For the sake of a child
My sister and I both had the highest SAT score of our graduating high school class and we both were awarded a National Merit Scholarship to the University of Georgia based on those high scores. She accepted hers and I declined mine.
Our different decisions in that regard is a significant factor in her getting a serious career while I ended up the little wifey. So I've thought a lot about her life choices because "There but for some quirk of fate go I."
I spent a lot of years wrapped around the axle about some things she did that I felt just made no sense and I still cannot make sense of them. Primarily, I have been baffled for decades by her decision to remarry somewhat quickly, nominally because her biological clock was ticking LIKE THIS!
But:
1. She spent years sending me articles about fertility and discussing them with me.
2. She worked at the CDC for some years.
3. She had a good income and made money like a man.
My sister required fertility treatments with two different husbands. This makes her a hard case.
Often, just changing partners resolves it.
Given her educational background, academic awards, successful career, industry insider access to medical research into fertility issues and her personal situation, I sincerely believe I was fed a rigorous set of articles and other information that meets an unusually high bar for scientific quality.
I had access to information and thought processes rooted in getting a career woman what she wanted and I was exposed to practical alternatives rooted in the interests of the health of the mother which are not typically considered at all.
One of her physicians was a woman and contrary to standard practice, she chose to not cauterize the uteruses of women at risk of bleeding to death following a difficult birth. She instead packed the uterus to promote clotting and stop the bleeding and personally monitored the case closely until the danger was resolved.
This woman physician had to justify and defend this decision before a medical board.
Cauterizing the uterus to save a woman from bleeding to death leaves her defacto sterile and incapable of having more children because it destroys the ability of the uterus to support a placenta. Packing it preserves fertility but is an inconvenience and hassle for the treating physician who then will be asked to justify why they looked out for the interests of the patient instead of covering their own ass legally with the slam dunk solution guaranteed to prevent bleeding to death.
At least two of her patients went on to have more children following this procedure.
I've hypothesized that historically we didn't REALLY compel virginity. There was probably a polite tolerance for playing the field and then you have a shotgun wedding when you get a girl pregnant.
That hypothesis is partly rooted in the research my sister shared with me which said that just rolling the genetic dice -- in other words sleeping around casually -- until something successfully clicks is vastly more effective than any medical miracles modern medicine has cooked up.
It also has can have fewer side effects.
My sister was maimed for life by fertility treatments. She developed a softball-sized ovarian cyst and spent most of her pregnancy bedridden. She was left with long-term debilitating consequences which is why she had multiple miscarriages which isn't easy on the body either.
I never understood why she went that route when SHE is why I know this stuff about fertility. She sent me those research articles and regularly had discussions with me about her desire to have a baby and things she knew related to all of this.
The other thing I know from my sister's research is that a lot of people in the "you can never be too rich or too thin" crowd -- in other words, upper class Caucasians -- could skip expensive fertility treatments if they gained five pounds.
This is true because you need a certain level of stored calories for the body to go "She can survive growing a baby." (My recollection: It's 25,000 calories worth of fat stores you want to shoot for.)
So I never understood why she didn't just gain a few pounds to boost her odds of success and then cried on shoulders about her tragic tale of woe until taking comfort in the arms of a stranger delivered a MIRACLE baby! At which point, she could have "gotten religion" or whatever and cleaned up her act "for the sake of the baby."
Because she made money like a man, so if all she wanted was a free sperm donor without Megabucks IVF, well, not your problem if a grown man is counting on a total stranger to supply birth control instead of bringing his own.
Because you KNOW a lot of MEN don't hesitate to say "I was just looking to have a good time. Get an abortion!" if it's genuinely an accident. Not his problem how horribly that impacts your life.
My sister also knew a guy who signed away his parental rights. He had dated a gal who was legally separated at the time. Neither of them did anything wrong, but she got pregnant by him and she was getting divorced in part because she was failing to conceive.
So she told her husband "I'm pregnant by someone else I've been dating" and the two of them decided to stop the divorce proceedings and wanted to raise the baby as their own and ASKED the guy to legally void his parental rights to the baby she was carrying.
He jumped on it because they can't ask him for child support if he legally gives up all rights to the child so they can kind of "adopt" his baby, so to speak.
So you know if it got confrontational, my sister could have been prepared to lawyer up and say "I don't want child support. Just sign this and walk away. Next time, bring condoms, fool."
I mean she could have genuinely just slept around hoping for a happy surprise. Or thought about what to say IF they asked certain questions. Like if they pull out a condom, do you walk or try to politely admit "I'm really kinda sorta looking for a free sperm donor."
Babies happen and we have all kinds of long-standing practices for how to clean up the mess in a patriarchal approved manner, such as shotgun weddings. We act like women are supposed to marry for love and WANT kids, but if you just want a baby and not a man, that's not even an option that anyone is supposed to THINK about.
So my sister supposedly desperately needed to remarry quickly and messed up her own life, probably her second husband's life and possibly her kid's life "because her biological clock was ticking like THIS" and that has really bothered me for a lot of years because she made money like a man and she's the source of most of what I know about fertility issues.
If she had just slept around, she would probably have been healthier too because she probably wouldn't have ended up with a softball-sized ovarian cyst and wouldn't have spent a large part of her pregnancy bedridden. So she likely would have been perfectly capable of raising a child alone.
So even though it didn't apply to my life AT ALL because my first child was a surprise package and we only skipped birth control like two or three times to get our second child, I know a LOT about fertility stuff because my sister worked at the CDC for years and sent me articles probably accessed via special internal databases not readily available to the public and she was trying to solve her own problem of intractable fertility problems.
So I have reason to believe this is information that meets an unusually high bar of scientific rigor.
Primates trend towards being heteronormative patriarchal cultures. Most work pretty similar to humans: Males are jealous and possessive and may have a harem but SHE is supposed to be faithful.
But not bonobos. They are a free-love society where females have many lovers and they basically have orgies involving the entire group and "everyone mates with everyone."
EXCEPT females don't mate with their own sons. They know who their sons are because they gave birth and raised them.
The ENTIRE reason men are so possessive of women in patrilineal, patriarchal heteronormative cultures is because unlike women, men can't be easily certain if the baby is theirs. Matrilineal societies appear to be less nutty in that regard because until IVF etc., everyone could be confident who the mother was.
In addition to female bonobos not mating with their sons, female bonobos get sent to other troups when they hit sexual maturity so they CAN'T accidentally mate with a father or half brother.
They typically have one baby every few years and the mom has sole custody. A single mom can handle raising one child at a time if they are adequately spaced out.
This is generally true for humans as well. So if you have ONE baby and make enough money and HOW you make money is somewhat parenting friendly, this isn't a societal disaster waiting to happen. My sister had a stable office job. She wasn't a long-haul trucker or construction worker or the like.
So women don't necessarily have to give up careers to have a child. We can stop pretending that "Well, we EITHER insist women are second class citizens and servants to men OR GENOCIDE!!!"
Lots of married couples only have ONE child these days. And divorce rates exceeded fifty percent last I checked.
So a single mom raising a child alone isn't even particularly socially weird at this point. The sole difference here would be "I didn't feel compelled to entrap some guy I don't really love to get the baby I REALLY wanted."
My personal "obsession" with this bizarre detail of my sister's life is a factor in recent speculation on this site that maybe my sister was secretly a career criminal. Because seducing some guy who could have realized what she was up to in order to get him away from his job MIGHT make some kind of sense of "WHY in the HECK was she so hellbent on getting remarried so quickly?????"
Her cover story was "My biological clock is ticking LIKE THIS!" Why not instead have a cover story of "I was brutally raped by my ex, I will NEVER remarry, I'm a hot mess and OOPSIE! Accidentally pregnant! Now I need to get my act together for the sake of the child."