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An Ultimate Faith vs. Science Split: “Babies As Blessings.”

I encounter this one a lot.

Ted Bauer
3 min readJul 16, 2024

Just to set the table here, I’m currently in Year IV of infertility and it’s awful and I wouldn’t wish it on people I legitimately hate + you constantly just feel shitty about yourself and your inability to do a seemingly basic human thing. It’s hard.

Well, as you go through infertility, you hear the same basic shit from other people all the time — and it’s not necessarily bad, per se, because a lot of times people just don’t know what to say. But it’s usually a mix of:

  • “Hang in there.”
  • “I’m praying for you.”
  • “It will happen.”

There’s an odd quirk to human nature whereby usually the least-empathetic people are the people who just found out they’re going to be parents. It makes sense in a way because they just got into the club + scaled the mountain, ya know? So they’re usually at the peak emotional place, plus they’re probably scared shitless so they’re focusing a lot on themselves and thus come off more selfish. So I get it, but ideally you’d want upcoming parents to be the most empathetic to what others are going through, as that’s good practice for, uh, parenting. But whatever.

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Ted Bauer
Ted Bauer

Written by Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.

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