As a side point, you’ve got a great blog here, and a good addition to my blogroll.

http://web.aanet.com.au/cmcdonald/Articles/The%20Ethics%20of%20IVF.htm

I personally think it’s almost all society that builds into women’s minds that we are worth nothing if we do not choose to mother a child. It’s the way we force women to continue to do something that is quite hard work and thankless when they now have the option to do other things. I think that many parents just say it’s wonderful because the peer pressure is such that saying “yeah, don’t really like it, wish I hadn’t have done it, would rather not make that mistake again” is just impossible!

There are possibly reasons for that lack of reasoning too (um, sorry if that sounds incredibly confusing…)- social conditioning that leads to us making an *assumption* instead, often at quite an early age; and the nature of the decision, specifically its total irrevocability, its often unimaginably huge and traumatic life-changing impact, which we know will be massive but have very little idea how to plan for in advance. In other words, we often regard it as almost an essential, obvious ambition, like finding a life-partner or wanting to have a satisfying job; and before doing it, we are extremely ignorant about how almost everything will be after we have done it.

Both of those definitely applied to me!

But a third reason for the lack of reasoning is the apparently very high satisfaction levels among those who have taken the plunge, including those who hardly planned it at all. They nearly always say it enriched their life, and express positivity about their decision. This is very unusual considering everything above!

I’ve pondered all of the above and why it might be so quite often, as most of my close women friends from school and university are childless, in fact I’m the odd one out of my group. But they “ended up” that way due to not having life-partners through their twenties and some way into their thirties, in most cases (oddly, all partnered up after then. No idea how totally unrepresentative this bunch may be.)

Anyway, I don’t have any answers about why or when or whether, and I out this down to the massiveness of the subject, with all its implications. Certainly, how and whether one parents arouses stronger (and potentially more divisive) emotions among people than most other subjects I can think of with the possible exception of war-politics.

All very interesting though- thanks for directing me to this post!

Your slotting of Bangla and French together strikes me as apt for another reason, too. I admire the native speakers of both languages for their pride in their own tongues, and the way they coolly put other-language imperialists (meaning Hindi and English respectively) in their place.

I first learnt French at l’Alliance Francaise in Calcutta, from a Bengali teacher who was very good. And one of his favourite pastimes was to corner us and tell us things about comparative literature in Bengali and French! Somehow to this day, in the big classification system in my brain, Bengali and French sit snuggled together. No rhyme or reason and never explored any linguistic basis for it either..