4 ms·

Women are the only people who get pregnant. If you force people to choose between a family and a job some people would see that as discriminatory against women.

by dmm 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- rayiner 12y ago
  In Western welfare states, where public services are paid-for by deferring burdens into the future, childfree people are essentially freeloading.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - rayiner 12y ago
      It's not just what you traditionally think of as "welfare." Our whole economy is predicated on the assumption that populations will not collapse. This is especially true of Silicon Valley. Baked into the $50 million investment round that values your company at $500 million is the assumption that the company, if it succeeds, will have customers in the future. If, e.g., the whole world became sterile tomorrow, VC, the stock market, property values, everything would collapse.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
  - afutd 12y ago
    This comment is akin to the farmers who tell us we need to subsidize them because without them we will all starve. There are hundreds of millions of people who would very much like to come to the United States. They are ready and willing to start working and contributing taxes now. We can pick and chose the skills we need, not invest for 22+ years and hope for the best. We only need the product you are selling because you use your political power to prevent your competitors, with a superior product, from entering the market. That's predatory behavior, not altruism.
    - rayiner 12y ago
      The irony of appealing to immigration to justify child-hostile policies is that all those immigrants (me included) think westerners are crazy for being so child-hostile. Hispanics in the U.S. have a fertility rate of 3.
      - afutd 12y ago
        If they do all think we westerners are crazy (and I'm certainly not going to take your word for it), that isn't enough of a downside to leave us with a shortage of potential immigrants. Your argument about freeloaders is just plain wrong. What we have going here is attractive enough that we have people lining up out the door. We don't desperately need you to do us a favor and bless society with your children, despite the fact that every parent seems to think we do.
        rayiner 12y ago
        You're free-loading either way. You're just arguing about free-loading off parents in India versus the U.S.
        afutd 12y ago
        It's not freeloading. It's a voluntary trade for value. In any event, your logic is flawed. A person can easily be a net contributor over a lifetime without having children. And someone who has children, can easily be a net drain even after attributing some of the costs/contributions of the children (which may well also be negative).
      - dragonwriter 12y ago
        > all those immigrants (me included) think westerners are crazy for being so child-hostile. Westerners in general isn't child-hostile, even if US labor practices are, and many of those immigrants -- including the Hispanic ones -- are Westerners themselves.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
- DanBC 12y ago
  Do you feel words like "breeders" are conducive to discussion?
- krschultz 12y ago
  Do you feel "discriminated" against when people get sick and get paid sick leave?
  - dreamdu5t 12y ago
    Well getting sick isn't presumably a choice. You don't accidentally have sex (excluding rape).
    - Fomite 12y ago
      A huge number of pregnancies are unplanned, and even fairly reliable contraceptive methods have a non-trivial failure rate.
      - joshuapants 12y ago
        Man there should be a startup that develops some kind of medical procedure that can fix pregnancies after they happen
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- jasonlotito 12y ago
  Replying to the parent comment this way is disingenuous. While you might be a girl, you were born a guy, and you cannot get pregnant.
  - srdev 12y ago
    You don't have to get pregnant to be a parent. This fact doesn't have any bearing on the discussion.
- philfrasty 12y ago
  Original sentence (before changed by amy to make the homophobic argument): "I am a childfree woman..."
- srdev 12y ago
  First of all, your use of the term "breeder" is pretty disgusting and you should feel ashamed of using it. I'm a man and maternity leave does not bother me despite it being "discrimination" on the face of it. For one, maternity leave isn't really equivalent to vacation. Taking care of a newborn baby is very hard, exhausting work. To add to that, giving birth is a pretty physically traumatic situation that a woman does have to spend time recovering from. Ultimately, no two people at a company are going to have identical benefits. We should try to be fair and equitable, but that means different things to different people, and is not always clear-cut. I can either wring my hands that someone somewhere may be getting a better deal than me, or I can actually go ahead and try to improve my situation. I don't see any point in trying to knock down women who want to be mothers because they may be getting a benefit that I'm not. And finally, there are strong arguments for mandatory maternal (and paternal) leave from a societal perspective. I'm not going to rehash them here, but they're there if you really want to understand the other side.
- 2late2apologize 12y ago
  Maternity leave is not a vacation. It takes time to physiologically recover from giving birth. Psychologically, new mothers need time to adapt to their new role. Between frequent feedings, diapers, sleepless nights, taking care of a newborn is a lot of work. Certainly there is no time for leisure so labeling maternity leave a vacation is disingenuous. That being said, there should be a "leave" option for parents adopting children as well.
- leothekim 12y ago
  Maternity leave is not a vacation. And people generally don't have kids so they can take long paid vacations. It's not a reward a company bestows upon an employee for having a child, nor is it a mechanism for discrimination towards those who don't have or choose not to have children. It's a way for an employer to support an employee in an important life choice, and is one of many benefits that a company may provide to foster a nurturing and open office culture. FWIW, most states don't even require employers to pay for maternity leave and are only bound by FMLA. Newly-minted parents usually take accrued PTO, sick days, and declare disability to take care of their newborns. [EDIT] For context, the parent poster (whose comment is now deleted) wrote about feeling discriminated against when a company gives maternity leave to parents but got no vacation time for choosing not to have kids. As an aside, I am confused by why the poster felt discriminated against.

Women are the only people who get pregnant. If you force people to choose between a family and a job some people would see that as discriminatory against women.

by dmm 12y ago

Women are the only people who get pregnant. If you force people to choose between a family and a job some people would see that as discriminatory against women.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 12y ago
In Western welfare states, where public services are paid-for by deferring burdens into the future, childfree people are essentially freeloading.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - rayiner 12y ago
    It's not just what you traditionally think of as "welfare." Our whole economy is predicated on the assumption that populations will not collapse. This is especially true of Silicon Valley. Baked into the $50 million investment round that values your company at $500 million is the assumption that the company, if it succeeds, will have customers in the future. If, e.g., the whole world became sterile tomorrow, VC, the stock market, property values, everything would collapse.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- afutd 12y ago
  This comment is akin to the farmers who tell us we need to subsidize them because without them we will all starve. There are hundreds of millions of people who would very much like to come to the United States. They are ready and willing to start working and contributing taxes now. We can pick and chose the skills we need, not invest for 22+ years and hope for the best. We only need the product you are selling because you use your political power to prevent your competitors, with a superior product, from entering the market. That's predatory behavior, not altruism.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    The irony of appealing to immigration to justify child-hostile policies is that all those immigrants (me included) think westerners are crazy for being so child-hostile. Hispanics in the U.S. have a fertility rate of 3.
    - afutd 12y ago
      If they do all think we westerners are crazy (and I'm certainly not going to take your word for it), that isn't enough of a downside to leave us with a shortage of potential immigrants. Your argument about freeloaders is just plain wrong. What we have going here is attractive enough that we have people lining up out the door. We don't desperately need you to do us a favor and bless society with your children, despite the fact that every parent seems to think we do.
      - rayiner 12y ago
        You're free-loading either way. You're just arguing about free-loading off parents in India versus the U.S.
        afutd 12y ago
        It's not freeloading. It's a voluntary trade for value. In any event, your logic is flawed. A person can easily be a net contributor over a lifetime without having children. And someone who has children, can easily be a net drain even after attributing some of the costs/contributions of the children (which may well also be negative).
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > all those immigrants (me included) think westerners are crazy for being so child-hostile. Westerners in general isn't child-hostile, even if US labor practices are, and many of those immigrants -- including the Hispanic ones -- are Westerners themselves.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
DanBC 12y ago
Do you feel words like "breeders" are conducive to discussion?
krschultz 12y ago
Do you feel "discriminated" against when people get sick and get paid sick leave?
- dreamdu5t 12y ago
  Well getting sick isn't presumably a choice. You don't accidentally have sex (excluding rape).
  - Fomite 12y ago
    A huge number of pregnancies are unplanned, and even fairly reliable contraceptive methods have a non-trivial failure rate.
    - joshuapants 12y ago
      Man there should be a startup that develops some kind of medical procedure that can fix pregnancies after they happen
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
jasonlotito 12y ago
Replying to the parent comment this way is disingenuous. While you might be a girl, you were born a guy, and you cannot get pregnant.
- srdev 12y ago
  You don't have to get pregnant to be a parent. This fact doesn't have any bearing on the discussion.
philfrasty 12y ago
Original sentence (before changed by amy to make the homophobic argument): "I am a childfree woman..."
srdev 12y ago
First of all, your use of the term "breeder" is pretty disgusting and you should feel ashamed of using it. I'm a man and maternity leave does not bother me despite it being "discrimination" on the face of it. For one, maternity leave isn't really equivalent to vacation. Taking care of a newborn baby is very hard, exhausting work. To add to that, giving birth is a pretty physically traumatic situation that a woman does have to spend time recovering from. Ultimately, no two people at a company are going to have identical benefits. We should try to be fair and equitable, but that means different things to different people, and is not always clear-cut. I can either wring my hands that someone somewhere may be getting a better deal than me, or I can actually go ahead and try to improve my situation. I don't see any point in trying to knock down women who want to be mothers because they may be getting a benefit that I'm not. And finally, there are strong arguments for mandatory maternal (and paternal) leave from a societal perspective. I'm not going to rehash them here, but they're there if you really want to understand the other side.
2late2apologize 12y ago
Maternity leave is not a vacation. It takes time to physiologically recover from giving birth. Psychologically, new mothers need time to adapt to their new role. Between frequent feedings, diapers, sleepless nights, taking care of a newborn is a lot of work. Certainly there is no time for leisure so labeling maternity leave a vacation is disingenuous. That being said, there should be a "leave" option for parents adopting children as well.
leothekim 12y ago
Maternity leave is not a vacation. And people generally don't have kids so they can take long paid vacations. It's not a reward a company bestows upon an employee for having a child, nor is it a mechanism for discrimination towards those who don't have or choose not to have children. It's a way for an employer to support an employee in an important life choice, and is one of many benefits that a company may provide to foster a nurturing and open office culture. FWIW, most states don't even require employers to pay for maternity leave and are only bound by FMLA. Newly-minted parents usually take accrued PTO, sick days, and declare disability to take care of their newborns. [EDIT] For context, the parent poster (whose comment is now deleted) wrote about feeling discriminated against when a company gives maternity leave to parents but got no vacation time for choosing not to have kids. As an aside, I am confused by why the poster felt discriminated against.