of them.

Why should I reproduce?

There is no solid answer here. Human reproduction still exists in a feral state, one that has not benefited from technological or scientific advancement. Human instinct makes them reluctant to apply legitimate science to themselves, trusting only in what feels instinctively natural rather than what is objectively valid, and this leads to them relying upon feral/instinctive behaviors rather than pursuing far more beneficial actions that are logically and scientifically optimized.

The feral, wander around, have sex with random people you meet and reproduce is the natural way. It is random selection, and this system has become incredibly flawed for many reasons. The only reason this system functions in the wild is because nature constantly culls the animals produced by the system that aren’t successful.

Nature rolls 10 6-sided dice, then it keeps the ones that are 5 and 6, then it kills off the 1–4, then it rolls those 8 dice again. It does this until it has nothing but 5–6 dice. This is how nature functions. It randomly reproduces, it keeps what is more successful, and it kills off what is less successful.

The issue with human society is there is no longer natural culling in place that would ensure the health of the species. There are no natural predators to force humans to remain competitive.

There is no man-lion that wanders around eating the men, women, and children that are too slow to escape his man-fangs. If there were, this would leave only the fast to reproduce, so the children produced are reliably faster than the man-lion, and this is how natural selection tends to work. The man-lion of course is in the same boat, if he is not fast enough to eat the humans, then he dies from starvation, leaving only the man-lions that are fast enough to catch enough people to eat.

In humans there is nothing to ensure natural selection, and this means evolution stops. Selective pressure, the man-lion for example, is what causes animals to evolve, and in human society there is no selective pressure.

The tragedy is that human society has negative selective pressure. This is beyond an absence of selective pressure that kills those who are perfectly healthy, just not good enough to compete. Negative selective pressure means that people who would naturally die instead live and go on to reproduce. The most visible example of this is the rise in C-section births.

https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k4319

Some women have hips that are too narrow to bear children naturally. These women and their children would naturally die in childbirth, but instead they live. This creates children who inherit the trait of hips that are too small, and these children go on to reproduce, have a C-section, and further reinforce this trait that would not naturally survive.

Knowing that the results of negative selective pressure jarringly visible within human society, this is a very alarming issue that must be addressed. Having negative selective pressure essentially means the loosening of the nuts and bolts that hold the human species together.

Natural selection keeps these tight by killing off anyone whose nuts and bolts are a bit looser than the others. Loose nuts and bolts will often be inherited, and negative selective pressure allows the natural deviations that would otherwise be culled to now be reinforced within the population. If this trend continues, if we continue saving lives just because we can despite this inducing the destabilization of the natural genome, then the human race will eventually devolve into something completely unrecognizable.

If the human race continues down this path, due to negative selective pressure, it will eventually exist in a form that is 100% incapable of surviving in the wild, 100% incapable of surviving without extensive technological aid 100% of the time. Essentially the human species will become some shapeless entity with little capacity beyond reproduction, a puddle of shapeless meat, with every organ failing and dependent upon significant artificial technological crutches in order to function.

In this society, so long as a human can reproduce, it will survive, and this will lead to profound random deviation from the natural genome with no constraints that exist to ensure that these deviations are not harmful or problematic.

In this situation there are no constraints upon quality or functionality of life beyond the capacity to reproduce. When the meeting of the other natural standards of functionality becomes optional, these standards will cease to be met. Water will only fill the shape of the glass that it is in, the glass is what forces the water to take this shape. By removing the glass of natural standards and demands upon the human body, then no longer will humans be constrained by this human shaped glass, no longer will they take the shape of this glass, instead they will just exist as a formless a puddle on the ground.

What can be done to prevent the destabilization of the human genome?

Human society must reinstate selective pressure. Through their own intelligence they have artificially abolished natural selection by removing selective pressure from their species; by those same means they must artificially reinstate selective pressure.

Logic dictates that the human species should be bred selectively in the same right that every domesticated crop and animal has been bred. Dogs have been bred into many different breeds, and farm animals have been bred in order to reinforce traits that provide the most value per head.

Few would argue that selective breeding has not produced profound advancements in quality of these animals, and humans, as animals, would reap the exact same optimization and genetic diversification that has been produced in these animals if bred properly, in accordance with animal husbandry, just like every dog, cat, cow, and crop that human society reaps the benefits of.

This may not sound appealing, as humans are finicky about sex. With a dog, the most you will ever have to do is just grab their penis and help it get inside of the dam that is in heat, and the dog will do his damnedest to impregnate her. Humans don’t tend to take kindly to this, and while this is problematic, natural reproduction is inefficient due to logistical concerns as well as psycho-social implications and repercussions of sex.

Is there anything we can do, knowing that humans are so particular about sex?

Yes, again, the simple economic solution of an economy of scale and the specialization of labor come into play here.

The feral system is inherently inefficient. It was designed to operate in low-population density, small-group environments. It was designed to function with respect to the physical size of the human relative to the amount of available food in the wild before the advent of farming.

Neither of these constraints that shaped the reproductive system of feral humans remains valid. Society does not operate on an isolated small-group/individualist level, and we are no longer limited by the food supplies of the wilderness with respect to scavenging/gathering and very primitive hunting.

On top of this, knowing that random reproduction is only viable in the presence of selective pressure, it is clear that our current methods of reproduction are inherently flawed. Artificial selective pressure could produce the same effect as natural selective pressure, but through 4,000 years of practicing animal husbandry we have a very firm grasp on the science of selective breeding which produces genetic improvements at a rate far greater than random reproduction in tandem with natural selection.

While feral/individualist humans may have particular qualms with being bred selectively, this is largely a product of education and indoctrination. To create women that are very fond of reproducing and fond of bearing children, you just need to teach them this from birth, rather than attempt to indoctrinate them with the gender-neutral woman-laborer-hybrid model that is currently applied.

Women are instinctively compelled to reproduce, bear children, and rear children, just like any other animal. This means that any sort of aversion or distaste for the action is the result of secondary indoctrination that pushes them away from simple instinct.

Knowing that we must reproduce until we are at carrying capacity, this indicates there is a massive undertaking, especially in places such as America that produce copious amounts of food.

Asking women to reproduce heartily would be problematic, as the economy currently relies heavily on women in the workforce, and this means they likely will be rather inhibited from reproducing at necessary rates.

Thankfully, we can look to nature and understand that individualistic reproduction is not the typical manner in which large-community collectivist organisms reproduce. We can look at ants or bees and understand that these creatures are incredibly similar to ourselves with respect to social orchestration and the division of labor. These creatures form large communities and they divide and specialize labor in order to ensure the well-being of the hive or colony.

These large-community species all use a queen-based model to reproduce. They have one designated queen that reproduces for the entire colony. This is the most practical model. If you have 100 men and 100 women, having one queen to do all of the reproduction allows 99 women to work. If these 99 women were all rearing children instead of working, then you would lose 50% of your available workforce.

Granted, these creatures are at a profound advantage because they can reproduce externally, which humans are unable to do in the present. The human female must carry the child internally rather than lay eggs, and this limits the amount of children one woman can have.

That being said, we know for certain that this queen-based system is the most effective way for a large-community species to reproduce, and as humans are now very much so a large-community based species, this is the only viable model. While we cannot subsist upon a single queen, we can instead have many queens who reproduce professionally, as this is in accordance with both the division of labor and the economy of scale.

Wouldn’t a queen-based system lead to problematic concentrations of one of the queen’s genetics?

This is very true, and just as this woman would not be expected to receive a parade of different penises inside of her over the course of her life, she is not expected to be the genetic mother of many of her children, but rather the surrogate of children that are bred selectively, with intent to produce a certain cultivar of human with certain traits.

Isn’t that taboo to argue that some people are born with different inherent capacities based upon their genetics?

That may be so, but this is not about psychological traits. This is about physical traits, which one can readily see are inherited. The foundational selective traits of this system would be birthing capacity for the queens, and size for the drone/laborer population.

Queens must be selectively reinforced to be very large, with hips readily capable of birthing children, naturally fertile wombs, and substantial breast milk production. These women would look much like giants today, although their height is limited with respect to health and longevity, as size can become problematic and induce health consequences and early deaths.

A queen would of course be reproducing in multiples, having multiple births per term, as this is the most efficient means to ensure this woman is capable of reproducing at or above social replacement rate. For every two children produced by a queen, this allows one woman to working instead of reproducing. A queen that reproduces for 20 terms at 4 head per term allows 39 women to work instead of reproduce, as the first two are the queen’s own replacement rate.

The laborers on the other hand would be bred for size. The cost of a human is proportional to their size. If the human is not needed for any form of physical labor, then size functionally becomes irrelevant until it starts to impair their brain function. We can create smaller houses, smaller clothes, and everything else, and this would cost much less money to sustain the upkeep of these laborers.

The other main advantage of the smaller laborers it that a queen could simultaneously gestate more small-laborer types than she could larger-queen or drone types. If the laborer is half the size of a drone, then the queen could safely gestate twice as many per term.

The drones would be those who are needed for heavy physical labor, those that are needed for defense, or any other task that require physical strength in order to be successful. These are not ideal workers because their increased size means that as population of drones would have substantially higher upkeep costs than a population of laborers.

These three groups would substantiate the majority of the population. Any further cultivation with respect to inherent traits would be done as-needed or as applicable. Whatever beneficial traits that can be reinforced will be reinforced within the community, and whatever traits that are non-beneficial would be culled by selective breeding.

Genetic engineering could lead to profound advancements and furtherance of the species, just as it has in many crops, but we do not need any degree of genetic engineering to make active progress towards ensuring a functional reproductive system for a large-scale communal species such as ourselves.

This is what the modernization of human reproduction would look like. It applies the same reproductive science that is applied to every other species that has a substantial economic presence in human society, from apples, to corn, to cats, to dogs, and cows.

You may think that this is odd or that this is weird. Think about apples. This system is what allowed the creation of those delicious apples. Think of milk. This system is what created cows that can produce milk on a level that allows humans to drink it consistently.

Think of dogs. This system is what allowed dogs to change from wolves into the many different breeds of dogs we have today. This system is what created dogs that each have a very different and valuable set of skills.

This system alone empowered the dog as a species to exemplify the power that the division of labor has upon a society. Each dog has their own natural skill, such as guarding or hunting, and these dogs all perform highly in their specialized trait. Just as specialized laborers perform highly in their own specialized trades, producing value at a much higher rate and produce goods of much higher quality than the feral jack-of-all-trades that sows his crops, builds his house, makes his own clothes, and does everything else with his own two hands.

The division of labor is what allowed human society to succeed. Selective breeding defined by animal husbandry is what created the very high quality crops and animals that our society depends upon today. The economy of scale has proven to revolutionize society by providing us goods and services of very high quality at a much lower price.

The division of labor among reproduction is the natural standard that is seen in large-community species such as ants and bees because it is unquestionably the most efficient and productive manner for a large-community species to reproduce. This argument is not revolutionary or controversial; this argument is just using what we already know to be certain about animal reproduction and economics in order to modernize human reproduction in a manner that adequately represents the state of social, scientific, and technological advancement that defines our society.