Americas child death shame

[Angrboda]

While it's important to encourage responsibility and hold people accountable for their actions, I think a whole side of this question is being ignored. (I blame Plato, personally.) The fact is that we are biological beings with built in drives that are generally more in control than we are. First, the most obvious, sex leads to babies. We have strong, less than rational, drives to have sex. We're built that way for a reason. We also have strong desires to have children (and this operates at more than just the level of 'thought', it's a bodily conditioned response). At a fundamental level, there is no good reason to have children; ever. (I'm exaggerating.) If nature left it up to us coming up with rational reasons to have babies, we'd be extinct. There are six billion plus people on the planet, a large percentage of whom are going to be afflicted with the urge to breed, and not all of them are going to be as successful as a summerqueen at coming up with a post-hoc rationalization for following their irrational inclinations. Making babies is what we do; making up resaons for making babies is likely just an afterthought. (Michael Shermer suggests that we develop beliefs first, and then develop reasons afterward. And there is psychological research to support it. How much more so for emotional, irrational drives to breed?)

One quick example. When a man holds a newborn, there are pheromones and hormones given off by the baby's head which incline him towards desiring children. If after holding someone else's child, the man comes home and talks to his wife about having children, is he being irresponsible, or simply responding to his biological nature?

(And regards summer's question about the different socialization of men and women, there are significant hormonal differences between the neurological development of an adolescent male and an adolescent female. I don't want to oversell, but the hormonal differences result in differences in neural development, and which brain areas undergo development, which results in the world of the female adolescent being "cognitively" different than that of the male. It is this differential neurological picture, as much as socialization, which results in differential prioritization of cognitive tasks (social behaviors) and differences in cognitive stimulii (emotions and epiphenomena such as confusion, anxiety, attraction, and desire). [There is a further level I won't go into, but biologically and cognitively, because of the mechanics of the two separate roles in reproduction, the male and the female, strategies for maximizing one's results socially and sexually will diverge substantially. A boy, attempting to fulfill his sexual drives, has different priorities, concerns, and responses to the potential for that behavior resulting in pregnancy.])