Friday, September 9, 2011

"Baby Roulette" Among Worst Ideas Ever

Posted By on Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 2:00 PM

I can say this with some degree of certitude: the only person who would ever say that you can just "work [a baby] in" to your life is someone who doesn't have a baby. Oh sure, let's just see what happens if we bring a living, disposable income annihilating, sleep-hating, disgusting-bodily-fluid generating creature into this world that will proceed to constantly affect our lives for eighteen years (and let's be honest with ourselves, far beyond that). What could possibly go wrong?

Veronica,* 28, was about three years into a serious relationship when she started getting less careful about taking the Pill. She didn’t necessarily want a baby, but she felt OK about rolling the pregnancy dice. “If it just ‘happened,’ it would have worked out,” she says. And even though she and her boyfriend recently broke up after five years together, Veronica still thinks if she had gotten pregnant, it would have been meant to be: “You can have a child when you’re not 100 percent sure of things. You just work it in.”

This laissez-faire attitude about the life-changing act of becoming a mother may seem shocking, but it’s far from unusual. Nearly 50 percent of American pregnancies are unplanned, and three quarters of those are in women 29 and younger. And get this: Research shows that women with a college degree are more likely to experience an unintended pregnancy than those who haven’t attended college.

I love my own children, I think there's probably a right time for babies, it's probably unfair to saddle women with the responsibility for birth control and I suppose this wouldn't help Glamour fill page space, but I think my version of this article would have read "OMG BABY TERRIBLE IDEA DON'T BE STUPID HOW HARD IS IT TO NOT BE RECKLESS AND DUMB OMG WTF OMG." Hipster nonchalance about procreation is not cool, people.

[The Hairpin]

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