Ken wrote: ↑Sun Sep 08, 2024 5:11 pmThis post is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.
I teach in a public HS and I can very much promise you that the vast majority of young women in our society are not interested in a world in which the only societal choice available to them is wife, mother, and making babies.
Not all Anabaptist women are wives, mothers, or "making babies".
Some of them aren't married at all, like my business partner.
Some of them are married, but don't have any babies.
I will not comment further on your remark of "making babies".
On the whole, it seems most single Anabaptist women would prefer to be married, and then having a career or a business is a second (or third) choice for them (the second choice often is being a perennial schoolteacher, or going to various mission fields to teach, etc.). I'm fairly certain if my business partner encounters a marriage proposal she wants to accept, I'll be finding myself solo shortly thereafter.
And if you think that “just live like the Amish is going to be a winning answer for most young women (or young men for that matter) then I would suggest you are extremely out of touch. There are a lot of *possible* ways to live in this world. One can live a frugal subsistence lifestyle on 5 acres of land. Or by living off seal meat and caribou in the tundra. But most people prefer to live in a world in which they have more freedom and opportunity, not less.
I never said to "live like the Amish". I referred to plain people as a whole, which encompasses a wide variety of lifestyles.
Furthermore, if that is the attitude towards young women in the workplace (that they should abandon their profession and career as soon as they get pregnant) it doesn’t surprise me at all that they would be reluctant to share their reproductive status with you until they are ready to do so on their own terms.
Most Anabaptist women will quit their job once they're pregnant and far enough along because they consider taking care of their children a higher and more important thing to do with their life and time than prepare Excel spreadsheets for their boss, enter data into QuickBooks, key in data for tax forms and submit them to state web portals, conduct Zoom meetings, or whatever it is people do it at offices these days.
As far as "sharing reproductive status", amongst those who use smartphones, an announcement posted on WhatsApp is typical by the second trimester. (Sometimes quite a bit earlier, although I'm not sure I think that's a good idea.)
The point is, things like subsidised child care, "maternity leave", and all this other stuff isn't necessary. It just makes more sense to have 1 person earning full time and the other parent able to dedicate their focus to the home sphere and taking care of children, instead of trying to find servants to hire to do it for them. We aren't wealthy aristocrats who can afford a household staff to take care of our children for us, and it doesn't seem reasonable to expect the government to do so on our behalf.