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> Your question: "Why should mothers take care of infants?" Admittedly, you can't read properly, because that's not a question I asked. > Admittedly, it is ve

> Your question: "Why should mothers take care of infants?" Admittedly, you can't read properly, because that's not a question I asked. > Admittedly, it is very difficult to have this conversation when some people hold axiomatically that men and women are biologically interchangeable. Speak for yourself if you want to introduce straw men in the discourse; no one else did. Here we adults are talking about participation in society in equal conditions for all humans, irrespective of debilitating conditions that may temporarily affect them, whether due to illness or strenuous exertion. Excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere because some of them have a higher biological burden in reproduction is anything but a libertarian ideal. Having men participating in equal terms in the responsibility and joy of raising their children should be seen as a right as well as an obligation. A society that is unable to guarantee that right and claim that duty is a society that has lost its way.

angelzen 5y ago
Let's recap: 1. The proposal is to offer mothers a 12 months leave, at the very least as a social expectation, even better paid by a state run insurance, see e.g. unemployment, to take care of their infant children. 2. Mothers rather than fathers because mammals feed their infants with milk, and milk is produced only by mothers. Human mothers need to feed their infants every 2-3 hours. As long as breastfeeding takes place, simultaneously working a career is pretty much out of the question. "The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that infants be exclusively breastfed for about the first 6 months with continued breastfeeding along with introducing appropriate complementary foods for 1 year or longer." https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/faq/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/faq/index.htm 3. This arrangement will create gap years and have a measurable effect on mothers careers. Specifically their wages will be smaller compared to same age fathers. Working the chain of reasoning backwards, anyone that axiomatically insists no wage gap should ever be measured between men and women, sadly a very popular stance, is (willfully?) ignoring the motherhood aspect. Men and women are not fully interchangeable. I don't see where the catastrophizing charge "excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere" comes from. As stated above, there is at least one critical area in life, specifically infant care, where men and women are not perfectly equal. Not being perfectly equal does not imply men and women must be maximally different to the point of "exclusion from the social sphere". Until we drop the pretense that men and women are perfectly equal, we are going to produce inhuman outcomes. This is not even a new observation, the ancients had the story of Procustes holding people equal by the standard of his iron bed and fixing any deviation from his equal norm via blunt force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
- TuringTest 5y ago
  > don't see where the catastrophizing charge "excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere" comes from You don't see it because you make chains of reasoning backwards leading you to absurd conclusions because you leave thousands of alternative explanations along the way, such as "as long as breastfeeding takes place, simultaneously working a career is pretty much out of the question" (then how is it possible that many women do exactly that, breastfeeding and working?) or "This arrangement will create gap years and have a measurable effect on mothers careers" (no shit Sherlock, that's why there are proposals being made to fix precisely that effect. Of course it won't be fixed if you do nothing and keep the current status quo.) > Men and women are not fully interchangeable. And that is the starting point of my reasoning. The only option you see from that point is "as a consequence, women have a lower salary", completely blind to the possibility of "let's put means so that this biological difference does not represent a burden, on the basis of sharing the upbringing of children" that you keep ignoring over and over again.
  - angelzen 5y ago
    We seem to disagree with a very specific point about breastfeeding. One perspective is supported by reasonable authoritative sources (AAP). What is your recommendation for the care and feeding for an infant in their first year of life?

angelzen 5y ago

Let's recap: 1. The proposal is to offer mothers a 12 months leave, at the very least as a social expectation, even better paid by a state run insurance, see e.g. unemployment, to take care of their infant children. 2. Mothers rather than fathers because mammals feed their infants with milk, and milk is produced only by mothers. Human mothers need to feed their infants every 2-3 hours. As long as breastfeeding takes place, simultaneously working a career is pretty much out of the question. "The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that infants be exclusively breastfed for about the first 6 months with continued breastfeeding along with introducing appropriate complementary foods for 1 year or longer." https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/faq/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/faq/index.htm 3. This arrangement will create gap years and have a measurable effect on mothers careers. Specifically their wages will be smaller compared to same age fathers. Working the chain of reasoning backwards, anyone that axiomatically insists no wage gap should ever be measured between men and women, sadly a very popular stance, is (willfully?) ignoring the motherhood aspect. Men and women are not fully interchangeable. I don't see where the catastrophizing charge "excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere" comes from. As stated above, there is at least one critical area in life, specifically infant care, where men and women are not perfectly equal. Not being perfectly equal does not imply men and women must be maximally different to the point of "exclusion from the social sphere". Until we drop the pretense that men and women are perfectly equal, we are going to produce inhuman outcomes. This is not even a new observation, the ancients had the story of Procustes holding people equal by the standard of his iron bed and fixing any deviation from his equal norm via blunt force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes

TuringTest 5y ago
> don't see where the catastrophizing charge "excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere" comes from You don't see it because you make chains of reasoning backwards leading you to absurd conclusions because you leave thousands of alternative explanations along the way, such as "as long as breastfeeding takes place, simultaneously working a career is pretty much out of the question" (then how is it possible that many women do exactly that, breastfeeding and working?) or "This arrangement will create gap years and have a measurable effect on mothers careers" (no shit Sherlock, that's why there are proposals being made to fix precisely that effect. Of course it won't be fixed if you do nothing and keep the current status quo.) > Men and women are not fully interchangeable. And that is the starting point of my reasoning. The only option you see from that point is "as a consequence, women have a lower salary", completely blind to the possibility of "let's put means so that this biological difference does not represent a burden, on the basis of sharing the upbringing of children" that you keep ignoring over and over again.
- angelzen 5y ago
  We seem to disagree with a very specific point about breastfeeding. One perspective is supported by reasonable authoritative sources (AAP). What is your recommendation for the care and feeding for an infant in their first year of life?