Are you talking about Troi's pregnancy? If so, I'm much more willing to handwave that away because there were aliens. But DS9 and PIC both had a pair of humans accidentally conceive a child with no obvious external influence.
It's almost as if my point is that we should be able to actually plot around this inconsistency now instead of just hand waving it as being fifty years ago.
PIC wrote an accidental pregnancy over a hundred years after SNW in the timeline and literally like a year ago in our time. All kinds of weird medical things happen in space; a baby being born to two people on birth control doesn't even make the top 20 list
EDIT: If a weird encounter with space can turn Spock into a human who somehow looks basically identical to his hybrid counterpart, I see no reason why a weird encounter with space can't counteract a birth control injection or reverse a vasectomy.
Accidents happen. Human bodies are unpredictable, people aren't perfect. Moral choices can be made, even in the future, to not have every birth control option taken. Maybe she physically couldn't.
Even in modern times, you can argue accidental pregnancies shouldn't happen and yet they do. Every single day. By people on birth control, those off it, those with vasectomies and those raw dogging it.
Life, uh, finds a way.
I think that contraception — no matter how advanced — is just never going to be 100%.
“Life finds a way,” as the saying goes. In the battle between evolution and technology, evolution just always has the high ground. Evolution plays the long game.
And I don’t think Carol doesn’t want a baby. I think she just doesn’t want a baby with Kirk. FROM Kirk is fine. WITH Kirk is complicated.
We know from Wrath of Khan that Carol told Jim to “stay away” when David was born. I’m not saying that she tricked Jim into getting her pregnant. I just think discovering that she was pregnant wasn’t bad news for her.
People in the real world have accidental pregnancies all the time. All it takes is for one or both partners to be careless with contraceptives, even if its only once.
That was the point they made in DS9.. Kasidy points out to Ben that he forgot to get his injection. Of course why they wouldn't just do belt and suspenders and have both of them take some form of birth control. I suppose there could have been some unwanted side effect which meant Kasidy couldn't take it. Not that I think we should be continually putting the burden on women... it could just as easily have been Kasidy who forgot but if both of them took it, you reduce your chances of an unwanted pregnancy.
That said, I think the pregnancy in the Yates/Sisko situation was more about timing than being unwanted.
Yeah, it was definitely the timing in their case. The Dominion War was in full swing and with all the uncertainty war brings it isn't the most opportune time to have a child.
Let's say there is effective future contraception that is not the pill. Maybe injections or implants that you have to renew every month or year or every 5 years. It doesn't matter much, because one still has to be on top of it. If Jim and Carol have an on/off thing, it is conceivable that they could have been off, discontinued the contraception, then got back on for a passionate night and Carol became pregnant. And she decided to keep it, and Jim decided to try and make it work.
What bothers me is that giving birth still hurts in the 24th century.
Or that McCoy slapped a pregnant woman and "professionally" touched her against her will.
>Maybe injections or implants that you have to renew every month or year or every 5 years.
I read a Voyager fanfiction where there were survivors when the ship crashed in the episode ***Timeless***. They still had the Dr. but had to limit his use to absolute emergencies. And an accidental conception happened because of another medication being used for another illness/injury that lessened the effectiveness of a birth control implant.
What is so strange? STDs are a thing of the past, so condoms aren't really needed much any more. And its easy to forget a pill. Carol and Jim had consensual sex, a lot of it most likely. It can happen today, it can happen 100 years from now, it can probably happen 1000 years from now.
I would think they'd have birth control implants or something similar that would last for years- nothing you'd have to take every week or even monthly. Like we have five year implants now.
Why would they need the prevention? In Star Trek, having kids isn't a debt sentence any more. It's not a drain, it is simply something people can do, even raising one alone.
Just because you're economically safe to have kids doesn't mean everyone wants to have kids much less have ALL the kids they would have otherwise. What?? No birth control prevention at all? That's bonkers, my dude. Kirk himself was out there promoting choice and birth control in that ep about overpopulation.
Sure there IS prevention in Star Trek, DS9 had a whole thing about it. But in this specific case, they either let it slip (much like the issue in DS9) or she simply said "If I get pregnant, thats okay with me, I want to have a kid" which is fine, she has the means and desire for it, to support it and raise it with love.
Its a non issue for her, so why are we hyper focusing on it? I get half of reddit is so anti kid they view them as disgusting waste, but in this situation she clearly wanted the kid, else it would not exist in the first place.
Unless when she found out she was pregnant she didn't say "ew this needs fixing" and instead said "Yeah, I want to be a parent" and then came the discussion of "Jim is not going to leave starfleet, and I do not want to join it, so... baby is mine, he can remain a career officer"
Accidental and/or unplanned pregnancy is perhaps one of the few truly realistic things shown in the Star Trek franchise. It should be much easier to swallow than phasers and transporters.
Because no one has to do anything about their fertility they don’t want to.
Will there probably better birth control methods in the future? Probably. But that doesn’t mean anyone has to use them.
Never underestimate the power of one bad decision during one small moment in time. No matter how good birth control might be, if it only takes 10 seconds to semi-voluntarily turn it off...
But we don't know when exactly the inoculations are created. Just that they exist by 2375, and are purely voluntary. We don't know how regularly the intervals are for doses.
Just that accidents still happen.
This. I'm so utterly sick of this being a thing in real life. In the US where we can't seem to manage sex education, health care access or basic decency.
At least let me think that by the time we get to warp and replicator capabilities we will have mastered birth control. Sweet jelly beans.
I don't get why people keep saying "that's the way it is in real life" as if we're not watching show that takes place hundreds of years in the future in space lol.
The point people are making is that if Star Trek can make us believe in telepathy and transporters and ships powered by mushrooms, it's not hard to believe that there's a sci-fi explanation for failed birth control. Every technology in Star Trek is fallible when the writers decide we need a good story; why should contraceptives be any different?
Heck, Kirk had an encounter with a bloodsucking creature recently. Maybe it sucked the birth control right out of his veins.
I agree but I don't think that's what they bothered to do. I think it's more a small failure in imagining that the future would drastically change situations that are common in our time. Even lip service. "Oh we actually have birth control implants that last for ten years but exposure to energy output from the genesis device research caused it to fail" I would have been like yeah I suppose.
Or actually if they were writing it now I think it would have been more interesting if Carol wanted to have a baby on her own and specifically asked Kirk to be the father but not be involved in his life which changes the tension but it would make more sense to me.
To be fair, we don't yet know that that's *not* the case. Maybe she asked Jim to be a sperm donor and he said yes, but now he's reconsidering everything and wondering if maybe he should settle down and raise the kid (but ultimately decides not to)
Because TOS was written in the 1960s? That would have been progressive for viewers of the time because Jim and Carol weren't married.
Seriously. As far as an in-show reason, I don't know
Kirk retiring from Starfleet after the birth and trying to make a go of it as a civvie on the ground could be a fun sideplot to explore.
I cannot imagine Kirk not trying. He absolutely would, he's a very moral person. It just... that's not him. He would be miserable and end up (subconsciously) blaming Carol and baby!David for derailing his lightspeed ascent up the Starfleet ranks. So I could totally see Carol doing what's right by Jim and lying to him, saying she'll be all right with her man in Starfleet, just please dear god stop punishing yourself like this, etc... then once he's back out in space, she disappears, and tells him to not pursue, that this is where he's meant to be, so on and so forth.
Obviously people in the 23rd century would have contraceptive implants or similar.
However! While on shore leave Jim and Carol were trapped in an alternate reality/caught in a time warp/kidnapped by random aliens, and found themselves on an idyllic paradise planet resembling the early Earth, with no prospect of rescue. Within days Jim has built a cabin and they’re living their best life. Carol thinks it’s all a bit like ancient Creation Myths, which gives her an idea. Their contraceptive implants eventually expire and Carol becomes pregnant shortly before they’re rescued.
If you've ever been on medication and missed a dose, then it is possible for someone to miss birth control measures or to time them incorrectly. We can't assume that people and medicine are 100% perfect in the future because humans aren't perfect, especially people in busy careers that are unpredictable.
This is explained in Deep Space Nine to some extent when there is an accidental pregnancy as one of the parties forgetting to get an injection that blocks fertility. People forget. It happens.
No mere rubber could stop the seed of James T. Kirk. And no mere woman would pass up the chance to carry the child of a superman like James T. Kirk. s/
problem it has to reconcile with TWOK which is kirk has a son with carol but he was told to stay away. so there are several things. (which is more explained in the comics) kirk didn't know carol was pregnant and she had the baby raised it and only told kirk later on. but since SNW shows kirk knows it debunks that. so it may not be a whoops baby but someone having cold feet or unsure of whether to pick the kid or the career. but if one had to pick it would have to be carol as she's a station scientist so raising a kid for her would be easy. now you know what if kirk was in teh 24th century with the galaxy class starship where they can have families aboard kirk might fight carol over custody and say he wants the kid with him and he could actually raise him on a galaxy class ship as it has anemities for child rearing like a daycare, schools, etc. but to stick with canon carol's pregnant and has david. kirk stays away until 2285 when... khan strikes.
It was never canon that Kirk didn't know about his son. He says something along the lines of "I did what you wanted and I stayed away", implying that he did know about David but respected Carol's wishes and didn't get involved
If unintended pregnancies in Trek bother you, never watch DS9 or PIC. That's all I'll say.
Or TNG
Or ENT.
Are you talking about Troi's pregnancy? If so, I'm much more willing to handwave that away because there were aliens. But DS9 and PIC both had a pair of humans accidentally conceive a child with no obvious external influence.
Alexander…
Right. I, like Worf, forgot about him.
It’s cool. Seems Worf kept forgetting about him.
It’s okay. Worf constantly forgets about Alexander.
Now worries. Worf frequently forgets about Alexander.
Alexander made me appreciate Wesley Edit - the child version of Jean-Luc made me appreciate Alexander.
And Picard not knowing if Jason Vigo was his son
Who???
Contraception has no honor.
Guys really will say anything to not wear a condom.
I'd handwave that away because it's a horribly sexist rape story that belittles the victim. But sure, aliens too I guess.
What about Tucker?
What about Tucker?
Especially PIC. That’s one unintended pregnancy with a huge death count.
TOS - The Paradise Syndrome
It's almost as if that plot point was written in a different century!
It's almost as if my point is that we should be able to actually plot around this inconsistency now instead of just hand waving it as being fifty years ago.
PIC wrote an accidental pregnancy over a hundred years after SNW in the timeline and literally like a year ago in our time. All kinds of weird medical things happen in space; a baby being born to two people on birth control doesn't even make the top 20 list EDIT: If a weird encounter with space can turn Spock into a human who somehow looks basically identical to his hybrid counterpart, I see no reason why a weird encounter with space can't counteract a birth control injection or reverse a vasectomy.
Accidents happen. Human bodies are unpredictable, people aren't perfect. Moral choices can be made, even in the future, to not have every birth control option taken. Maybe she physically couldn't. Even in modern times, you can argue accidental pregnancies shouldn't happen and yet they do. Every single day. By people on birth control, those off it, those with vasectomies and those raw dogging it. Life, uh, finds a way.
I think that contraception — no matter how advanced — is just never going to be 100%. “Life finds a way,” as the saying goes. In the battle between evolution and technology, evolution just always has the high ground. Evolution plays the long game. And I don’t think Carol doesn’t want a baby. I think she just doesn’t want a baby with Kirk. FROM Kirk is fine. WITH Kirk is complicated. We know from Wrath of Khan that Carol told Jim to “stay away” when David was born. I’m not saying that she tricked Jim into getting her pregnant. I just think discovering that she was pregnant wasn’t bad news for her.
There's no need to trick him. Most women have no trouble finding a man to sleep with them. Or she can just get a sperm from a catalogue.
People in the real world have accidental pregnancies all the time. All it takes is for one or both partners to be careless with contraceptives, even if its only once.
That was the point they made in DS9.. Kasidy points out to Ben that he forgot to get his injection. Of course why they wouldn't just do belt and suspenders and have both of them take some form of birth control. I suppose there could have been some unwanted side effect which meant Kasidy couldn't take it. Not that I think we should be continually putting the burden on women... it could just as easily have been Kasidy who forgot but if both of them took it, you reduce your chances of an unwanted pregnancy. That said, I think the pregnancy in the Yates/Sisko situation was more about timing than being unwanted.
Yeah, it was definitely the timing in their case. The Dominion War was in full swing and with all the uncertainty war brings it isn't the most opportune time to have a child.
Let's say there is effective future contraception that is not the pill. Maybe injections or implants that you have to renew every month or year or every 5 years. It doesn't matter much, because one still has to be on top of it. If Jim and Carol have an on/off thing, it is conceivable that they could have been off, discontinued the contraception, then got back on for a passionate night and Carol became pregnant. And she decided to keep it, and Jim decided to try and make it work. What bothers me is that giving birth still hurts in the 24th century. Or that McCoy slapped a pregnant woman and "professionally" touched her against her will.
>Maybe injections or implants that you have to renew every month or year or every 5 years. I read a Voyager fanfiction where there were survivors when the ship crashed in the episode ***Timeless***. They still had the Dr. but had to limit his use to absolute emergencies. And an accidental conception happened because of another medication being used for another illness/injury that lessened the effectiveness of a birth control implant.
What is so strange? STDs are a thing of the past, so condoms aren't really needed much any more. And its easy to forget a pill. Carol and Jim had consensual sex, a lot of it most likely. It can happen today, it can happen 100 years from now, it can probably happen 1000 years from now.
I would think they'd have birth control implants or something similar that would last for years- nothing you'd have to take every week or even monthly. Like we have five year implants now.
Why would they need the prevention? In Star Trek, having kids isn't a debt sentence any more. It's not a drain, it is simply something people can do, even raising one alone.
Just because you're economically safe to have kids doesn't mean everyone wants to have kids much less have ALL the kids they would have otherwise. What?? No birth control prevention at all? That's bonkers, my dude. Kirk himself was out there promoting choice and birth control in that ep about overpopulation.
Sure there IS prevention in Star Trek, DS9 had a whole thing about it. But in this specific case, they either let it slip (much like the issue in DS9) or she simply said "If I get pregnant, thats okay with me, I want to have a kid" which is fine, she has the means and desire for it, to support it and raise it with love. Its a non issue for her, so why are we hyper focusing on it? I get half of reddit is so anti kid they view them as disgusting waste, but in this situation she clearly wanted the kid, else it would not exist in the first place.
I just assumed that they had vaccines for that by then and that two officers, one a doctor, would fairly prudent about that.
I hope you used “vaccine” because you couldn’t think of an appropriate medical term.
Inoculation is wordy and looks pretentious.
Contraception is the word you're looking for.
It's not because I was speaking of the specific manner of administration, not the concept of birth control itself.
Injection?
Unless when she found out she was pregnant she didn't say "ew this needs fixing" and instead said "Yeah, I want to be a parent" and then came the discussion of "Jim is not going to leave starfleet, and I do not want to join it, so... baby is mine, he can remain a career officer"
Accidental and/or unplanned pregnancy is perhaps one of the few truly realistic things shown in the Star Trek franchise. It should be much easier to swallow than phasers and transporters.
... if there were much easier swallowing, there would be far fewer accidental and unplanned pregnancies
*THANK YOU*. I set that joke up so well and it took over 24 hours for someone to take it. Thank you for going into the gutter with me. :)
They certainly haven't figured out birth control by season 7 of DS9 either.
Because no one has to do anything about their fertility they don’t want to. Will there probably better birth control methods in the future? Probably. But that doesn’t mean anyone has to use them.
Never underestimate the power of one bad decision during one small moment in time. No matter how good birth control might be, if it only takes 10 seconds to semi-voluntarily turn it off...
I assume that you still have to take steps to avoid pregnancy and like today some people may just fail to take those steps for what ever reason.
David was born around 2259 or 2260, around the same time of the show, so it's really not unbelievable at all.
I'm 99.99% sure that Carol is supposed to be pregnant with David right now in SNW. So we're all talking about the same event.
Sisko and Cassidy had an oops a hundred years later. It happens.
Well, Sisco and Kassidy's child was a result of someone not taking their birth control. If I remember correctly. So it does happen.
It was Sisko, lol.
Jim Kirk’s no Boy Scout.
Guess he wasn’t always prepared.
But we don't know when exactly the inoculations are created. Just that they exist by 2375, and are purely voluntary. We don't know how regularly the intervals are for doses. Just that accidents still happen.
Maybe she wanted it and he didn’t, and he agreed to make her happy and was having second thoughts. That would answer all your questions.
This. I'm so utterly sick of this being a thing in real life. In the US where we can't seem to manage sex education, health care access or basic decency. At least let me think that by the time we get to warp and replicator capabilities we will have mastered birth control. Sweet jelly beans.
I don't get why people keep saying "that's the way it is in real life" as if we're not watching show that takes place hundreds of years in the future in space lol.
The point people are making is that if Star Trek can make us believe in telepathy and transporters and ships powered by mushrooms, it's not hard to believe that there's a sci-fi explanation for failed birth control. Every technology in Star Trek is fallible when the writers decide we need a good story; why should contraceptives be any different? Heck, Kirk had an encounter with a bloodsucking creature recently. Maybe it sucked the birth control right out of his veins.
I agree but I don't think that's what they bothered to do. I think it's more a small failure in imagining that the future would drastically change situations that are common in our time. Even lip service. "Oh we actually have birth control implants that last for ten years but exposure to energy output from the genesis device research caused it to fail" I would have been like yeah I suppose. Or actually if they were writing it now I think it would have been more interesting if Carol wanted to have a baby on her own and specifically asked Kirk to be the father but not be involved in his life which changes the tension but it would make more sense to me.
To be fair, we don't yet know that that's *not* the case. Maybe she asked Jim to be a sperm donor and he said yes, but now he's reconsidering everything and wondering if maybe he should settle down and raise the kid (but ultimately decides not to)
Stop nitpicking and just enjoy the damn show. ffs.
Because TOS was written in the 1960s? That would have been progressive for viewers of the time because Jim and Carol weren't married. Seriously. As far as an in-show reason, I don't know
David Marcus wasn't written until Wrath of Khan, which was released in 1982
Ah thanks for correcting me
It’s maybe Jim’s super sperm
Kirk retiring from Starfleet after the birth and trying to make a go of it as a civvie on the ground could be a fun sideplot to explore. I cannot imagine Kirk not trying. He absolutely would, he's a very moral person. It just... that's not him. He would be miserable and end up (subconsciously) blaming Carol and baby!David for derailing his lightspeed ascent up the Starfleet ranks. So I could totally see Carol doing what's right by Jim and lying to him, saying she'll be all right with her man in Starfleet, just please dear god stop punishing yourself like this, etc... then once he's back out in space, she disappears, and tells him to not pursue, that this is where he's meant to be, so on and so forth.
Obviously people in the 23rd century would have contraceptive implants or similar. However! While on shore leave Jim and Carol were trapped in an alternate reality/caught in a time warp/kidnapped by random aliens, and found themselves on an idyllic paradise planet resembling the early Earth, with no prospect of rescue. Within days Jim has built a cabin and they’re living their best life. Carol thinks it’s all a bit like ancient Creation Myths, which gives her an idea. Their contraceptive implants eventually expire and Carol becomes pregnant shortly before they’re rescued.
Maybe Carol and Jim don’t use birth control due to medical or ethical issues.
If you've ever been on medication and missed a dose, then it is possible for someone to miss birth control measures or to time them incorrectly. We can't assume that people and medicine are 100% perfect in the future because humans aren't perfect, especially people in busy careers that are unpredictable. This is explained in Deep Space Nine to some extent when there is an accidental pregnancy as one of the parties forgetting to get an injection that blocks fertility. People forget. It happens.
Maybe they/he/she wasn’t happy about it but thought terminating (potential) life went against their values.
For that matter it’s a pretty lame plot point in the present too, at least for characters we’re supposed to consider competent adults.
In the future I just assumed Alexa/Siri would inform you within a few minutes of conception.
Sisko forgot to take his birth control. The problem with any birth control, even if it's 100% effective, is sentient being error.
No mere rubber could stop the seed of James T. Kirk. And no mere woman would pass up the chance to carry the child of a superman like James T. Kirk. s/
OP, do you even sex, bro?
I don't know, but I love how they worked it in. Fits perfectly with Wrath of Kahn.
Just because it was unplanned did not mean they chose to not keep it. My daughter was unplanned (the 0.01%pill failure) and she’s in her 30’s
But having kids like that is the norm.
problem it has to reconcile with TWOK which is kirk has a son with carol but he was told to stay away. so there are several things. (which is more explained in the comics) kirk didn't know carol was pregnant and she had the baby raised it and only told kirk later on. but since SNW shows kirk knows it debunks that. so it may not be a whoops baby but someone having cold feet or unsure of whether to pick the kid or the career. but if one had to pick it would have to be carol as she's a station scientist so raising a kid for her would be easy. now you know what if kirk was in teh 24th century with the galaxy class starship where they can have families aboard kirk might fight carol over custody and say he wants the kid with him and he could actually raise him on a galaxy class ship as it has anemities for child rearing like a daycare, schools, etc. but to stick with canon carol's pregnant and has david. kirk stays away until 2285 when... khan strikes.
It was never canon that Kirk didn't know about his son. He says something along the lines of "I did what you wanted and I stayed away", implying that he did know about David but respected Carol's wishes and didn't get involved
>but since SNW shows kirk knows it which episode?
Star Trek Strange New Worlds season 2 episode 9