Innate Drive

I have no right to address those who feel a biological urge to reproduce. It exists. My only advice is that you examine your motive to ensure it is truly innate, since social factors play a major role in this area.

Parents and grandparents can bring enormous pressure to bear, especially if they’re bored, lonely, mired in tradition, dissatisfied with their achievements or obsessed with immortality (see below).

Religious dictates similarly skew the stats and should be ignored at all costs.

Stress

Next door’s baby is possessed. It projectile vomits, manifests nine personalities, howls through the night and makes its father query his sanity. I see him sometimes when I’m giving the hydrangeas a sprinkle before the sun gets on them. Nerves so shot he begs one of my Styvies rather than attempt a rollie.

While I grant that human resilience may partly be due to the drop-forge nature of child rearing, the conjugal screaming matches that rattle my porcelain ducks cannot be uncommon. One in two Australian marriages fails (and that’s just by legal definition). How many breakups are due to the corrosive demands of progeny?

Couples who imagine a baby will enhance their relationship should be required by law to watch five episodes (any five) of ‘The Bold and The Beautiful’ before proceeding.

Sh*t

This is a cliched but, by golly, powerful argument for the negative. I did mobile discos for ten years, drove taxis for two, worked factories for seven and have clubbed for three. Not in any of these arenas have I encountered anything so hideous as baby sh*t. It sticks like Napalm, permeates like creosote and regenerates like a hydra. How anyone could commit to a world featuring this element is beyond me. Surely the priceless idiom: ‘it stuck like sh*t to a blanket’ must stem from infant excrement? Unless I’m moving in the wrong circles…

To be continued...