Hello Baby (Spoilers Below The Fold)

Hello Baby is a webcomic at Webtoons by Enjelicious, a South Korean comic author, who established herself with her first "big time" debut comic, Age Matters, which was recently completed after years of serialization. Hello Baby has been running for about six months and as I write, thirty episodes are available if you are willing to pay a modest price so you don't have to wait three weeks to read episodes for free.

Age Matters, one of the hottest titles in the romance comic genre at the time, was about a young woman filling in for a friend in her friend's job a cook and maid for a young CEO of a social media tech company who falls in love with him, that also has a strong supporting cast of secondary characters, and a backstory of melodrama involving famous models, villains motivated by jealousy and money, and rich family business chiefs looking for marriage alliances. Overall, the tone is cute and funny, if somewhat cliched. The most serious issues it explores, not very seriously, are the propriety of a woman dating a younger man, and the propriety of a woman dating her boss. It has a good chance of being made into a live action K-drama if this isn't already in the works.

Hello Baby is her sophomore romance comic effort. It is more serious, more down to Earth, and explores deeper emotions and issues related to modern marriage, parenting, love, responsibility, and our social instincts that deserve thought and discussion (but can't be discussed without revealing some spoilers from the first dozen or so episodes from what will probably be more than a hundred episodes when it's done, below the fold). It is also a huge hit and also has strong K-drama potential.

Synopsis

Gwen, our heroine, has a one night stand on the last night of a cruise with a man whose relationship with the girlfriend he'd planned to propose to that night abruptly ended. She gets pregnant, has the baby, and manages on her own for months. Eventually, the father, a young man reluctantly running a prosperous part of his family's business that he has little genuine interest in, finds her and tries to become a part of his son's life. 

He has an arrogant lawyer try to have her agree to custody and child support terms, in a way that leaves her feeling bullied instead of loved, and she lawyers up with a childhood friend who would like to marry her himself. The father, with the help of his grandmother and business colleagues, tries to heal the damage done by his lawyer, first by doing right by her and setting her up in an apartment for Gwen and their son with help from his grandmother. Then, he resolves to try make the three of them into a family and win Gwen's hand in marriage after having been absent for a little more than a year. They remind each other of the chemistry they had in their brief encounter on the cruise, and they're both basically decent people, even if he initially comes across as a non-serious playboy and her lawyer and friends caution her against being duped. In the background, initially unbeknownst to either of them, it turns out that an alliance with Gwen would also be a coup for the father's family business. 

The plot primarily revolves primarily around the delicate business of a couple already bound by a child in common trying to rebuild the love and trust that ideally should have preceded Gwen's pregnancy, the love triangle with her lawyer who is sincerely crushing on Gwen, and the opportunities for misunderstandings and feelings of betrayal when the business advantage is discovered and makes it seem like this earnest courtship was driven by ulterior motives.

Exploring The Issues

Hello Baby is not burdened with old school Scarlet Letter-style condemnation of a woman who has a one night stand and gets pregnant. No one, from the father's grandma, to his business associates, to the lawyers involved, to his other family members, to the people at the pediatrician's office, to their friends, fault her for this, and the father is not resentful that she wasn't on birth control.

This said, this is playing out in the context of modern Korean culture (although it isn't entirely clear that the story is actually set there). Both Japan and South Korea have among the lowest out of wedlock birth rates in the world. This is not the working class United States where 60% of children are born to unmarried mothers, or Sweden with similarly underutilized marriage institutions, or even the United States of college educated women to whom 10% of children are born out of wedlock. Less than 5% of mothers in Japan and South Korea are unmarried, despite the fact that contraception other than condoms is fairly rare in both countries, and South Korea only legalized abortion within the last few years although this prohibition was often ignored, and was only a misdemeanor, before abortion was legalized there. Abortion has been common in Japan and used with little moral stigma there, even when used as essentially a backup method of birth control, for a long time.

The differences in out of wedlock birthrate (and the related question of divorce rates) may have a cultural basis, but also have a lot to do with the incentives create by a country's family laws, social safety net, and economic circumstances. Unfortunately, however, these incentives are a crude instrument, not a selective one. They either make both good marriages and bad ones more likely to form and more likely to last, or they make both good marriages and bad ones less likely to form and less likely to last. There isn't a strong case that any of the key policies driving these trends is preventing bad marriages from forming and dissolving them when they are formed, while encouraging good marriages to form and supporting them so that they last.

Hello Baby does, however, bring a lot of modern issues and values to the fore.

If anyone is condemned, ever so mildly, it is the father, for not being able to keep it together with his intended fiancee, for not staying in touch with Gwen after their one night stand, and for being absent and unsupportive, even innocently, during her pregnancy and their son's first months of life. His unserious playboy demeanor doesn't help either.

His most serious offense, at the outset, however, for which he can genuinely be faulted, is hiring a bulldog of a lawyer to pressure Gwen to allow him into her life with an aggressive approach in an initial meeting with her. This is a thing.

Part of the problem is that a court's language of legal rights related to a child that can be enforced is not conducive to building a healthy relationship rooted in humility, empathy, cooperation, and love. Yes, co-parents who work together to raise their children, and yes, parents should both contribute to the economic support of their child, something that often doesn't happen without court intervention. It may be a necessary evil. But the way it plays out is emotionally wrong and contributes to the endless misery that family court can involve. A forum designed for securing compensation for blameworthy accidents, breached leases, and broken contractual promises with primarily economic ends on a one time basis between people at arms-length from each other, isn't a great fit for the ongoing interactions over a couple of decades involved in family building and parenting. One can imagine a better system, but it isn't an easy problem to solve either.

Another big issue is the emerging separation of sex, marriage, and parenting. South Korea and Japan may have more older virgins than most countries, but premarital sex isn't taboo or illegal. What is the "right thing" to do when premarital sex leads to pregnancy and a child, for a couple that doesn't have a meaningful relationship with each other first?

We may be past the era of shotgun marriage, but we haven't exactly landed at a consensus of what to do instead either. Physical intimacy can't be taken for granted between people who aren't in a current romantic or marital relationship with each other, but it is also less of an affront between people who have already had sex willingly and had a baby together. Hello Baby illustrates the extreme of an enthusiastic and enjoyable one night stand that happened because the couple had excellent chemistry, but, of course, the average duration in which a couple has unprotected sex before the woman gets pregnant is closer to six months. Hello Baby doesn't get into the very different ground of pregnancies arising from rape or even reluctant pressured sex in bad relationship, which present issues for another story.

"Categorical thinking", that the people in a couple are just co-parents and not currently lovers, is close to normative. It's rude and ultimately a gross imposition and legally sanctionable, for someone to assume that just because they had sex before and had a child together that they're entitled to sex now. But it is also a fact that unmarried co-parents who aren't cohabiting often do have sex, and that co-parents who are having sex have more cooperative parenting dealings with each other and pay child support much more reliably, generally leaving their shared children better off than children of co-parents who never have sex any longer.

There are certainly fathers whom unmarried mothers are not wrong to not want in their shared children's lives and may not want to formally recognize as fathers. A mere contribution of genetic material, we have come to understand, isn't really fatherhood in a full and legitimate sense. Single mothers and their children make up a grossly disproportionate share of people in poverty in the U.S. 

But, the fathers that unmarried mothers don't want in their children's lives are very frequently economic losers themselves. Often, they are high school dropouts or only have a high school diploma and have no occupational credentials or valuable job skills. They tend to have frequently bouts of unemployment and less than full-time employment, and don't make much money when they are working. Often, these fathers have less economic success in the labor market than others and would be a net economic burden if they stayed around - necessitating that the family buy more food, live in a bigger rental home, buy more clothes, have another car and the expenses that go with it, and in general, add as much, or almost as much, to the family's expenses as their after-tax earnings after money wasted on alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, gambling, prostitutes, entertainment for themselves, and other spending that doesn't benefit the rest of the household even when they are working - which not infrequently, they aren't. Often, they are unwilling or unable, to be responsible and competent house husbands who can provide child care and do more than their share of the chores for a working spouse either.

And, of course, the kind of men who drop out of high school or go no further are often in that position not just because they are not particularly high in IQ, but also because they lack key non-academic traits. They try to resolve problems with their fists or crude intimidation rather than with words and good faith negotiation. They aren't good at doing what they are told on the job, or following through on chores and tasks at home. They aren't hard working. They aren't kind and don't express love well. They are short on empathy. They may be unfaithful. They may commit crimes. And so on. In short, they lack social virtues too. 

In short, a lot of women seek to keep fathers out of their children's lives because the fathers bring nothing to the relationship economically or in terms of social virtues, and may do harm. The society of the 1950s needed men like this economically and rewarded them handsomely, as have most of the societies that preceded them, but in the 21st century, they are dead weight economically because they lack academic success, and often aren't nurtured in other way either, in part because they aren't valuable to society.

Now, the father in Hello Baby isn't that guy. He's affluent and has steady quality managerial employment, even if he isn't particularly hard working or talented compared to his peers in similar jobs not appointed out of nepotism. He isn't a paragon of social virtue, but he's not a cad either, even though he comes across as one at first. He has some interpersonal relationship skills and isn't completely clueless, even if he isn't especially perceptive. He has what it takes to economically support Gwen and their son, and to be as decent a husband and father as most men who are husbands and fathers.

Part of the modern conflict is an optimization/satisficing issue. He is good enough. But, under the circumstances where they have had a child together, should Gwen accept him when the unplanned pregnancy forced her hand and has put him in a position where any other choice will make raising their son very complicated, when but for their unplanned child, another man, like her lawyer friend, might be a better husband for her and a more optimal choice.

We have passed the point of shotgun marriages where having a child together conclusively forces the parents to marry, but it doesn't follow that the fact that they have a child together is completely irrelevant for someone in Gwen's position who is trying to choose a life partner. 

It isn't wrong to attach some value to having a simple family with married parents of shared children, relative to the option of being co-parents with no romantic attachment to each other married to other people who may each be somewhat more optimal life partners for them (often in marriages producing half-siblings), sharing custody as the child moves back and forth between households regularly, with child support paid, all of which sends them back to court periodically as circumstances change over time with lawyers reaping fees on a regular basis in the process.

But, how much should this matter? How much better must a "perfect match" with whom you aren't yet a co-parent be than the adequate match who is a co-parent with you too be, to make the "perfect match" worth it? And, of course, just because you are holding out for a "perfect match" there is no guarantee that you'll actually find one. Indeed, having a child with someone else makes you less of a perfect match for someone else as well, making securing that "perfect match" even harder. 

If one is considering only the best interests of their child, the father has to be pretty inadequate indeed. If one is considering only Gwen's interests, it is a somewhat closer call. Most people these days would acknowledge that morally, neither their child's interest nor Gwen's interests should be the sole consideration, that the interests of the father matter too, and that the right decision should balance all three, rather than making any one person's needs paramount. And, of course, what is best for each of the three people involved isn't entirely independent.

Of course, a romance novelist doesn't have to make that choice if she wants to portray a simple and unambiguous and less heart wrenching fantasy. If the man who is the co-parent as a result of a one night stand turns out to be a perfect match anyway, relative to another prospect in  love triangle, as revealed in some critical moments, there is no conflict and the answer is easy. Their child was providence and led to a happy marriage that they otherwise would have failed to realize due to lack of communication, was such a promising option. I don't know if that is where Enjelicious is going in Hello Baby or not, although it would be shocking if Gwen and the father of her child didn't end up together as a family and married couple in the end. This is an unmarried co-parents version of The Parent Trap (originally in 1961 and rebooted in 1998).

Yet another question is whether the notion of a "perfect match", or even the notion that it is important for prospective spouses to be compatible, is really a valid construct. The evidence, such as it is, tends to say that it isn't, although part of this may be due to "range limitation" in that compatibility is only considered and evaluated as a factor in cases when couples are sufficiently compatible to have some romantic attraction to each other in the first place, and not just random couples. But, the long history of arranged marriages and mail order brides and shotgun weddings producing reasonably happy marriages casts some doubt even on this caveat.

The best predictor of whether you will be happy when you are married is whether you were happy when you were single. It is certainly fair to say that there is not just one right person out there for you that is "the one" that you must scour the world to find. Indeed, excessively high expectations for a partner, in contrast to the assumption that marriage and relationships are something you both have to work at to make work, can set relationships up for failure.

So, setting aside the comparatively easy cases of rape or abusive relationships that led to pregnancies, and of fathers who are just so awful that they are incapable of being good husbands and fathers, economically or socially, there is a legitimate case to be made that wanting parents of a child to make the utmost effort to stay together before considering other options is more than just a starry eyed romantic notion. On the other hand, since there are few bright lines to draw, none of these choices is ever easy and it is the stuff of long, involved, fact intense dramas of deliberation like Hello Baby even though the choice in the comic is comparatively an easy one.

Other issues, like the pros and cons of nepotism and family businesses come up tangentially in Hello Baby and in Age Matters but don't get an in depth examination and are more window dressing for stories that are primarily romances.