In conversation with girls my age - starting uni - there was one common idea on this issue...
1. career, therefore 'independence' and 'stability'
2. marriage, (loss of independence?)
3. children

Problem is, women's fertility isn't set up for that. More and more women and discovering that they can't put it off til after 30-35, and that IVF works all too rarely, and costs more that they can afford. The message given to young girls is career first, because that leads to independence. In reality, we should be saying "first, marriage and children, then career". While a 50 year-old woman can have the naus for work, they can't conceive.

Most men would prefer to have a first child in their mid to late twenties. They want to be active with their young, especially boys, and play a part in their lives. Unfortunately, they are dettered by many things. The first is young women wanting to put it off til later. The second is we don't have the assurance that we will have shared custody after divorce. The third is a concern for children; most men want their wives to exit the workforce for at least a year after a birth, a very wise idea, and worry about finances. The Baby Bonus has helped, in lower, and lower-middle class suburbs, to bump up the birth-rate. Middle class, especially upper-middle class families will probably need a higher payment before having children.

It is ironic that we are asking for men to be more involved with fatherhood and parenting, yet when it comes to issues like RU486, adoption and abortion, men are being told to butt out even though half of the genetic material to create those children is theirs. This involvement of men must be sincere and total if it to be taken seriously.

To all posters and Daniel

How refreshing to have an article about our most precious people - babies who will continue in this wonderful country.

How refreshing not to have an article about Islam and the tyrade that goes with such articles.

How refreshing that posters, even though some have different views, are not berating each other! Well done Daniel and posters.

However, how sad that some posters who are sincerely engaging in long term relationships or marriages - are already planning for the possibility of divorce!

Divorce is not an inevitable outcome of marriage. I shake my head as I think about people who are even contemplating divorce before they are married?

BOAZ_David

Loved that quote

Cheers
Kay

PS: To the "youngsters" who are thinking about having children - you do not need a brand new home with four bedrooms, two bathrooms and three garages. You do not need FOX and surround digital TV. You do not need multiple computers and mobiles.

Take a breath. Breathe the air. Listen to the sound of silence.

Seeker wrote:

Hamlet

I dispute your stats of false paternity in 3% to 5% of cases for Australia. These must be guesstimates only, for as you imply, who tests and measures these things? Even abortion rates are unknown (and how many of those are because of "wrong" paternity?).

It would have to be a least 10%

end of quote.

Indeed, the DNA testing industry has reported a figure of around 10%, however this can be misleading, as the tests that have been carried out are the result of some suspicion of false paternity anyway.

In some overseas studies, which involved testing of parents and children for other medical reasons, such as transplantation and the like, in other words a random sample, the figures have been closer to 3% to 5%.

What bugs me is that the focus on the morality of testing has been placed on the possibility of the child's best interests not being served by the establishing of paternity, or non-paternity.

The issue of the woman's duplicitous behaviour in the interests of the child is never mentioned. Even when the man is not responsible for the birth of a child, he is held to be responsible for 'injuring' the best interests of the child.

Whilst I can understand this, it begs the question, once again, as to why men would take the rsik of parenthood.

My understanding is that there is somewhat of a linkage between falling birth rates, and the level of affluence of a society compared to others around the world. In other words, the richer your country, the less it citizens have babies. (I am also told that Richer = Better Educated, and that better educated people tend to have fewer children as well.)

To the extent that this linkage is true, isn't it interesting (not entirely sure which word is most apt here) that as a society gets richer/smarter, we all apparently 'vote with our feet' and have less children.

How can so many smart and affluent people all be so wrong? Are they all mad?

If our society decides that it really does want us to have more children, I'd say that someone's going to have to mount a fairly sustained and motivating case. Seems to me that a lot of smart, rich people are going to take some convincing….

Warning: Eugenic Sentence Follows: As some might (arguably misguidedly) say at this point, the irony is, of course, that it is probably the smart, affluent folk that ought to be ‘encouraged to breed’. (Please, I’m not touching that idea with a barge pole.)

Let’s be naughty and play Devil’s Advocate, and extrapolate this trend out (to the extent that it is true and supported by the facts) to a surreal extent: an atrophying and diminishing conclave of rich, smart people, who aren’t replacing themselves, being out-bred by less affluent hordes who multiply geometrically, since they know no better.

Twenty years ago, I thought something like this might happen to some degree. Low and behold, Peter Costello now tells us to have more babies. Is anyone planning ahead here, or are we all expecting that the Other Guy already has a fix for this on their To Do list?

Hamlet,

So after taking into account the fertility rate and multiple children in households, at best 1 in 19 men, and at worst 1 in 6 or more, are routinely deceived about their paternity, by both the mother and the state.

So many women in other topics on abortion and 486 etc arguing for the freedom of women to have as much sex as they like without consequence:

And no one here defending the right of women to foist on unsuspecting men a cuckoo to raise as their own, that is, for women to have sex with one man and place the consequences on another.

Do I perceive a double standard here?