Why baby now?

I want to and I can.

I’m 21, married, and purposefully pregnant (about 11 weeks as of writing). I’m also not religious, am a software engineer, and live in San Francisco. This is altogether surprising to people, so I often get asked why I’m having a kid right now. I’ve noticed I have a habit of rambling off a list of upsides in order to justify myself, as I will do at the end of this post—these upsides are, in sum, significant, and maybe if none of them applied I wouldn’t be doing this right now, but they are nowhere near the core of this decision. The core of this decision is that I want to and I can.

I want to

For a long time I’ve had frequent dreams about becoming a mother.

The first time I had this dream I was fifteen or so—I hadn’t actually had sex yet, which made it particularly strange and memorable—and, as with every similar dream since, there was no teenage pregnancy panic, no fear that my life was over or contemplation of getting an abortion. It was a happy dream.¹

Later when an accidental teenage pregnancy became a possibility, I sometimes hoped my period would be late. In practice I took precautions, and if I had gotten pregnant I wouldn’t have kept it…but I still hoped.

During the brief periods when I’ve had TikTok on my phone, my feed has been full of mothers and babies. I’ve always found it so addictive that I delete it after a few days.

I’ve long had a talent for sticking my belly out such that I look about 6 months pregnant, which I’ve sometimes done in the mirror as a way of fantasizing.

None of this is particularly deep. Just the symptoms of severe early-onset baby fever. There are many such cases, though I have met none as extreme as mine in real life.

This was where I was coming from when a series of retrospectively fortunate events brought me to where I am now.

I was 19, and I’d been dating this guy from college for almost a year, when I actually did have an accidental pregnancy. I found out during what was already one of the most stressful and thrilling weeks of my life: I’d worked about 100 hours trying to keep a conference alive. And in the background I was counting how many days late my period was—2, 3, 4 days, it’s probably just the stress…5, 6—shit I don’t think that’s happened in the last five years. So on the last night of the conference, as soon as my responsibilities were about finished, I took a pregnancy test, and it was positive.

I got home, and with the help of some friends, made a pro/con list. Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture, but I believe it was something like this:²

Pros

• I really want it.

• Could give another person a happy life.

• More energy since I’m young.

• Kid will probably have a good temperament.

• It’s actually manageable: could finish my math degree on time and still get a high-paying job, and have lots of family support in the meantime (Mom loves babies).

• Inspiration to others…?

Cons

• Don’t want to be with the father longterm. Plus he doesn’t want the baby and is not ready.

• Makes finding another partner harder.

• Bad for my career. Would be much better if I just waited a few years.

• Bad for social/professional reputation.

I ultimately came out against, and decided to have an abortion. If that had been my only opportunity to have a kid, the pros easily would have won out. But in reality, I could get all of the pros and few of the cons by waiting a couple of years and setting myself up right. So even though I didn’t have that baby, I credit the one I’m carrying now to that experience: it startled me into actually going after what I wanted.

So the next day I broke up with my boyfriend and decided to find myself a husband.

I began my search the following day by inviting a very cute, competent, generous man I’d worked with at the conference named Austin to my twentieth birthday party.³ I got wildly lucky, and less than a year later we got married.

Around the time we got married, we were planning on having our first baby at 24. Then I thought maybe 23 almost 24—as soon as my brother graduates high school so my mom can move to the west coast and help out. Then, how about a few months earlier: what if my mom just shows up after my maternity leave is over? I was sliding down a slippery slope.

Then Austin and I spent 5 hours hanging out with our friends and their newborn, and for the following month, I was obsessed. The closest thing I can compare it to is the way I was obsessed with my husband when we were first dating. I thought about them all the time and talked about them an annoying amount. I got kind of manic and had trouble sleeping, and would stay up late into the night gorging on my obsession—in the case of my husband, talking with him on the phone, and in the case of the baby, watching vlogs of new mothers on youtube.

See the purple line trending up in September after we met the baby.

Before I met my friend’s baby, I had enough will power to fight the baby craving. Afterwards, I was hopeless. So, I consulted the relevant authorities: my practical and experienced mother, my brutally honest if inexperienced best friend, and Byrne Hobart. They all confirmed that I was not insane and would be okay if I just did it. So I bought some folic acid and made a baby.

In defense of baby fever

I anticipate a reaction to this that’s like “you shouldn’t make decisions about whether or not to have kids based on feelings. You should make spreadsheets and consider the consequences very carefully and look into the effect it’ll have on your happiness and your career and your IMPACT etc.” On the one hand, I kind of agree.

On the other hand, spreadsheets only make a difference if you were on the fence to begin with. Like, the threat of eternal damnation is not enough to get even most conscientious, well-behaved, Christian teenage boys not to masturbate. So the threat of a 25% less successful career or whatever is not going to stop me from having a baby.

And though I don’t endorse the feeling, part of me gets defensive and suspicious sometimes when other women in EA say things like “I decided not to have kids because I ran the numbers and found that it would make my career less impactful”. Part of me doesn’t really believe it, just like you shouldn’t believe me later in this post when I say I decided to have kids because of plummeting birth rates. To be clear, it’s not that claims are false, but unless I have some other evidence that someone is super extraordinarily disciplined and committed to their values, I think they were probably pretty close to making that decision anyway. In other words, these claims are usually barely true.

I can

Perhaps contrary to my above defense of baby fever, I do not think that desire alone is sufficient to make having a baby a good idea, and if I weren’t in a position to support a child I wouldn’t have one. I know this because when I had an accidental pregnancy and was less ready, I had an abortion. I also didn’t poke holes in condoms in high school, and not because it never occurred to me.

But now I’m in a different situation: I’m married to a man who will make a wonderful father, is really excited to have kids, has enough savings to comfortably support them, and doesn’t believe in divorce. Our babies will be brought into a pretty great situation.

Common arguments against (early) motherhood that don’t sway me

It’ll hurt my career.

Well, of course it will. The question is how much.

I’m not in a career like consulting or finance or politics where working insane amounts or attending all the right events is very important. I’m a software engineer, and later I might do operations or management, but in any case I won’t take that much of a hit by working 40 hour weeks.

Though I haven’t finished college yet, if at some point I decide it’s important that I do, based on my track record in school as a strategic slacker I expect I’d be able to graduate with a baby just fine. After all, college is easier than working.

(If only women got married younger and to slightly older men I’d think having a baby or two during college would be a great move for lots of people. Maybe more women should get married younger and to slightly older men 🤔)

I’m particularly confident in my ability to do fine career-wise because of my own mother. She did wait to have kids until she was 28, but after having kids she still worked a lot of hours, travelled a lot for work, and continued to advance in her career and make about as much money as my software engineer father. Meanwhile, she was very much the “default parent” in the way mothers tend to be, and she showed us lots of love, and she cooked us many dinners. She has this thing where she just needs to be doing stuff all the time. When we were little, she filled her “free” time with caring for us, and now that we don’t need her as much, she gardens a lot and spoils her dog, while remaining extremely generous with her time when her kids need help doing taxes or planning a wedding. She’s told me that when she’s able to move closer to us, she plans to have a daily schedule of working 6am-2pm and watching our kid(s) the rest of the day. She also claims she’ll never retire. This doing stuff all the time thing doesn’t come as naturally to me as it does to her, but she gives me something to aspire to, and the fact that I got half my genes from her gives me greater confidence that I can live up.

I’ll have to sacrifice my freedom

I think freedom in the “do whatever you want with your time” sense is overrated. Yes, kids limit your freedom—they give you more obligations and constrain your time, as do spouses, friends, jobs, values, and basically any serious pursuit that fulfills you and benefits the people around you.

I don’t mean to completely dismiss this concern: kids are on their own level in terms of freedom loss. There is no non-tragic exit from parenthood. Even when not actually with their kids, parents, and realistically especially mothers, are always on call should anything come up. I expect to at times feel exhausted with the whole thing, to wish I could freeze the child in time for a few days and for once not have to worry about them. My sense is all parents feel this way sometimes.

But most of my free time now, which I spend playing games, reading books, cooking, and going to parties I don’t like very much, I’d be happy to spend playing less interesting games, reading simpler books, cooking for my kid, and taking them to kid events I don’t like very much. And yes I know, sometimes they will cry or have tantrums, they might want to read the same books over and over, they might be picky, but they’ll also be my favorite person in the world. And I will have made them from scratch! Seems worth it.

Having a kid young is tacky or something

To be honest it’s hard for me to tell how real this is: first, people don’t say such things explicitly, and also, I really don’t feel this way so part of me finds it hard to imagine that so many people do. But I suspect this feeling is common among coastal elites, since they don’t have kids young whereas working class religious folks do, and when a fashion becomes associated with the lower class, the upper class will begin to find it icky.

This is not a factor for me. If anything, I find early parenthood more aesthetically appealing than delayed parenthood, not that this is very significant either way.

The environment/overpopulation

See Scott Alexander’s response here.

The many slightly relevant upsides

• I want to be a parent in a world that resembles the one where I grew up. I think AGI is coming pretty soon, as in possibly before the baby I’m currently pregnant with starts kindergarten, and probably before it grows up. It’s going to drastically change the world, and I’m not sure parenting in that new world will fulfill this desire I have. There’s also the existential risk fear: I want to have this experience before I die.

• I’ll have more energy. Biologically speaking, right now is the best time for me to be having kids, both in terms of actual health risks, and general energy levels. Related to the freedom point from earlier, people will be like “enjoy your youth! Go party!” but the same aptitudes that make 21 year olds better at staying out all night drinking also make them better at staying up all night nursing a newborn. Austin of course will also have more energy now than later, though even now he’s not particularly young to be having a kid.

• Grandparents will have more energy. We’re extremely lucky to have Austin’s parents in our area, and my parents planning to move to our area once my youngest sibling graduates high school in a couple of years. And they’ll be much more able to help out in their 50s and 60s than in their 60s and 70s.

• First grandchild, so more help. Austin and I each have two siblings, so later there will probably be more grandchildren that spread our parents thinner. By starting so early, our first couple of kids will have all four grandparents to themselves for 5+ years.

• They’ll get to meet their great grandparents. Austin and I combined currently have 5 living grandparents. This probably won’t be true in 5 years.

• Combat plummeting birth rates. Population collapse and the resulting economic collapse would be bad. I’m not that concerned, because I think AI is going to change everything and cause huge economic growth, and various upcoming reproductive technologies like IVG and artificial wombs will do a lot to help birth rates. But I’m not totally comfortable depending on those technologies to save us, and I’d like people like me to exist in the future.

• Fulfill some life-affirming, pronatalist instinct. More than making me nervous, plummeting birth rates make me sad. I am really against neutrality about creating happy lives. I am both extremely grateful for my own life, and grateful for the existence of most other people who live and have lived, who (literally) enrich the lives of the people around them. I see my generation becoming increasingly misanthropic, and indifferent to their own existence and then too to the potential existence of their children. Or worried that any lives we create will not be happy because we’re all doomed. Or they care too much about their freedom, falsely believing that without it they’ll be miserable, meanwhile giving up their shot at meaning and impact. This is all really sad to me, and having a baby now feels a bit like taking a stand in favor of life and in opposition to this current mood that I don’t like.

• Information value. Hence, this blog. People like me usually don’t have kids at 21. That is, people who grew up in upper middle class families, went to elite-ish colleges, are software engineers, live in San Francisco, and aren’t even religious. People like me usually wait until they’re 30 or 35 and have their whole life together. And there’s lots of data to suggest that having a kid at 21 is a bad idea, but I don’t really trust it because there are so many things correlated with that choice, and those things mostly don’t apply to me. When I become a mother, I’ll basically occupy my own demographic. Let’s see how this goes.

• Inspiration value. A few people have already said to us in person something along the lines of “it’s really cool to see that you can just do it.” And I mean, we haven’t exactly just done it yet, it could still be a disaster. But I don’t think it will be. There’s this myth in San Francisco that you have to be 30 or 35 and have your whole life together in order to have kids, and I want to do my small part in dispelling that. Maybe I never fell for the myth because my extended family is Mormon, so I have lots of aunts and uncles who had kids around my age and ended up just fine. I hope to similarly show people around me that starting the process of having kids is a thing you can just do, and if you want to and you have a great partner and you can afford it, maybe you should.

1. In the last couple of years I’ve sometimes experienced a variation where I have the baby but then forget to feed it and get really panicked that it’s starved to death—this is less great.

2. Another consideration here that didn’t make it to the whiteboard was adoption. This seemed like a nice thing to do, a way to get the big “give another person a happy life” pro without some of the cons—babies are in very high demand on the adoption market, and tend not to end up in foster care, but instead adopted by heavily screened, enthusiastic, well-resourced parents. Maybe a stronger or more selfless version of me would have done that, but it just seemed too hard. First there’s the physical challenge of pregnancy, and the healths risks of birth. But mostly it was that I knew I’d get too attached: carrying a baby for nine months and putting so much of myself into it and then seeing the little thing and giving it away to other parents seemed like the biggest sacrifice of all the options. Just the thought of it made me cry.

At my doctor’s appointment though, before they gave me the abortion medication, they did an ultrasound. If we’d seen two embryos on that screen I wouldn’t have taken the pills: two good lives would have been too much to pass up.

3. Our getting married really fast was probably also helped along by my situation via forced vulnerability and seriousness: that night I learned that he was Catholic, and interrogated him about his beliefs, which eventually led to me asking him about abortion. He said he was pro-life, because creating happy lives is good. I was like yeah I agree, but in practice it’s often net negative to go through with the pregnancy. I began to describe my own situation as though it were hypothetical but quickly gave up and just told him I was pregnant. Then he backed down a bit, and I had to talk him back up to telling me what he really thought, which was still that I shouldn’t have an abortion. So we stayed up late talking through that and many other things, including my newfound determination to get married soon. I later learned that he had seriously considered just asking me to marry him then so I could keep the kid and be supported—I’m glad he didn’t do this, because while I find it admirable, I probably would have thought he was insane.

Despite our disagreement, he was there for me through the whole process. And ironically, through our discussions about it, we found a lot of alignment: we were both very excited to have kids, and lots of them, and soon. We both enjoyed getting deep into moral discussions, and were both comfortable with and interested in disagreements. We both felt our perspectives were understood rather than demonized or distorted by the other, and this was helped along by actually sharing many of the same convictions.