I promise I’m not a doomsday prepper or anything, just a person in my 30s who grew up in poverty and has only recently gotten to a point of being slightly above water. We are aware that having a child would immediately bring us back to scraping by, which means that we may not be able to afford any extras for said child. No dance classes, no preschool, no crayons with the sharpener on the back. Just stressed out parents who won’t be able to give as much attention and care due to burnout and survival mode. That doesn’t sound nice for anyone involved… The kinder thing for me to do is either wait till we’re in a better financial state(where aging and inflation works against us) or just accept we won’t have them. Our plan, as I said, is to eventually foster and hopefully adopt from there, because by the time we feel financially stable enough to support another human in our world, I’ll probably be too old for a safe pregnancy.(Which I’m disgusted by as well, but that’s a whole different issue)

This isn’t a situation where I’m worried about the world blowing up, it’s accepting that we’ll either be trapping ourselves and a child in poverty and continuing that cycle we both came from or dealing with a high risk geriatric pregnancy and a baby in our 40s.