Dakini wrote:Duvniask wrote:I'm not really in on this conversation, but I don't think you can argue that pregnancy and the birth of a child isn't a significant life event just by pointing to what percentage of someone's life the process takes up. There can be little doubt that we treat a pregnant woman differently from a normal one, because they require more gentleness and care, especially in the anguish of childbirth. I mean, sleep takes up 1/3 of our lives yet doesn't necessarily factor that much into what we consider memorable moments of our existence.
Pregnancy is a short-lived period of time and that plus giving birth are only parts of becoming a parent that people with uteruses have to do on their own. Literally everything else about being a parent can be shared with another person. Cis men should be just as involved in rearing their children as cis women are once they've made their appearance into the world. There's nothing biologically preventing them from doing so.
Should you be kind to pregnant people and people who have recently given birth? Yes. Should pregnant people avoid contact sports and shit? Also yes. Does this mean that non-pregnant women need different treatment? No.Besides, the average fertility rate wouldn't necessarily be what determines how much pregnancy is seen as specifically a women's issue, especially since plenty of women do have more than 2 kids (using the average can be misleading).
Plenty of women also have zero kids. I was also using the global fertility rate, which is higher than the fertility rate in most of the countries posters here are living in (it's 1.71 in the USA, for example).
My criticism of you looking at averages is a bit difficult to explain, so I'm not sure how I should go about it. Men, however loosely you would go about defining that, basically don't birth children - whereas women have the ability in many cases to have, say, 10. People view pregnancy as a "women's issue", and thus may naturally to some extent reproduce some gender roles from this fact*, not because of the "average" number of children being born; rather it's probably explained by the fact that one gender (near) exclusively serves this function and has the ability to do so.
*These do not really have to be impactful on the fact that child rearing should be an equal-effort endeavor or not. What I'm saying is not normative. There might be something to be said about which parts of child rearing are best divided between the sexes, however, although the evidence on that is not wholly conclusive.