Celebrating the beauty of contraceptions through jewelry is a good step.
Ah, the clash between reproductive rights and environmentalism raises its ugly head once again. Jill reads this article by Daniel Engber that suggests that Americans—who are the most massive per capita polluters on the planet, mind you—cut back on our births to one or none to save the planet. She dismisses the idea on the theory that there lies the path to coercion. I’m going to disagree. First of all, dismissing coercion out of hand in a situation as dire as ours concerns me. Not that one should conclude that coercion is the best bet, but desperate times should at least allow for the consideration of desperate measures.
Still, I think we’re far from even having to worry about coercing people, China-style. First of all, it’s best not to make an assault on human dignity right out of the gate without trying other measures. Coercion is unlikely to work, anyway, since people would rebel and create all sorts of nasty problems. You just don’t want to go there if you can at all help it.
But we don’t have to go there. At this point in time, the experiment of creating incentives and social pressure to limit your children to one or none hasn’t even been tried, so we have a great opportunity here. There’s tremendous social pressure on women to have two or more children, and if we could just counter that message through incentive programs, we might be able to dramatically reduce the American birth rate without even getting close to being pushy. Or we could fail miserably, of course, but that could happen with any plan of action and I think a genuine attempt at voluntary population reduction would be the likeliest to work without creating pushback.
Right now, the social messages are so strongly pro-fertility that getting the counter message out there is difficult, as this article notes, pointing out that Bill McKibben was treated like a wild-eyed extremist for making the mundane suggestion that it would be better for parents to keep it at one child. The 17 child (or is it 18?) Duggar family was trotted out to both be ogled at and admired for having one child after another—Michelle Duggar was even given a Mother of the Year award for sheer volume. People who have dramatic multiple births after ingesting tons of fertility drugs are treated like public heroes (if they’re white) and have tons of gifts and money showered on them. Columnists around the country blame insufficient American fertility for everything from Islamic extremism to the problems with Social Security. The notion that having kids is just what you do goes routinely unquestioned and women especially who question whether or not they really want to have children get castigated for it—I’ve even been told that I’m not really a woman because I don’t feel the need to procreate. Similarly, women who see the value in sticking to one child often get treated like they’re just short of being abusive to their single child for depriving her of a sibling by people who are all too willing to tout the benefits of having siblings while ignoring the huge drawbacks for children that come from having to compete for parental resources. We live in a country where people get in a huge huff over the idea of government coercion that limits children, but then the majority of people accept the notion that some attempts to coerce women to have children by limiting contraception and abortion is okay, and the debate is generally over how much coercion is too much.
With that much pressure on women to shut up and have babies without asking too many questions, it’s likely that even creating a system that validates women who have one or none could empower women to really think about their choices , which I think would lead to a lot more women sticking to one or none. If so, everyone benefits. Women have more power. Children do better if they’re really wanted (and the benefits that come from being an only child are nothing to sneeze at). And the environment might be salvageable if we could reverse the exponential population growth of the past century. (If you haven’t seen A Inconvenient Truth, do. Al Gore has four children, but he’s still willing to admit that exponential population growth is a major factor in global warming.) We could also restructure our policies to reflect a society that values those who stick to one or none. We could make contraception and abortion free, and have bike messengers hand out condoms and emergency contraception like they do in France. We could restructure our tax system so that being childless or even sticking to one gets you a tax credit. The government could run ads like this to drive home the message that having children is something you should only do if you’ve put a lot of thought into it:
There could be more public service information out there pointing out the disadvantages of having two or more children and therefore having to split up family resources. Do you really want to pay two college tuitions? Do you want your eldest to have to turn down Harvard and go to State U. to save money so child number two can also go to college? The answer may end up being yes at the end of the day for some people, but a lot of people will decide against having a second child once they realize that you can stick to one while being a thoughtful person, instead of the horrible sibling-depriving abusive wretch that others might make you out to be.
Above all, we need to keep up the feminist drumbeat. Women have an extra incentive that men don’t have to limit the number of children—the wear and tear on the body—and if women are making the decisions about how many children to have, truly making the decisions instead of kow-towing to social pressures, we’ll see a cumulative effect of smaller family sizes on average. Individual variation fully accounted for (some women just want a lot), I still think that women that live free of patriarchal pressure will have, on average, less children. For every woman who freely chooses to have four, you’ll have a lot of women who freely decide they want none as a counter balance. Nothing will help slow population growth more than treating women like full human beings who have a right to a full range of options, instead of the current attitudes we have linking womanhood and motherhood together as if they’re the exact same thing.
185 Responses to “At least trying a bit of voluntary population control”
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And we could also try and improve educational and employment opportunities for women, so that they can have the option to do something they feel is worthwhile other than have kids.
Whenever women have a wide range of opportunities, the opportunity costs of childrearing increase such that family sizes fall. Developed countries have lower fertility than developing or undeveloped countries for this reason, among others. Within developed countries, women in higher socioeconomic classes have smaller families than women in lower classes due to their greater opportunity costs.
If you factor out immigration, the US already has negative population growth, so coercion and incentives apparently aren’t necessary to curb reproduction, if you reckon that it would be desirable to do so.
The ideal complted family size in America today appears to be two, one of each sex, but families will stretch it out to three to try to get a mix. More than three makes you a freak.
First of all, it’s best not to make an assault on human dignity right out of the gate without trying other measures.
Ok…and then we make an assault on human dignity?
Snark aside, how do you reconcile a concept like body autonomy with coercion to not have kids? These sound (at least superficially) mutually exclusive.
There’s been much discussion in the last decade or so about dropping birthrates in the EU and Japan and how those dropping birthrates might negatively impact those economic engines. I’d be pretty surprised if you didn’t get pushback on this just based on that.
Also, my limited memory is that there have been some proposals for programs that would employ sterilization to curb rising welfare rolls. Which, of course, is not anywhere close to the spirit of what you’re addressing here. But I suspect you’ll get some fairly vociferous objections to this idea based on that history.
I’m too lazy to look up the data, but isn’t it a fairly well-accepted fact that increased education and a higher standard-of-living lowers family size? Which is why they have that pesky demographics problem in the EU and Japan to begin with?
I totally agree that we should push to make limiting your family size just as acceptable and popular a social movement as having multiple kids is, but I base that on liking to make people’s personal choices as socially acceptable as possible in general, not for environmental reasons. I can’t imagine why coercion to have more children is any less moral than coercion to have less, so that strikes me as an impossible-to-sustain argument–you’d have to accept the basic idea that the government has the power to dictate your personal reproduction in either case. I also don’t think America’s population growth rate based upon physical reproduction of non-immigrant persons living here is really enough of a major environmental issue–I think raising our population growth as an environmental issue would rapidly and unavoidably become an anti-immigration issue, as immigrants are responsible for a lot more population growth and are also a lot more likely to have more than one kid. Normally I loooooove your posts and agree with you in most all respects, but this one seems a little dubious on multiple levels.
I said this over at Feministe, but I also disagree with Jill.
I think a smaller family, ie having fewer children IS the right thing to do in this world, as we already have more than the world can comfortably support. I honestly don’t see that thinking such is a good thing, a more ethical thing, will automatically turned into enforced coercion.
Maybe having lots of children will turn into something thought strange, or something to be a tad frowned on. I don’t see this as necessarily a bad thing, both for the world, and for the children in these families.
I also think however that this should also be a part of a wider effort to improve living-standards around the world in a sustainable way. be a part of efforts to empower women, Further, we can make it parts of efforts to ensure those of us that have the least power aren’t unduly impacted by such.
Yes, I am someone that doesn’t want children, and honestly gets a tad sick of hearing how damn saint-like and expected child-having is. However, this isn’t about having children vs. not having children, this is about if you are to have children, thinking responsibly about how many that would be.
It’s perfectly okay to support choice for someone, for everyone, without thinking what they chose is a good thing.
I would argue that there needs to be changes made more as the structural larger-scale level, as individual efforts are not enough. However, I would argue that such changes are impossible without individual changes occurring simultaneously. For example, I do think city-living is better for the planet, as it is more efficient, but I don’t think people should be forced to move. However, I do think it is more ethical for someone to NOT have a huge McMansion and large amounts of land. Of using less power and less disposable products, etc, etc, etc. Encouraging people to avoid such is not enforcement.
Each of these needs to be part of a wider socio-cultural change, and not ad-hoc disparate efforts. If there is one thing we have learnt from our feminisms, it is that legal civil changes are never going to be enough, though they have their place. We need cultural changes, and that’s what I am speaking for here.
There’s been much discussion in the last decade or so about dropping birthrates in the EU and Japan and how those dropping birthrates might negatively impact those economic engines. I’d be pretty surprised if you didn’t get pushback on this just based on that.
Race comes into it as well.
As Amanda noted, when white women pump up full of fertility drugs and drop a sprog they are feted. When a Mexican woman has her 5th kid the middle and upper class people say “Dammit! Another one? How will you pay for it? Just quit breeding!”
At the same time, poor immigrants with their massive families are now providing more and more of the labor and I doubt this trend is going to reverse. It’s a catch-22…the Capitalist wants cheap labor but disdains his workforce.
Part of the problem is that our economy is based on growth, which is mathematically and environmentally unsound. So we can either get into space to keep growing, or we can find a better way to run the economy.
This issue of no children or only children is so important. I am an only and I have an only daughter. Now that she is almost 8 people have stopped pestering us to have another one. My friends who don’t want children get the same thing. It is a relentless drum beat to procreat even from my friends who I would have thought would have known better. I don’t criticize my friends for having more than one, so why should I have to defend my choice all the time? All this talk about how awful it is to be an only child from people who aren’t only children and all the fuss at women (single or not) who choose not to have children is insensitive, patriarchial, and yes coersive.
About the ad, I was recently with my daughter at a nice restaurant where we watched almost that kind of display from a young boy. His mother eventually had to haul him out while his older sister and father sat. I know children have all sorts of issues, but the parents let it go on and on as if the rest of us weren’t there or should solve their problem. In this case it appeared that the parents weren’t too interested in parenting. I won’t guess at their motives for having children, but one of them should be the desire to do some parenting.
I have one child, not because I couldn’t have two as many people suggest, but because we only wanted to raise one child. I am also keenly aware of the suggestion that women (sometimes this is directed at a couple) are selfish for having one or no children. It is all part of the same problem.
So yes, lets figure out how to glamorize the one or none option and do the world a favor.
Sarah in Chicago
Encouraging a change in the culture sounds like a mission and a half. I don’t disagree with anything you said, I just don’t see how you can accomplish the end-state of lowering birth rates in the face of scarcity without eventually resorting to coercion.
I also completely agree with the idea that this is an elevating of standards of living–which includes women having educations and careers and so forth so they have options for fulfillment besides popping out babies. It’s a great vision, but how do you pull it off?
Well, a good start would be not putting trillions of dollars into the military, and instead route funding to international organisations, the UN aid and development programs. Remove religiously-based restrictions on information and assistance programs. Change assistance paradigms from national to international, with a focus on doing such at the local level.
Put more subsidies into scientific research, stop focusing on development as merely a goal in of itself, but rather how to do such sustainably. There’s tons out there Petey, people are already trying, but the political will isn’t there. This isn’t reinventing the wheel.
But those are just my opinions, mind you.
Encouraging one-child families so that your singleton will be able to pay full boat at Harvard is probably the wrong way to get at the resource-consumption issue. All that means is Junior gets his own Hummer for the 18th birthday.
(I’m all for limiting family size, although not necessarily to 1 unless there are a bunch of other changes in the way children get raised and cared for. It’s just that I think pushing for reduction in consumption per person is probably as good a bet — and that the two work together.)
While I agree that improving women’s health care, education, etc etc will ultimately lead to women having fewer children, and while I agree that having fewer children is a good and ethical thing, I have a big problem with the continued politicization of reproduction. Because at the end of the day, women are getting screwed. Right now, a lot of us are getting screwed by the fertility-fetishism that demands women have more children than they want. I don’t want to replace that with a system where women are screwed if they have more children than is deemed socially acceptable. I think you’re absolutely right that making child-free or one-child lifestyles more acceptable is a good thing, but I don’t like the idea of doing so at the expense of the acceptability of multi-child families.
The problem with public policy incentivizing child-free or one-child families is that incentives often bleed into coercion for the people with the least power. Take the group CRACK, for example — they target drug-addicted women and offer them a few hundred bucks to be permanently sterilized. They bill themselves as an organization dedicated to preventing more “crack babies.” For you or I, $200 in exchange for our fertility may only be an incentive; for a woman who is desperate and addicted and is being offered $200 worth of drug money, things look a little bit different. Is it technically coercion? No. But it’s a fine line. And of course, the women who have their reproductive capacities taken away are disproportionately black and brown. In my post I alluded to our “ugly history,” and I know you’ve read the fabulous Dorothy Robert’s “Killing the Black Body.” Ideally, population control wouldn’t have a racial element to it; historically and realistically, it does, and it’s something we need to be really careful about.
I have one son. I would have liked two kids, but that wasn’t to be—and I am well aware of the financial and other advantages that accrue to the one-child family:
(1) We can live in a smaller home. Less stuff, cheaper, smaller carbon footprint.
(2) The kid’s college savings account is sizeable. Less outgo for regular expenses (food, clothing, pediatrician co-pays, movie tickets, etc.) means more money for savings, and the savings don’t have to be split two (or more) ways.
(3) More time for parents to devote to (a) that kid and (b) their own interests.
I have one childless friend who would have loved to be a mother but circumstances never worked out, and two others who have never really been interested in bearing children at all. They don’t quite balance out all my cousins with two or three kids, though.
A couple years ago, I noticed a lot of opt-out stay-at-home-mom yuppie families in my area had three kids. Someone told me “three is the new two.” I hope that doesn’t catch on!
This is always such a pleasant conversation to have, no? I’m surprised that we haven’t heard from the usual suspects on this yet.
I do agree 100% with Entomologista. It’s nice to hear somebody else say it for once.
Sarah in Chicago & paul are both saying things of value. I believe that advocating reduced consumption and advocating reduced family size are both vital elements to the long term health of humanity.
Do individual efforts solve the problem? Probably not. But without individual efforts, the political will to make institutional changes in the US will never happen. (Insert cliche here)
Yes - the growth model of our economy is part (most) of the problem. Yes - patriarchy and the need to control women is the rest of it.
No - I don’t know how to fix it except globalise education of women.
Gosh yes - stop telling me how mature and wonderful you are because you spawned some more american consumption-machines. Yafuckinhoo.
Weeeeell, I’m pregnant with #3. On purpose. Not because I think that big families are the be-all, end-all, or it’s my God-given right to populate the planet (we’re atheists), or anything stupid like that, but because we love our first two kids and know we’ll love a third just as much. And I think we can justify it, too: we live below our means, with a sizable amount in savings; we live as eco-friendly as we can on our budget (local produce, minimal consumption, etc.); and DH and I both come from families of three children, but none of our siblings (or their partners, of those who are married or in relationships) want children. So of six kids (8, if you count the partners), we’re putting out three children, which is less than half of the replacement rate for our generation. Our sibs are happy with that, too; we’ve taken the pressure off of them to have kids, since the grandparents are now well-stocked with grandchildren, and they enjoy them as aunts and uncles.
It *is* possible to have a “larger” family without being stupid about it.
Thank you, Amanda, for addressing this thorny issue. I agree, encouraging people to have fewer children is a good thing. Whether or not global population growth is leading us toward some massive environmental catastrophe, I think that reducing it will definitiely have positive consequences for resource use, pollution, etc.
I guess where I disagree is in being able to so neatly demarcate “truly making the decisions” from bending to “social pressures.” Philosophically, I think any decision a person can make is going to be influenced by some social (outside) pressure or another; there’s realy no decision-making process that can exist outside of that. That said, some social influences (education, career options, the expectation that they will be able to work outside the home) are going to be better for women than others (the 2.3 child per family ideal). Which is why I can be comfortable with the idea of incentives to act altruistically, esp. if it leads to better outcomes for both the entire planet and the individual (yes, I’m assuming smaller families are better for individual women, who give birth and are most often the ones who take care of the children).
I think it’s a happy concidence that doing what’s right for women in developing countries will lead to those women making ecologically friendlier childbearing choices. But if this weren’t the case…I would have a lot of trouble reconciling feminist goals with environmental ones.
“Three is the new two”?
Son, how do you like being a fashion statement?
I pointed this out the last time there was a thread about family size: we consume less as a family than our single neighbor.
He has a bigger house without solar panels.
He has two cars and drives more miles than we do.
He flies
moreas much as I do.He buys expensive toys.
It isn’t just the number of consumers, it is the total overall level of consumption. That IVF sprog Petey noted may very well “require” more than 3 or even 5 of those immigrant children, who wear hand-me-downs and reuse toys and walk to school and don’t take big vacations.
But … golly! If Real Americans™ stop having children, won’t they take over?
You know … them? Those folks that like the foods with flavor, and have accents, and who make Pat Buchanan get all vocal and uptight?
maybe this is really part of your point and i’m just slow on the uptake, but… since when is procreation such a fundamental and necessary part of human dignity, anyway?
I amused that the Duggan’s get trotted out so much, because they are only the tip of the evangelical homeschooling Christian iceberg.
The McKims had 13 by 2002 (they probably have one or two more by now). The author of the article cited had 10 by 2002.
Michael Farris (Patrick Henry College, HSLDA) has 10. At one conference I attended, pre cell phones, told the group assembled that they couldn’t fit all their kids in one van so they has developed a signal using the vans’ head and tail lights to let each driver know that everyone was accounted for. Apparently along with birth control they didn’t believe in CB radios either.
He also bragged that on every Earth Day he made it a point to buy a large box of disposable diapers. (the room laughed and cheered)
I found a comment I made on Padagon in 2006 (response to John Have more White Babies Gibson) that stated that we in the US are in negative population growth
I don’t think cooercive birth control is necessary. Nor do I think a limit of one child is good. The emotional bonds and psychological benefit of having a sibling has been completely ignored. One might say that this omission was necessary to focus on the idea posed. But I think not even giving a nod to this causes one to dismiss this article.
I can think the aforementioned Christian homeschoolers might suggest that a one child family promotes waste of it’s own by the oft spoiling of an only child.
Population goes down when wealth goes up (and I am not suggesting the GOP way of predatory wealth creation). Lowering population in any practical and long term meassure as to effect pollution and global warming, is fully dependant on economic development and equity of our poorest in mirco and the entire world in macro.
But that does not even touch, and will not touch, the tremendous waste in this country. While a smaller community will not have the same total amount of waste, the per capita waste will stay the same. This requires an entire overall approach from reducing serving sizes the resturants serve (there by reducing what is thrown away uneaten) to creating effective and efficient public transportation (because I I refuse to live in a city, any city).
I think we tend to look at this will too narrow a focus and not realize that it’s the whole kit and kaboodle. For instance we are emptying the aquiffer under Colorado (one of the main water sources for many states) and we are taking more and more from the Colorado River one of the main water sources for many of those same states) - while driving through California two weeks ago and noticing how dry SoCal is, I wondered why we have not built any desalination powered by solar, in SoCal to support the population and agriculture.
At one point the only solice I could find while watching a large portion of asphalt get watered, while a hotel was trying to water their lawn, was that they were doing it at night.
The problem with public policy incentivizing child-free or one-child families is that incentives often bleed into coercion for the people with the least power. Take the group CRACK, for example — they target drug-addicted women and offer them a few hundred bucks to be permanently sterilized. They bill themselves as an organization dedicated to preventing more “crack babies.” For you or I, $200 in exchange for our fertility may only be an incentive; for a woman who is desperate and addicted and is being offered $200 worth of drug money, things look a little bit different.
Put it this way:
If one of these women, wanting to be free of pregnancy risk and knowing she did not want kids, walked into an ob/gyn clinic or even planned parenthood requesting a sterilization, what would the response be? How much would she have to pay? Would she be told that she should think it over, or to worry about future husband’s desires, or that she was too young or childless?
It is one thing to offer an incentive, but that incentive may just be an open and hassle-free door. That open and hassle-free door should be open to ALL women who request surgical sterilization. I would be surprised if there aren’t many, many women out there with third children they hadn’t planned, all because they couldn’t afford or couldn’t obtain tubal ligation procedures because of these barriers that are routinely thrown in front of women.
Normally, Amanda, I agree with most of what you say.
This one, however, is where I’m going to have to disagree. Or at least have some issues with.
Particularly, this statement:
Like one commenter has mentioned so far, you NEED to take race into account. For you, a white woman, of course the message is pro-fertility. For the black woman on welfare? Pretty much the opposite. Population control issues always end up disproportionately affecting poor women and women of color. It’s a product of our white supremacist society.
I went into more depth at feministe, but I’ll repost this part of my comment here:
While you might have good intentions and not mean for your environmentalist/population control policies to be directed at women of color and poor women…that’s what’s gonna happen. That’s what’s always happened. Your good intentions (that everyone should reduce their baby output) aren’t going to subvert this racist system we’ve got (which will turn into: poor women/w.o.c. should reduce their baby output).
Honestly, I feel it’s wrong to put pressure on people about fertility in either direction. I’m 23, rather intelligent, well-educated, etc, and I want children. Among my peer group I’m considered a freak, and I’ve had people I respect look down on me for not entering academia and instead looking to become a mother. I have not ever felt any pressure to breed (probably cuz of my age) but have felt LOTS of pressure to not breed at all, or at least hold it off for 10 years after having a career I don’t want. I frankly don’t think this is any better.
As Americans, that paranthetical aside is a major problem. There is a history of forced sterilization from the eugenics movement of the early 1900s to at least as late of the 70s, poor, and especially black women, are targets of this. The continued demonization of the Welfare Queen and the continued glorification of the WASP Mother should be a pretty good indicator that we’d be willing to embrace those policies again in a hearbeat.Better (and safer) by far to embrace the matter of reproductive rights purely on the basis of justice and individual rights. Look at the way the rightwing co-opts liberal speech as a justification of their own monstrous ideology; the “concern” for Iraqi freedom; the way white supremacist cry racism at every turn; the way “men’s rights” movements feign victimization.
Our history is not encouraging.
I have four children. Okay so all were accidents, the closest one to being planned was the last one.
We (even when I was temporarly stupid) were far more energy and waste conscious than our smaller family neighbors.
We shopped at second hand stores for clothes, furniture, dishes, etc. And we still do.
We had one car, for which I would only run errands in a circle or a figure 8. My husband would take the commuter rail into Boston. (up until they move to Worcester, MA a year after we bought our house - after 6 years of moving 9 times, I was not moving again) Now he drives but he is not a “driver” and would really enjoy having public transportation along I-495.
Clothes that are not worn through and that there is no child to pass them down to are taken to a second hand clothing bin. It totally shocked me when we moved here at how many people just put good clothes, furniture, toys, bikes etc. out for the trashman to take. If it’s still good and we can’t use it anymore, and no one we no can, it goes to a second hand store.
And instead of taking a plane to visit my family in Colorado we’d take the train.
So is my family of what used to be 6 making more pollution and waste than a family of 3 or a single person?
(I also have a comment in moderation)
Well, if we don’t deal with our environmental issues, it could all become a moot point. We’re already seeing rising infertility rates, and they’ll probably get worse. Today’s children were born into a sea of toxins and are being fed a diet stuffed with artificial hormones that are affecting their sexual development and reproductive future. A couple more generations without some serious changes, and infertility could become epidemic.
Maybe we’ll get smart before then. Or not.
That said, coercion is always bad. Coercion always creates backlash, which means the law of unintended consequences has a field day. Education and encouragement to reduce family size is fine and could go a long way, but coercion is an all-round bad idea.
Ms Kate, yes, it’s overall consumption, not number of consumers that counts, but your kids aren’t going to live with you forever. They’re going to grow up and have their own houses and cars and possibly kids who will also grow up to do the same, which will increase overall consumption. Right now your family might have a smaller footprint than your single neighbor, but in the long term, it’ll probably end up being bigger.
Jan Andrea mentioned “the replacement rate for our generation.” I’ve never understood that being raised as something pertinent in the U.S. As long as we have immigration of any kind, and until such time as the U.S. birth rate plummets a la Japan and there are too few workers to support retirees’ government benefits, it’s a moot point. There’s no obligation for an individual to add children to the population.
The problem with your example, Ms Kate (and I’m not trying to attack your lifestyle, just point out a hole in the logic of your comment) is that, assuming your profligate neighbor continues not to have children, his excessive consumption stops when he dies. On the other hand, assuming your kids go on to have children themselves, the use of resources caused by their existence goes on and on and on, more likely than not increasing with each generation, given current trends. Your family may be wasting fewer resources than his now, but that won’t be true in 100 years.
Which is why we need a lot more people choosing to stop at 0 or 1 so that the people who really can’t be happy without more can have more without endangering the whole species.
To make it clear: I doubt that people are going to wise up and save the planet, so this is sort of an idealization post. And ideally these messages of “limit your births already” would be aimed at white women. I see no downside to telling white people to cut out with the thoughtless reproduction. In my ideal world, the programs would aim straight at the very middle class white people who reinforce the notion to each other that having children in mandatory and being childless is bad. Which is why I mentioned tax credits for the childless, not welfare cuts, as a population control mechanism.
Wow Amanda! Thanks for pushing my buttons this morning. I’m 40YO woman who NEVER EVER wanted children. I’m married to a wonderful man for the last 18 years who has been supportive of that decision too. The other considerations are important too, but I realized some time ago that communicating the enviro impact of not having children was yet another way for me to justify my own truth of not needing to be a mother to have value. I’m sick of justifying my existence to people.
Boy, have I been on the receiving end of not understanding. “Well, you guys are no different than roommates” is my current favorite, as well as “well, they obviously value having money over children”. Ignorant fucking idiots.
Tangentially, I’m also frustrated by the pervasive cultural attitude that values working with people in either health care, teaching or child care over other types of careers. I’m an IT consultant - love it, and love how I can help companies out with my skills. Why is that valued less than someone teaching in a formal classroom setting?
As Americans, that parenthetical aside presents a major problem.From the eugenic movement of the early 1900s to at least as late as the 70s, poor-and most especially black women- have been subjected to policies of forced sterilization. The continued demonization of the Welfare Queen (read: Black Mother) and the worship of the WASP Mother suggests we’d embrace a return to such racist policies.
Better and safer by far to embrace and fight for reproductive rights purely on the grounds of justice and individual rights. Look at how the rightwing co-opts liberal language to justify their own monstrous ideologies; the “concern” for Iraqis freedom; white supremacist crying racism at the drop of a hat; “men’s rights” groups screaming victimization because they’ve lost entitilement; the republican platform which fights so viciously against the availability of birth control have nothing to say about the IUD being pushed on women on welfare.
Our history is not encouraging in this matter.
D’oh.
I think I double-posted, thinking I lost my first post.
Before this thread becomes a discussion about how awesome some eco-friendly bigger families are, I want to point something out: if you’re here writing to talk about how you reused and recycled and reduced your footprint, we’re not talking about you.
I assume that we’re talking about the millions of Americans who buy SnackPacks and throw the wrappers out the window and would laugh at the concept of washable cloth diapers. Because as lovely and as special as each of their chilren are, there are a lot of them. All adding up to a pretty big goddam footprint on the earth.
I would suggest that Amanda’s not making any point other than that the focus in our culture is more more more and bigger bigger bigger, even as it pertains to childbirth and family planning; and that a subtle shift in attitude could help. As she suggests, incentive rather than coercion is a way to start the shift- encouraging people to limit family size for environmental, economic and social reasons sounds good to me. Offering benefits sound great- I’m sure my family could have used a bonus for only having one kid. They already limited their offspring to one because they were poor, and they did the math.
Obviously, there’s a lot of sensitive issues here, especially with bodily autonomy and race. But that’s not to say that smaller families can’t benefit women at every level of society; and that we can’t start a dialogue about those benefits.
I’d add that I find it endlessly ironic that I’m a hardass environmentalist because I want the planet to be liveable…..for other people’s children. Because I’m not having my own. And yes, a large part of the reason is to reduce my carbon footprint and set an example of someone who lives childlessly and loves it. But it’s probably too little too late for other people’s children. I’m glad there are people with children who reduce their impact. It would be even more reduced if they didn’t have children. It’s sort of like how recycling doesn’t give you a pass to drive a car that gets 3 mpg everywhere you go. And hey, I’m not perfect. Because I’m childless doesn’t give me a pass to increase my pollution levels to twice what they are on the theory that I’m still polluting less. Again, it’s probably moot. We went from a billion to 7 billion in 100 years, a population explosion level that might be too great to back off from.
And, for God’s sake, let’s start with the people who drive Hummers. And, not put the pressure entirely on women, but on society. There. Okay, I thought of footnotes.
I did want to make one comment concerning population growth and economic opportunity. People point out (correctly) that as people’s (and more specifically, women’s) options and opportunities increase, the number of children they generally have statistically tends to decrease. Thus, the birth rates for first world countries tends to be lower than in third world countries, and within these countries, birth rates tend to be lower in the middle and upper classes than in the lower classes. All of this is perfectly true.
But people the often make the mistake of thinking that the solution to overpopulation is to make sure everyone has wonderful economic opportunities (basically, eliminate poverty). Nice idea, I suppose, but not actually possible, almost by definition. The rich can’t be rich without the poor.
Here’s an admittedly clumsy analogy, but I think it works. Let’s say we’re trying to stop the problem of flooding after rain storms in a particular town. Someone points out that flooding problems happen almost exclusive on the first floor of all the buildings in town, some second floors, and virtually none at all on the third floor and above. Wonderful! All we need to do, then, is eliminate all first and second floors in all buildings, and only allow third floors and above. No more flooding.
The economic prosperity argument as a solution for population growth is similar to that strategy for eliminating flooding.
The fact is, there will always be much larger lower economic class worldwide than there will ever be a middle or upper class. And that lower class will always be having more children.
As for my case, I don’t think so. My daughter has already taken a page from my sister’s notebook and decided not to have children. Which given her temperament I whole heartedly agree. My sister celebrated her 42 b-day yesterday, childless – I used to tell her to tell the people bugging her about it to tell them she had LOMI. Which is a made up disease that stands for Lack Of Maternal Instinct… I heard this on the radio from a LOMI celebrator (as opposed to “suffer”) thought it was brilliant and told her.
My eldest son regularly rails against SUVs and is, by his own admission, a socialist.
My middle son is so politically and socially aware that it is somewhat scary.
My youngest son is regularly appalled by waste and I think he will be a naturalist, zoologist or entomologist when he grows up.
Some how I don’t think they will have larger footprint then we have.
Or to rephrase what I said, the planet might correct for massive overpopulation the hard way since we didn’t do it the easy way—massive die-outs instead of birth control. It’s entirely possible. Once we run out of fossil fuels, for instance, bye-bye synthetic fertilizer and probably bye-bye to 1/5th of us due to starvation alone.
“well, they obviously value having money over children”.
I’d say, “Yeah, and so what?” Money will never be ungrateful or rebellious. If people are going to be that rude to you, might as well have some fun with them.
That’s not quite the way it is here on the Northside of Chicago. Even when my son went to Catholic preschool in the Gold Coast, with nothing but SAHMs, 3 was considered a bit excessive. Like if you were going to have three, you were probably going to be a stereotypical Catholic family with 8-10 kids.
People always ask when I’m out with the baby if she’s the only one, when they find out she’s not, they never tell me to have more. When the baby and the 3 y/o are with me, people comment on how great it is I have those two girls. When they find out there’s a big brother out there as well it’s always “…wow, three.”
Parents of other threes tend to act a bit like we’re in a club, b/c we’re just outside the norm. “Three is the new two” doesn’t seem to be the trend here at all. It’s more like “Accident?” “Yep, surprise baby.”
If you have a 4th, well, then you might as well be the Quiverfull, b/c you obviously have no sense about family size or you’re a religious fanantic.
I was talking to my son’s eye doctor the other day. She has twin boys, and people always ask her if she’s going to try again for a girl.
“No! Because then there would be three!” And as I confirmed to her, 3 is a LOT more than two. “It’d probably be another boy, too!”
I know this is all anecdotal, but it kind of shows the peer pressures white educated American women face. It’s not just “have kids”, it’s “have the right number of kids, properly gendered and separated”. If the 2 girls had come first, then the boy, people would be more understanding, strangely enough, because you have to have a boy!
I wish we could just reinforce women’s decisions–have as many or as few (or none) as you want to take care of. That the child question wasn’t even asked (except for potential grandparents, who do have a personal interest).
Ms Kate:
It is one thing to offer an incentive, but that incentive may just be an open and hassle-free door. That open and hassle-free door should be open to ALL women who request surgical sterilization. I would be surprised if there aren’t many, many women out there with third children they hadn’t planned, all because they couldn’t afford or couldn’t obtain tubal ligation procedures because of these barriers that are routinely thrown in front of women.
I love this thought. It’d be a massive overhaul of the way this country views reproductive choice, and it’d be worth it. For every woman to control her reproductive destiny would, I think, have a huge impact on how many children families were having. And also, on how family size was viewed- as an opportunity instead of a burden or a social mandate.
Amanda, do I have another comment in moderation. My browser did something strange and I don’t want inundate you will other tries.
Thanks
I have to agree with Jill and the others who’ve brought race into the equation. It’s all well and good to say that you want this aimed at the white middle class but the chances of a program like this being aimed at them is slim to none. We live in a country that has a history of forced sterilization of those they find “undesirable” brown folks, black folks, differently-abled folks. And while I know that that is not at all what you are advocating the idea that those prejudices are still very alive and well would be someone ignored is very (as you said) idealistic.
As a person of color the history of this scares me and would stop me from supporting anything of the kind no matter how much I might agree with the ideas behind it because I know what it could very easily become.
Oh gawd I get that a lot .. it seems to go better if I say “2 from husband number 1. 2 from husband number 2.” Then they look at me as if I’m slighlty more reasoned.
I turned 45 last week, granted I look younger (been told many times) but all of a sudden I’ve been fielding the question from others, not my husband “do you want more children?”
For gawds sakes No! I’m done.
Which is why we need a lot more people choosing to stop at 0 or 1 so that the people who really can’t be happy without more can have more without endangering the whole species.
I did choose to stop at 1, perhaps adopt a second, perhaps not.
There were so many barriers thrown in front of my decision and my desire to surgically implement that decision, that the only barrier that really mattered - a pore free condom - got a statistical shot at the game.
Judge me all you want, reproductive control purists, but always remember: theory is nice, reality is a bitch and YOU might be next! That said, reproductive autonomy for all women, without hassle is a far better prospect for population control than tsk tsk shame shame shame.
Yes but the rich can still be rich even if the poor have enough financially to insure a quality of life in their old age in ways other than by making sure they have enough children to shoulder the burden. Wealth increases when living wages allow the poor to put enough away for their future so they don’t have to rely on the historic large family.
The rich can still be rich even if the poor have universal access to health care and reproductive health information and education. The absence of having to pay for medication, doctor and hospital bills, increases wealth.
Economic wealth and wealth increases can be measured in different ways.
They have found in India that even in poor areas when prospective brides and grooms are educated about birth control and the rise in available income they will see if they limit their family size, especially when pointing out the benefits Amanda describes (college, better house, etc.). Most choose to limit their family size to 2 children.
I get really uneasy with these discussions because they always turn into a bunch of people who have kids justifying why they have these kids, particularly in the realm of “We do everything we can to be environmentally conscious about it” ie, kids are raised to be vegan, they bike everywhere, they only wear second-hand-made-in-America clothes spun from hemp, and they plant at least 1 (one) tree every day.
But having children, parent have to know that children are individual creatures and not necessarily going to adopt the values and philosophies of their parents once they have a little bit of autonomy — so again, having four children, no matter how eco-friendly and progressive they are raised, are just as likely, at 18, buy that SUV, start eating that McDonalds beef, and start shopping at the GAP.
I’m trying to live a life that’s at least a little conscietious of the world around me, I could be a lot better, but at least when I kick off I’ve done all the harm I can do.
Two things would help lower the population without pressuring people who might want 2 or 3 kids to limit themselves to one. 1. Having more than 3 be socially unacceptable. 2. Having no children at all be socially accepted. If adult women were even distributed as 25% 0 children, 25% 1 child, 25% 2 children and 25% 3 children, the overall reproduction rate would be 1.5 children per woman which would lead to a decent decline over a few generations.
I’m not sure what part of the planet you guys live on, but where I live there are large numbers of women who have children and large numbers who don’t. The vast majority of my friends don’t have children and are at an age that they aren’t likely to. For all the talk about choice, why not leave this one alone? Very few families have more than 3 or 4 kids and there are far more childless (or single child) households than in previous generations. You’ll get your lowered population. Stop trying to destigmatize your own choices by stigmatizing someone else’s.
Naamen, the problem is the chance of people doing this right is slim to none for a lot of reasons, not just racism. People aren’t really willing to rethink their lifestyles and society to save the planet, so really my commonsensical suggestions will be rejected for a lot of reasons.
Sharon, don’t you have some dishes to wash or some men to obey?
Tangentially, I’m also frustrated by the pervasive cultural attitude that values working with people in either health care, teaching or child care over other types of careers. I’m an IT consultant - love it, and love how I can help companies out with my skills. Why is that valued less than someone teaching in a formal classroom setting?
A tangential response: your work is more valued than that of a teacher, at least from a purely economic cost/benefit point of view. My tech-writer brother-in-law makes what I, a humanities professor, and my social-worker husband make combined. He holds one college degree. Between us, we hold five.
That said, I do not think your work is more or less intrinsically valuable than mine — not at all. (I’d be lost without our campus tech people, for starters!) I do think a lot of my human services colleagues wrap themselves in an air of noble sacrifice to help them deal with the fact that they are economically undervalued, and it’s frustrating, because the economic dislocation clearly makes for bad feelings all around.
having four children, no matter how eco-friendly and progressive they are raised, are just as likely, at 18, buy that SUV, start eating that McDonalds beef, and start shopping at the GAP.
Then the problem is clearly NOT how many children you have, it is the consumption level they are likely to assume. Reducing the participants in that consumption level is one way to reduce consumption, but that doesn’t solve the problem. The overall problem isn’t the number of participants but the total amount consumed and the amount of wastful consumption.
Some might argue that reducing the number of consumers doesn’t change squat - either more people will step to the trough (through immigration) or the remaining individuals will just make up the difference until some malthusian threshhold is reached. Either way, the problem of excessive consumption is not solved by shaming people to have only one kid.
As for my case, I don’t think so. My daughter (an adult) has already taken a page from my sister’s notebook and decided not to have children.
My sister celebrated her 42 b-day yesterday, childless – I used to tell her to tell the people bugging her about it to tell them she had LOMI. They, thinking she had a disease, backed off. Which is a made up disease that stands for Lack Of Maternal Instinct… I heard this on the radio from a LOMI celebrator (as opposed to “suffer”) thought it was brilliant and told her.
My eldest son (an adult) regularly rails against SUVs and is, by his own admission, a socialist. He is constantly trying to make his Pssat more and more fuel efficient
My middle son is so politically and socially aware that it is somewhat scary. He takes a lunch box to school in 10th grade, even though it’s not “cool,” because it’s environmentally responsible. If he fought it, we’d find another way. But even when he is punching out game pieces, the paperboard frames go in the recycle box.
My youngest son is regularly appalled by waste (and points it out, sometimes at embarassing times) and I think he will be a naturalist, zoologist or entomologist when he grows up.
He is appalled that I throw out his underwear that he’d grown out of.
Some how I don’t think they will have larger footprint then we have. But that’s not just due to us, but who our friends are, that my husband and I were both raised not to waste and to be environmentally responsible, so are our kids’ extended families (blood and step) are this way too — even if they are conservative republicans.
This is our village. It is the environment they were raised in and reinforced by family and family friends. Sometimes I am shocked because they are more adamant about certain things than I am.
Off-topic:
The necklace in that photo totally reminds me of the necklace worn by the redhead in… Sandman: Endless Nights, the Desire story.
okay now I know I have a comment in moderation
Wow this is amusing.
The “pro-choice”/”reproductive rights” crowd saying that you have the right to choose unless you have more then one child.
Makes you “anti-choice” don’t it?
I guess you will have to rewrite the liberal talking point about staying out of people’s bedrooms to include “unless you are conceiving another child”.
Where did I hear this before?
In the 1970s, the population bomb.
According to it we should have ran out of oil by now.
Badpoetry:
Following up on clytemnestra’s point. Happily, I think you’ve got the determinants of population growth a bit wrong.
First, a big determinant is urbanization. Children mainly provide an economic benefit in an agricultural setting, not so much in a city. The percentage of the world’s population living in urban areas has steadily risen and if anything future population growth will strength rather than weaken that trend.
Second, options and opportunities don’t have to be a zero-sum game. Contraception can be mass produced. The rich buying more or better contraception doesn’t reduce access for the poor.
So I think we’re more talking about absolute opportunities and not relative opportunity by and large.
If immigration were halted completely, you’d have your wish. I’m frankly surprised that environmentalists haven’t come out for immigration restrictions yet, it’s ludicrous to take people from low carbon emitting countries and stick them in high carbon emitting countries. Plus, given the current political situation, it has a reasonable chance of passing. Everything else is just pie in the sky.
Then the problem is clearly NOT how many children you have, it is the consumption level they are likely to assume.
Even if they are each at 25% of average, that’s still more than would be if they weren’t here. It’s okay to admit you’re not the perfect environmentalist. No one is. Which is why the attempts to save the planet are probably doomed to fail in the long run. We shot up to 6 billion people before we even paused to consider if that might be a problem.
The “pro-choice”/”reproductive rights” crowd saying that you have the right to choose unless you have more then one child.
Please quote me directly suggesting that the right to have more than one should be taken away. Strawman.
I’m sympathetic to the cause, but I don’t think this approach is a sound one.
And you’ve covered the reasons why I don’t think so in many places, including above … women who see the value in sticking to one child often get treated like they’re just short of being abusive
As you’ve written yourself when talking about reproductive rights, there is no reproductive choice women make that they won’t be criticized for by sizable, and often powerful, groups of other people. No children, one child, two children, 17 children…. Pill, condom, IUD, withdrawal, tubiligation, EC, none at all….
It *doesn’t* matter how many one woman choses or don’t chose, and for many commentators for women to even be making the choices at all is problematic.
In our world/society/planet all feel free to criticize all women for their reproductive choices. Whatever their choices are.
As it happens, I don’t think saving the environment is the one good exception to the principle of reproductive rights for all women. But then, I don’t think there is *any* exception ‘good’ enough to violate that principle.
True, but if you have 2 people polluting at 100% each, that’s 200%
If two plus four kids are polluting at 25% that’s 150% … so you are still down 50% from the two 100% polluters.
:-) …
I’ll go sit in the corner now
that should have had an ending ” ”
after the emoticon
damn
Not strawman. Lie.
Amanda, are you not aware that when a nation moves from an agrarian or nomadic economy to an industrial one, women have fewer children of their own accord? Ditto when education improves?
Are you not aware of the statistics that indicate that, while First World birth rates are already well below replacement rate, the steepest decline in rates of population growth are already in second-world countries such as Latin America? That world population appears to be self-regulating?
Why are you in favor of actively pressuring white women to have fewer children? Do you have such unquestioned faith in the eternal and unassailable hegemony of White Christians, and such hatred for same, that you are calling for the suicide of the very culture which produced you? Do you honestly believe that human beings can achieve control over large, chaotic and mysterious forces by totalitarian tactics which contradict our natural instincts to create families if we so choose?
Why do you think that an intelligent, educated woman is so incapable of making a responsible decision about her own life that ’society’ needs to engage in active propaganda tactics to force her in a direction which suits your necessarily skewed and imperfect view of what that direction should be?
Amanda, you are still neglecting the impact of immigration, and the tendency for people and consumption levels to fill the void. It isn’t the birthrate of anybody that has pushed US population to nearly 300 million. Birthrates are still much lower than than historic levels. - it is The inmigration and conversion of millions of low consumption persons into high consumption persons has pushed up our national consumption tally.
Then again, admonishing breeders not to breed and shaming women for their reproductive choices is far more acceptable than questioning the right of people to come share the wealth, no matter how damaging that may be to the planet. I’m totally amazed that you seem to be blind to the patriarchal underpinnings of your particular “solutions” here, and the historical consequences of espousing individual level solutions to pansocietal problems.
All of this talk about detracts from far more acceptable and far less puritanical or xenophobic solutions to the actual problems at hand: unecessary levels of waste and the role that poor design of our built environments and functional environments play in that waste. No individual choice ever built a mass transit system, created appropriate zoning of homes and schools and businesses, implemented design requirements for packaging, created building codes that reflect energy efficiency, etc. These are collective, societal decisions undertaken to address collective, societal problems.
Aaaaand, the trolls get here.
Joyous.
Well, she did say that coercion should be avoided, but only because it is “unlikely to work very well,” and that if other options fail an “assault on human dignity” could be staged.
I can see how you can spin that into “If population is an issue, then coercion is a viable solution,” which would directly contradict the idea of “choice” as most people understand it.
It’s a straw man (perhaps a willful “misunderstanding”) if that’s not what Amanda really means. I do sometimes suspect that her understanding of “choice” is different from that mine. That’s why I asked her if coercion were not opposed to “body autonomy.”
That is to say, I’m pretty sure Amanda doesn’t advocate eugenics or fascist controls on reproduction. But considered alone you can get that out of this post.
apt:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070911/ap_on_fe_st/russia_making_babies_day;_ylt=Ao2ml9ncRm7ypfF5A8vMPVXtiBIF
Jill’s point carries water with me. While I recognize many benefits (short- and long-term) to reduced family size or childfree living, I couldn’t see government pushing pro-contraceptive measures without recognizing that circumstances might change such that they’d push anti-contraceptive measures; I’m not interested in risking the latter for the benefits of the former. Once you open the door to accepting the State has an interest in interfering with private reproductive choices, the policies formed could go either way, and would, like many people have already pointed out, undoubtedly have a racist or classist twinge.
The Duggans get trotted out all the time. Who are we to pass judgment on their private reproductive choices? All I ask is that parents take care of their children - and to never bring the younger ones to clearly adult spaces like fine restaurants, or bars, which I saw the other day. Totally not okay. But this family and all the fuck-for-Jesus families are not the norm. Most people have pressure to reproduce coming from mothers who want grandchildren, or their own desire to have a third or fourth child, because they have all girls and want to try for a boy, or vv. And some people just like having a big family.
Now that we live in a post-industrial society, we don’t need tons of kids to work the farm. We have access to birth control, women can transfer property and have more legal rights, higher education and inclusion in the work force have been obtained…. All these good things have led to *social* changes in attitudes toward reproduction, which resulted in lower childbirth rates. I have no reason to think that further social changes won’t occur which push the reproduction rate down even more. The last big hump I think we need to get over is the idea that men need sons to carry the name. Sons are 50:50|mom:dad just like daughters are. No need to perpetuate the worry that your genetic line will fail if you have daughters instead of sons.
The problem, as I see it, its that there is no program — no matter how well-intentioned — that the government can not screw up or willfully pervert. Particularly here in the US, where the regime changes every four to eight years.
Eventually, programs to encourage fewer children will be reversed/decried/”corrected,” and then we’re all wandering around in red burqua, muttering “Atwood was right!” to ourselves.
Face it, our Dear Leaders can’t do anything in moderation; the pendulum will swing entirely too far in one direction or another.
Targeting the raw number of people rather than the patterns of excretion (not consumption) seems to me to rather miss the point, and to do so in a way that’s vaguely anti-humanist. Population causes problems because of resource use and waste. Resource use can be pretty benign if it doesn’t result in turning the resource into something that isn’t recycled. The real problem IMHO is dumping pollutants into the biosphere, from agricultural chemicals to old tires to CO2.
Life and the biosphere are inherently cyclic - the problem comes when we refuse to close the cycle, or we overload or otherwise break the relevant cycles. That’s where effort will yield results with a minimum of coercion. Relatively simple measures like carbon offsets, pollution credits based on sound science, full cycle pricing of goods (IOW including the cost of recycling in the sale price), and other solutions based on incentives rather than coercion seem to me a vastly superior solution.
“I couldn’t see government pushing pro-contraceptive measures without recognizing that circumstances might change such that they’d push anti-contraceptive measures;”
the bare minimum the government could do is take a neutral stance on contreception/conception. not enabling pharmacists to refuse to dispense contraception would go a tremendous way. calling it illegal sex discrimination for insurance companies to cover viagra and not birth control would do even more. the government doesn’t have to personally place EC in the bathroom cabinet of every woman for them to create a society where women aren’t expected at every turn to be pregnant.
One thing is for sure… our population will be controlled. It’s just a matter of how.
The planet Earth has a finite carrying capacity for the human organism. Thus, the population doubling every 60 years or so cannot continue.
I think Amanda’s point is very well taken about desperate times and desperate measures; if we don’t find a way to reduce our population- voluntarily or through coercion- the planet itself will coerce it down, very effectively. And we won’t like that very much.
And as I typically mention on this blog whenever the question of population control comes up, the single most important determining factor for population size for any organism is food supply. From bacteria to mice to humans, the population of any species can be fairly accurately determined from how much food and space is available to it.
I recommend Daniel Quinn’s work on this stuff. Check out the following:
https://www.newtribalventures.com/ntv/market/videonotes.cfm
Paul L.
Where did someone say that it should be illegal to have more than X number of kids? Where did someone say we should use the government to penalize people who have more children? Where did someone say that it was okay to give false information about having children (like anti-choicers do about birth control?)
Just because we’re pro-reproductive freedoms, and pro-choice, does not mean a) all choices are equal and b) it’s wrong to talk about that. Nice logical fallacies, though.
Oh, and side note: what the hell are liberal talking points? I didn’t get my copy. And didn’t we have a discussion somewhere in the blogsphere about the in/effectiveness of slogans awhile ago?
Because I’m not having my own. And yes, a large part of the reason is to reduce my carbon footprint and set an example of someone who lives childlessly and loves it.
But, who’s going to take care of you whenm you get old?
Weren’t you somones child?
With that much pressure on women to shut up and have babies without asking too many questions, it’s likely that even creating a system that validates women who have one or none could empower women to really think about their choices
Yes, that “system” would be one where women are seen as people, rather than as subhumans whose importance is solely tied to their reproductive and sexual functions.
All the people who are going on and on about multi-child families being ‘lionized’ are painting half the picture. Maternity is yet another area where women can’t win, no matter what. Have no children? You’re selfish and unwomanly. Have one? Your poor kid won’t have siblings. Have two? Fine, if the oldest is a boy and the youngest a girl, and maybe even then you should be having more. More than two? Hey, don’t you know what birth control is for, you MOO? (Unless you have two girls and a boy in that order; then you ‘got your boy’ and done your duty.) And of course, blame is only on Mommy. Nobody gives a fuck how many children a man has or with how many women.
Adjust all of the above by your social class, race and presence or absence of a husband–you can bet your ass that a single, poor black woman with one child is not being told that she needs to go out and have more.
“Desperate times” and environmentalism are platitudes unless we get at the real problem, which is sexism. Sorry.
EP,
what’s your point?
Weren’t you somones child?
Of course not. She’s a physical manifestation of the feminist hivemind. She gets pregnant on purpose and has abortions because she hates children that much.
I am in the unfortunate position of agreeing with everyone. Meaning that I can’t make up my mind. I think its fairly obvious at this point that the world population is out of control and that somehow people are able to believe that and at the exact same time believe that their favorite team needs to have more babies or else! So, something does need to be done about that, because I agree that if we don’t do something about it, the world is going to reach a breaking point and will force our hand…
On the other hand, I can see how easily any message discouraging fertility can be twisted–especially given the history of race and fertility, as well as the simple fact that it could easily turn into just more woman-blaming. (”The womenz are stealing my sperm and destroying the world!”)
I think its best to keep the government out of the picture entirely–other than ensuring that no one is forcing a specific choice on anyone–and I don’t think Amanda was encouraging the use of government coercion in her post. But I also think, or at least hope, that there is a way to develop a message towards negative population growth that is not only environmentally conscious, but also socially conscious.
EP’s just trying to start a parent/childfree flamewar. Let it troll elsewhere, please.
Just because we’re pro-reproductive freedoms, and pro-choice, does not mean a) all choices are equal and b) it’s wrong to talk about that.
It also doesn’t mean we should pretend that “Save Mother Earth” isn’t, and can’t be, yet another excuse to bash women for their reproduction - chosen or otherwise.
badpoetry, you do not have to be actually rich for making the opportunity cost of children significant. You just have to have opportunities.
In my (limited) experience, there is nothing like continued struggling — never quite making it, never quite giving up — to make women decide that whatever might be the right time to have children, “now” isn’t.
It also doesn’t mean we should pretend that “Save Mother Earth” isn’t, and can’t be, yet another excuse to bash women for their reproduction - chosen or otherwise.
Well this ought to cock your pistol then.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070912/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_russia_sex_2
Agreed. The ideas you list are neutral. It’s the interference in private reproductive choices, like tax penalties for the number of children someone has, or on the opposite side, creation of agencies whose goal is to distribute factually inaccurate data to misinform people about contraceptive failure that I would consider pro-contraceptive and anti-contraceptive pushes.
My impression is that progressives such as yourself have no problem using the government to implement your ideals. Such as people in US should have fewer children.
I am wondering if your “coercion” would have the force of the government/law behind it.
I suspect if not enough people do not respond to your incentives and social pressure that you will call for a law limiting children.
Like people keep buying SUVs and progressive trying to raise CAFE standards to ban them.
Sentences you always hear when someone talks about a pet cause.
Such as
“Lets keep abortion safe, legal and rare” from the pro-choice crowd.
or
“Guns don’t kill people. People kill People.” from the gun rights crowd.
Or this
Fighting words from Dean stir faithful here
That he doesn’t like me, so there should be more mes. It’s one of the weird pro-fertility attitudes out there.
Sharon, don’t you have some dishes to wash or some men to obey?
Don’t you have more nude photos of yourself to take?
EP’s just trying to start a parent/childfree flamewar. Let it troll elsewhere, please.
Actually I was showing the illogical position Amanda takes by advocating childless women so that childless women of the future could live in a clean environment. You cannot have a future with childless women.
you didn’t show anything illogical whatsoever. Amanda is saying she is going to remain childless. She isn’t advocating all women remain childless. In other words, you were setting up a strawman.
Good little troll. Run along now.
What bugs me about this is that no nuclear family–and very few extended clans–actually can deal with the burden of raising 17 or 18 kids. Really huge families, the kind that are in vogue amongst certain Christian-right communities, have to “outsource” the costs of rearing their children whether they want to or not; once the children are in existence they really don’t have much choice. That means that someone, other than them, must, voluntarily or otherwise, assume some large part of the responsibility of dealing with their kids. Which is turn is going to cost money–even if you voluntarily take upon yourself the costs of somebody else’s child-rearing, the burden you shoulder will always be translatable into a financial liability whether it’s immediately identifiable as such or not.
When enormous families are black or brown, everybody seems to be able to see how this operates right off the bat. Consequently black and brown women who procreate extravagantly are targets for a lot of nasty talk. There are some white women, though, who appear to have their neighbors convinced that by popping out 7 pairs of twins they’re doing the universe a favor. (God is Great!!…oh, wait, that’s the other guys. Oh well.) The same basic economics apply, though, and white families who decide to go ahead and have kids into the double digits impose on the society which surrounds them no less than black or brown families do. Kids are not cheaper by the dozen, even if some major portion of their upkeep is charged to someone other than their parents.
Once again: everyone can see why this is when the parents in question are black. Why is it that everyone can’t see how this works when the parents in question are white?
What bugs me about this is that no nuclear family–and very few extended clans–actually can deal with the burden of raising 17 or 18 kids. Really huge families, the kind that are in vogue amongst certain Christian-right communities, have to “outsource” the costs of rearing their children whether they want to or not; once the children are in existence they really don’t have much choice. That means that someone, other than them, must, voluntarily or otherwise, assume some large part of the responsibility of dealing with their kids. Which is turn is going to cost money–even if you voluntarily take upon yourself the costs of somebody else’s child-rearing, the burden you shoulder will always be translatable into a financial liability whether it’s immediately identifiable as such or not.
When enormous families are black or brown, everybody seems to be able to see how this operates right off the bat. Consequently black and brown women who procreate extravagantly are targets for a lot of nasty talk. There are some white women, though, who appear to have their neighbors convinced that by popping out 7 pairs of twins they’re doing the universe a favor. (God is Great!!…oh, wait, that’s the other guys. Oh well.) The same basic economics apply, though, and white families who decide to go ahead and have kids into the double digits impose on the society which surrounds them no less than black or brown families do. Kids are not cheaper by the dozen, even if some major portion of their upkeep is charged to someone other than their parents.
Once again: everyone can see why this is when the parents in question are black. Why is it that everyone can’t see how this works when the parents in question are white?
i’m surprised more people haven’t brought out the adoption thing. I want to be a parent, and i want more than one kid. But if I have my way (and Ms Kate, I understand that this isn’t always the case) then I will be having one kid biologically and adopting any more than that. Given my preference in sex partners, that will probably be pretty easy to do (legal restrictions notwithstanding). But I think perhaps some more social pressure to adopt might help out this campaign because, in addition to being environmentally responsible not to add much to the population yourself, it’s nice to think that a child who has already been born might get an opportunity at a loving family.
Also, to everyone who says that multiple children are better socialized: why not, while we are going for idealistic society changes, work on the way we interact as communities so that all children, even without siblings, get lots of good social role modeling? I’d like this for my kids, siblings or no.
Hey deep6, we have a faculty happy hour every Friday at a local bar and people always bring their kids. It’s loads of fun.
Now fine restaurants, that I can understand.
Well, if the Libertarians continue to push, we’re definitely going to end up with less children because no female trying to have a career is going to be able to work and have kids as well–too high a chance of getting fired for “not being serious enough.”
One of the reasons Japanese women have so few kids is because the lifestyle of a SAHM is so restricted. (Plus raising kids is very very expensive.) And Japanese companies being what they are, as soon as one of their female employees has a kid, it’s hi-ho and toss the woman out the door. So if a Japanese woman wants to have any sort of continuous career at all, she has to decide not to have kids.
And then we get the LDP geezers getting up and frothing at the mouth about how Japanese women are Bad Women and Not Doing Their Duty. And the women say “yeah, yeah, whatever, you old fart” and live their lives exactly as they please.
felagund - see, if I were there not only would I get up and leave, I’d make a point to say something to your party and the bartender on the way out. There are places that should remain childfree. I get that there are many working parents and that society does need to accommodate families in more public areas than historically proper, but establishments primarily devoted to serving alcohol are ADULT spaces. When I go to a bar after work to unwind, the absolute last thing I want to see is somebody’s kids running around. That would piss me off. Especially if they were screaming. Virtually everything these days is child-friendly and family-appropriate, I man the wall when it comes to the handful of places where I don’t want to see Little Jimmy or Spencer Jr. Christ, museum openings, fine restaurants, bars, night weddings, dance clubs, strip clubs, and the occasional NC-17-rated movie… and that’s it. To those of you out there who may have read this post, please, I beseech you: if you’re thinking of going to any of those places, keep your kids at home. Decrease babysitter joblessness. My village ain’t raisin’ your child. Yuck.
If children are behaving to the level of the space, they should stay. If adults can’t behave themselves, they should leave.
Throwing tantrums that kids are in *your* space means you should leave because you are the one who can’t behave, and not let the door hit your butt on the way out.
I’m glad you like black people …
Oh, and Deep6, don’t EVER go to Ireland or Portland, OR, where the pubs ARE considered to be family restaurants. Shit, in Portland we sat between two families with babies AND dogs while swilling our brewpub fare!
My kids love the bar. Free popcorn! Pop! Video games! French fries with dinner. Why deny them some simple pleasures. While some bars would not be appropriate, a neighborhood joint that serves food is OK in my book.
You know what bugs me in bars? Sports fans. They’re always yelling at the teevees when I’m trying to have a conversation.
re: night weddings. Last time I checked, my kids are part of the family. Therefore, they join in the family celebrations.
One hundred comments and not a single mention of men not choosing to reproduce or what men can do to reduce population growth. It’s all on women. I wish I could be surprised by that. It’s a shame that our culture so strongly connects women and reproduction that there has been nary a mention of vasectomy. For example, if CRACK is offering women $200 to get sterilized, why aren’t they making the same offer to men? Obviously because men have nothing to do with reproduction.
Other than consumption/excretion/pollution problems, a growing population also creates ecological problems due to the amount of space used by and for human activity. You could have 25 billion extremely environmentally friendly people and still cause an ecological disaster.
I’m kind of late on this and haven’t read all of the 105 posts, so i apologize if this has already been said.
There have been financial incentives offered to poor women to not have children but those are often denounced as racist despite the common sense element of helping people who can’t support additional children from having more children. I like the idea of financial incentives and would like to see this done more often.
Raoul: yeah, we’re inviting kids to our night wedding. Of course, we’re also going to try to provide a room/place for the kids to go play or nap if they get bored or tired.
If you don’t take the kids out to nice places, they don’t learn how to behave in nice places. Of course, that means that if they’re not behaving appropriately, you need to be prepared to remove them.
Addendum: On the other hand, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to exclude children from an event you are hosting. It’s your party; if folks with kids can’t or won’t find a babysitter, they don’t have to attend.
Exceptions are arbitrary inclusion of some kids but not others and whining about how parents Mary and Bob don’t love you enough to come to your party. If you invite people who have children without also inviting or offering arrangements for said children, you don’t get to demand their presence. Actually, you don’t get to demand the presence of anyone, but I find these situations particularly egregious.
I’m with Jack Squid, aren’t there men out there who will get snipped for $200 in drug money? If you’re on the Maury Povich show, you should see your doctor before sleeping with another woman.
For every woman out there that has three or more children there is at least one father who should be thinking about his carbon footprint.
On the children at parties issue- if you want socialized adults then you have to take children into social situations. Suck it up deep6, my boy is out in public and will remain so until he learns his social cues at which point he can become a hermit if he so chooses. (And yes, there are locations that are clearly labelled off-limits to children and parents who take them there are noodle-headed nincompoops who should have been better socialized as children.)
What Jake Squid said.
If poor women of color are being offered a cash incentive to get sterilized, then ALL women should be able to get a sterilization, no matter their circumstances or ethnic background.
Similarly for men. Why we don’t have free public contraception and sterilization is something that I absolutely cannot fathom except in the most Marxist of terms.
Which is to say that governments don’t want poor people and people of color to be able to control their fertility because our corporate overlords need a high population of unskilled labor to depress labor prices across the board. Our military-industrial complex also needs plenty of poor people of color to use as cannon fodder in their wars.
Since U.S. government is paid for by the corporate interest groups, it’s really no surprise that we find ourselves in a population quandry, hovering on the brink of ecological disaster. That’s what happen when government is pursued to enhance a profit motive, rather than for the delivery of goods and services that the public needs and can use.
The issue is that the only non-coercive incentives the government can offer are (ultimately) financial. Even those incentives are only non-coercive if you can afford to live without them.
And at nearly every economic level in America, the financial incentives for not having children are massive. The time, money and effort required to raise children can be channeled elsewhere. People who will have no or fewer children in response to financial incentives are already doing so. This is what’s going on in Japan, Europe, and much of the U.S.
So what does that leave? To my mind, cultural change and outright coercion. Coercion has already been talked down. Cultural change takes lots of work, lots of time, and I personally give it a major handicap on actually working.
It’d be nice if people had fewer kids. If you provide a population with education and opportunity, they eventually, probably, will. But I don’t see any concerted effort to specfically reduce fertility working wthiout resorting to draconian methods.
Or England or Paris. Same deal there–pretty much everyplace we went, pubs, bars, restaurants, etc., had kids. I don’t really see a problem with it. Of course, if the kids are a problem and not acting appropriately to the space, then it’s up to the parents to remove them, but having them there in the first place isn’t really a problem for me.
There are places that should remain childfree.
I’m sorry–you seem to have mistaken this for the “let’s all whine about those parents and their fucking sprogs” thread. It’s actually a thread about family size and ecology. Since nobody wiped all the CF newsgroups, listserves and blogs off the Internet, why don’t you go huff and stomp around there instead of being one of the trolls trying to derail this into a “kids rock/kids suck” thread?
But I don’t see any concerted effort to specfically reduce fertility working wthiout resorting to draconian methods.
In other words, you kinda like the draconian methods and would happily seize on “nothing else works” as an excuse to use them?
Because, see, in the examples YOU gave, financial and social incentives ARE working. Japan, Europe and most of the US already have a birthrate that’s below replacement; the only reason the US’s is higher is that we have high immigration, and eventually those immigrants will assimilate and have smaller families. There’s nothing to fix here.
As the father of an only child, I would like to see incentives for “family insurance” At most jobs you have three options pay for 1)yourself, 2)yourself and spouse, or 3) a family. This means if I pay the “family rate with my only child. I am subsidizing the mega families. I shouldn’t have to struggle to pay insurance for my family and pay for someone else’s kid.
Mythago:
“There’s nothing to fix here.”
If you think our current population growth is OK, there isn’t. Many people here have indicated they don’t, or at least wish it was lower.
I’m attempting to boil this argument down to a trifurcation. You can attempt to lower fertility through financial incentives, cultural incentives, or draconian enforcement. (There may be others, but I can’t think of them right now.) My point is that all three of these are boned:
1. The financial incentives are already in place, and very significant. I doubt a $500 tax credit is going to change somebody’s mind about having a kid if they’re willing to pay for 18 years of room and board plus college.
2. The cultural incentives are extremely hard to change. Plus, as some people have pointed out, in certain circles they’ve already changed.
3. Draconian enforcement is, simply, wrong. I’m against the government interfering in people’s reproductive rights, and that extends to letting people make decisions I don’t agree with.
Beyond that, you can go ask a Shaker how well active anti-fertility memes spread. If you can find one.
News flash, exlitigator: insurance through your work is based on the fact that some people subsidize others. You and your wife are being subsidized by younger, healthier couples. Your co-worker who has HIV pays the same basic rate as a co-worker without. Your boss who likes to go skydiving and extreme ironing doesn’t pay more based on his higher risk of injury.
There may be others, but I can’t think of them right now.
So, what, this is a false trilemma?
Please recall that you have a very wobbly definition of “our”. Birthrates in most of the industrialized world are below replacement rate. What, exactly, do you think we should change?
Ms. Kate - if complaining about something I dislike merits the description “tantrum” then you throw them far more often than I do. Reference: half the comments you’ve ever written.
Apparently some people let their kids hang out in bars. Actual bars. With drunks and loud music and smoking, swearing and all the behavior you want your kid to learn.
Classy.
So you’re okay with bringing young kids to fine restaurants? Late night parties? NC-17 movies? Is the kid’s behavior the only arbiter for you? So if a kid doesn’t run around it’s good fun to bring your daughter to a strip club?
I think the issue here is acknowledging there are certain places that adults like to go to where they don’t have to watch their language or be concerned about aggressive behavior or sexual behavior because there’s a kid nearby. I am one of those adults. There’s nothing bad about that. I know parents will get defensive, because they wouldn’t want to be inconvenienced by not being able to take their children everywhere they need to go, but I don’t give a shit. There are privileges that come with age, and if there’s a group of parents out there who want their children to be exposed to the rougher sides of society, behaviors and images then I think that’s whacked.
The night weddings I think should be adult-only because I have yet to see adults *actually* leave a wedding when their kids are throwing legitimate tantrums (not Ms. Kate style) and won’t stop. They travel a long way, go to all the trouble of getting dressed up, like schmoozing with old friends, want to have a couple drinks, and the absolute last thing they want to do is jump back in the car an hour into the reception. Parents do, however, leave after people have heard the kid screaming his guts out so long he starts to fall asleep, and that’s when they walk up to the bride and other guests and say it’s time take Jimmy home. You know, two hours into the abuse of my ears. Although, I will relent on this and say if a kid can behave himself, it’s cool. I’ve just never seen young kids act well past 8pm.
For example, if CRACK is offering women $200 to get sterilized, why aren’t they making the same offer to men? Obviously because men have nothing to do with reproduction.
I remember reading about this org, and they DO offer it to men. As well as all drug addicts, no matter what race or class. Also, they’ve been called Project Prevention for a while now. I understand the objections to the practice, but they shouldn’t be based on misinformation.
Oh, that’s right mythago. I forgot a pandagon thread is always on point, and that you personally dictate what people can and can’t write in defense of an opinion.
Bad day?
the families raising 1-2 children lavishly (the norm in america) are a greater problem than the extremely tiny number of people who have more than 10 kids.
it’s americans using computers that get dumped in third world countries that are the problem, not so much large families.
humans do tend to stabilise their own populations, usually by having enough kids and women survive childbirth and associated diseases so they can afford the risk of ‘only’ having 1-4 kids. the world over, most people in most countries are having fewer children. the population is pretty much on its way to stabilising.
white people are already not having replacement levels of kids– that’s why it’s such a huge deal when they do have large families.
americans should consume less, and white people in general should stop dumping food and teachers on africa, and then the standard of living would improve massively instead of being crippled under the weight of white guilt.
i guess i am baffled by this post since white people don’t like making babies, except for a tiny handful, and so asking them to keep on not having babies seems redundant.
the rest of it about how mere human existence (in the form of families with more than 2 kids, apparently) wounds precious gaia is just so much nihilism couched in psuedoconcern for ‘other people’.
So true.
I also think many of you are mistaking Amanda for saying all should be childfree, instead of advocating for a society where that is more accepted. Even though I haven’t chosen to be child free, my choice to have one child is for the same reasons Amanda has stated, ie ecology/overpopulation as well as the monetary issues at hand. I get tired of people asking me when I am going to have my next one. I have resorted to stating that it is my husband’s turn this time. That shuts them up!
“So, what, this is a false trilemma?”
It may be, but I can’t think of anything that falls outside those three categories. In trying to affect somebody’s decisions, you can hit their pocketbook, hit their values, or just hit them (broadly speaking). If you have a suggestion that breaks this mold, please fire away.
My whole point is that whatever I, or anyone else, think we should change is moot. Amanda’s already said something similar, though in less needlessly thorough detail.
Fear I may be double-posting after hitting moderation. But not enough to not try again.
Mythago:
“So, what, this is a false trilemma?”
It may be, but I can’t think of anything that falls outside those three categories. In trying to affect somebody’s decisions, you can hit their pocketbook, hit their values, or just hit them (broadly speaking). If you have a suggestion that breaks this mold, please fire away.
My whole point is that whatever I, or anyone else, think we should change is moot. Amanda’s already said something similar, though in less needlessly thorough detail.
Deep 6, you don’t seem to understand the difference between “concerned about developmentally inappropriate venues” and “I hate kids and don’t want them around”.
Replace your comments about kids with “women” or “blacks” and they become quite appalling in short order. That should clue you in that it is, in your case, about hate and not about appropriateness. Your inability to see the difference between pub culture and a cocktail lounge is telling.
There are plenty of childfree sites that cater to your particular variety of bile. I think Amanda has made it clear, in the past, that this is not one of them.
Anytime sexual or reproductive health are discussed, I think it would serve the discussion well to keep in mind that all of our opinions are very heavily colored by our own preferences and the life choices we have already made. Just scroll up through the comments here (or on any other post anywhere that deals with a similar subject) and notice how the vast majority of what is said is in defense of the commenters own life or future plans:
Who writes a blog post about how the world would be a better place if people had fewer children? A woman with no kids and no inclination to have them.
Who trolls the place calling her position fascistic? People who have kids already or who have a strong desire to have them in the future.
And people who have kids but would otherwise be inclined to agree with Amanda’s point try to justify their choices by explaining how environmentally aware they are, and so they are not part of the problem like all those other breeders.
Deep down, I think we all believe to some extent that our own choices are better and more responsible than our neighbors (that is why we chose to make them, after all), but it is hard to deny that our opinions are really much more about ourselves than about society as a whole.
I spend a lot of time on feminist websites and Amanda, you are one of my favorite bloggers, so I hope I do not get labeled as a troll, but posts like this make me a little defensive (this is certainly not the first I have encountered in feminist circles.) I know that women who are childless by choice have to do a lot of defending of their choice and sometimes they push back a little too hard and venture into disapproving-of-other-people territory.
Personally, I am 23 and a college graduate. I was raised in a liberal and a feminist home. I do want to have children, pretty soon and several of them. This is a desire that I feel down in my bones and it is something that I experience as being inseperable from my own sense of womanhood and even sexuality. It does not make me a bad feminist or a bad environmentalist or a victim of the patriarchy, just very different from a lot of the other feminists I know. Of course nobody has explicitly said I was less feminist because of my desire for a lot of kids, but I think you can understand how the tone of this discussion might be off-putting to someone like me.
That being said, I offer my hearty support to all of you out there who choose to have few or no children. We are all women and feminists and we are really all in this together.
Do you honestly believe that human beings can achieve control over large, chaotic and mysterious forces by totalitarian tactics which contradict our natural instincts to create families if we so choose?
I can’t speak for Amanda, but I absolutely know that the specific group of humans in question (white American middle-class women who feel pressured to have a second child) can be manipulated. I’m in that group and most of my peers shave their legs every day for no damn reason at all. Most wear makeup at work, again for no damn reason.
Except that social forces are real reasons, not some feminist straw-dream. So yeah, it IS possible to change women’s expectations of themselves and each other without going the Chinese route.
It’s called marketing and it works for every other not-coerced-and-completely-irrational choice. If marketing and a media bias can convince rational parents that it’s unsafe to let their kids play in the yard beause OMG the kidnappers are coming!!!!1! then it could sure as hell convince parents to be afraid of something that is actually true, which is that no one can afford three kids and two should be drawing stares.
My kid isn’t entitled to a sibling, she’s entitled to being able to take a deep breath when she’s 45. Since we knew enough to know that we had to pick between those two options, we chose a single adopted child rather than IVFing up a litter.
And when I tried to buy another copy of Bill McKibben’s excellent book, ‘Maybe One’, on the environmental rationale for limiting your family to one child?
It’s out of print. But you can have as many copies of his OMG the world is going to burn up and drown volume, ‘The End of Nature’, as you want.
So few people agree with me that the book I gave my sister on her 36th birthday, when her baby was 14 months old, is out of print 5 years later–when I want to give it to my other sister who is turning 35 and weighing whether she wants a kid at all.
My momis adjusting to the reality that two beautiful perfect granddaughters are all she gets.
Mythago - I am aware that insurance spreads risk. My point is that current insurance policies rewards big families, since any child after one is free. Since the point of this thread is how we should create incentives to lower population growth it seemed appropriate. Additionally, your examples miss the mark, my bosses sky diving is typically excluded, and HIV is often a preexisting condition. But the justness of our crappy health care system aside, this is an example of how policy rewards fertility.
Aaaaand, the trolls get here.
Hey! I’ve been busy working today!
I’m going to advocate positive population reduction. How about cars which have a one chance in six of exploding if you exceed the speed limit or drive drunk?
Ms Kate: You don’t seem to understand the difference between accepting some places are unsuitable for children because they’re adult-oriented environments, and hating children. Nothing I’ve said indicates I hate children. I just don’t want my nephews hanging out in a bar.
The law prevents children from being in certain establishments, punishes them for engaging in certain behaviors, or seeks to restrict their access to certain products. Most people would agree children should not have the same privileges as adults, nor should they be around adults when said adults are engaging in some of those age-appropriate privileges, which is why these restrictions exist for children but not adults. You seem to be ignoring this minor fact.
A bar is a developmentally appropriate place for children? Really? Hey, go say that to child services.
And you know full well gender and race are irrelevant to this discussion. I’m not saying my friend Jane shouldn’t be allowed in a bar because she has ovaries, or my black coworkers shouldn’t be let into NC-17 movies because it will make them violent. There is an obvious difference in how adults should behave when children are around, as opposed to when they’re not. I don’t want to be on Sesame Street behavior when I go someplace where it is acknowledged according to culture of adult privilege that I shouldn’t have to be.
There are plenty of mothers’ sites that cater to your irresponsible point of view. Your argument is the result of an attempt as inclusiveness gone crazy. We’re done now.
One hundred comments and not a single mention of men not choosing to reproduce or what men can do to reduce population growth. It’s all on women.
Er, Jake, that’s pretty much
(i) the flipside of abortion rights - a woman has autonomy over her own body and her own choices, and babies are limited by wombs, not sperm and
(ii) biology - it doesn’t matter one bit if a large number of men decide not to reproduce; what matters is what proportion of women decide to do the same.
Deep6, please define NC-17 rating.
I agree with Kylroy. What no one is talking about is that the “incentives” Amanda mentioned would most likely continue to punish women disproportionately for having children. Frankly, I want to change the financial incentives that already do - for fuck’s sake, I want there to be generous parental leave that neither men nor women are punished for taking; cheap, high quality day care, etc. I think those were feminist goals. But since those lower the “cost” of having children, perhaps you disagree? Their are certainly social incentives to having children, but all the financial incentives go the other way.
Also, this may make me unpopular, but…though I love this blog and usually agree with Amanda, I thought the response to Sharon (”don’t you have some men to obey”) was incredibly rude, unproductive, and uncalled for, given the original comment. (Unless there was one that was deleted that I didn’t see, in which case, ignore this.) Whether right or wrong, Sharon was making the point that there are very few people having large numbers of children, and most people she knows don’t have any. You can argue this statement on its merits, but my God, I was shocked at how cruel Amanda’s response was.
I should add that I have no children myself, but don’t wish to see women continue to bear more than their share of the burdens of child-bearing and child-rearing, and that the state making it easier seems like one of the best ways to do it.
Here’s something that hasn’t been said:
I LIKE my standard of living. I like having good food to eat, and a TV and a computer and a car. Sure, our planet could support another 10 billion people - if we all ate gruel and wore rags and watched the linoleum peel for entertainment. But that’s not the life I want to live, and I seriously doubt that anybody else wants that life either. Ideally, everybody in the world would have as good a life as we do in the US and Europe. But in order for that ideal situation to occur, we need a lot fewer people first.
Second of all, I work in agriculture. One of the things that has been drilled into my head over and over again in classes like pest management, host-plant resistance, and ecology is that we’ve got a major problem on our hands. That problem being: how does 5% of the country feed the other 95%, when the 95% keeps taking up all the farmland with suburbs and the population keeps growing at the current rate? We’ve increased agricultural output by about 300% in the past 100 years with things like pesticides, plant breeding, fertilizers, etc. There are obviously also environmental issues involved with maximizing crop production. A lot of people are working very hard on this problem. But do we really want to bet that we can see another increase of that order of magnitude? Do you feel lucky?
All species have a carrying capacity, end of story. Humans have just thus far managed to manipulate the environment to artificially increase k. All entomologists are familiar with the explosion/crash cycles of many insect species. So are we stupid like bugs, or are we smart enough to prevent something entirely predictable?
This is how I honestly feel: It is completely senseless, and irresponsible, for poor girls or women of ANY color to reproduce, anywhere in the world. By poor I mean, they can barely support themselves, and adding another mouth to feed besides their own would send them deeper into povery on a permanent or maybe decades-long basis. Isn’t this just basic common sense? When the Live 8 concert happened recently, I did some research on the world’s poorest countries and their average reproductive output per woman. A number of countries, I’m talking dead-poor developing countries, had an average birth rate of 6 babies per woman.
Surely anyone can see that this is senseless, and tragic, and catastrophic for the mother and child. But we keep on reproducing. The world’s population doubles every 40 years. DOUBLES! In all our lifetimes, our tiny planet is scheduled to go from 6 billion to 12 billion of us. Fighting over the same arid lands, same lack of water, etc etc. If any of you have a very young child right now, imagine that when they hit 80, our same little globe will be struggling under the weight of 24 billion humans.
Why is it somehow impolite to talk about coercion when this is what we are heading directly into? And why is it somehow impolite to talk about people NOT reproducing at all, if they don’t have a roof over their heads, a steady job, can’t pay their rent to begin with, etc etc etc. Aren’t these things just common sense?
Meanwhile people are polite and uber-PC about such things, and it’s to the detriment of the future of our species, and the planet. Isn’t it time to stop being polite before, as someone else said on here, mother nature goes about eradicating us the hard way?
PS, I’m a lifelong feminist, and childless.
This is how I honestly feel: It is completely senseless, and irresponsible, for poor girls or women of ANY color to reproduce, anywhere in the world. By poor I mean, they can barely support themselves, and adding another mouth to feed besides their own would send them deeper into povery on a permanent or maybe decades-long basis. Isn’t this just basic common sense? When the Live 8 concert happened recently, I did some research on the world’s poorest countries and their average reproductive output per woman. A number of countries, I’m talking dead-poor developing countries, had an average birth rate of 6 babies per woman.
Surely anyone can see that this is senseless, and tragic, and catastrophic for the mother and child. But we keep on reproducing. The world’s population doubles every 40 years. DOUBLES! In all our lifetimes, our tiny planet is scheduled to go from 6 billion to 12 billion of us. Fighting over the same arid lands, same lack of water, etc etc. If any of you have a very young child right now, imagine that when they hit 80, our same little globe will be struggling under the weight of 24 billion humans.
Why is it somehow impolite to talk about coercion when this is what we are heading directly into? And why is it somehow impolite to talk about people NOT reproducing at all, if they don’t have a roof over their heads, a steady job, can’t pay their rent to begin with, etc etc etc. Aren’t these things just common sense?
Meanwhile people are polite and uber-PC about such things, and it’s to the detriment of the future of our species, and the planet. Isn’t it time to stop being polite before, as someone else said on here, mother nature goes about eradicating us the hard way?
This is how I honestly feel: It is completely senseless, and irresponsible, for poor girls or women of ANY color to reproduce, anywhere in the world. By poor I mean, they can barely support themselves, and adding another mouth to feed besides their own would send them deeper into povery on a permanent or maybe decades-long basis. Isn’t this just basic common sense? When the Live 8 concert happened recently, I did some research on the world’s poorest countries and their average reproductive output per woman. A number of countries, I’m talking dead-poor developing countries, had an average birth rate of 6 babies per woman.
Surely anyone can see that this is senseless, and tragic, and catastrophic for the mother and child. But we keep on reproducing. The world’s population doubles every 40 years. DOUBLES! In all our lifetimes, our tiny planet is scheduled to go from 6 billion to 12 billion of us. Fighting over the same arid lands, same lack of water, etc etc. If any of you have a very young child right now, imagine that when they hit 80, our same little globe will be struggling under the weight of 24 billion humans.
Why is it somehow impolite to talk about coercion when this is what we are heading directly into? And why is it somehow impolite to talk about people NOT reproducing at all, if they don’t have a roof over their heads, a steady job, can’t pay their rent to begin with, etc etc etc. Aren’t these things just common sense?
Meanwhile people are polite and uber-PC about such things, and it’s to the detriment of the future of our species, and the planet. Isn’t it time to stop being polite before, as someone else said on here, mother nature goes about eradicating us the hard way?
This is how I honestly feel: It is completely senseless, and irresponsible, for poor girls or women of ANY color to reproduce, anywhere in the world. By poor I mean, they can barely support themselves, and adding another mouth to feed besides their own would send them deeper into povery on a permanent or maybe decades-long basis. Isn’t this just basic common sense? When the Live 8 concert happened recently, I did some research on the world’s poorest countries and their average reproductive output per woman. A number of countries, I’m talking dead-poor developing countries, had an average birth rate of 6 babies per woman.
Surely anyone can see that this is senseless, and tragic, and catastrophic for the mother and child. But we keep on reproducing. The world’s population doubles every 40 years. DOUBLES! In all our lifetimes, our tiny planet is scheduled to go from 6 billion to 12 billion of us. Fighting over the same arid lands, same lack of water, etc etc. If any of you have a very young child right now, imagine that when they hit 80, our same little globe will be struggling under the weight of 24 billion humans.
Why is it somehow impolite to talk about coercion when this is what we are heading directly into? And why is it somehow impolite to talk about people NOT reproducing at all, if they don’t have a roof over their heads, a steady job, can’t pay their rent to begin with, etc etc etc. Aren’t these things just common sense?
Meanwhile people are polite and uber-PC about such things, and it’s to the detriment of the future of our species, and the planet. Isn’t it time to stop being polite before, as someone else said on here, mother nature goes about eradicating us the hard way?
(i) the flipside of abortion rights - a woman has autonomy over her own body and her own choices, and babies are limited by wombs, not sperm and
(ii) biology - it doesn’t matter one bit if a large number of men decide not to reproduce; what matters is what proportion of women decide to do the same.
I certainly don’t get your (i).
I see two problems. First, of course a woman has autonomy over her own body. That’s one of the things that makes women the equals of men. What does a woman’s bodily autonomy have to do with pushing sterilization on women but not on men. Unless you mean that men do not have autonomy over their own bodies, something I can’t believe you’d be saying. Secondly, do you mean it doesn’t matter how much unprotected sex I have (wrt reproduction)? Whether I am fertile or not has no effect on the number of children born? Surely, if I’m sterilized and in a long term committed relationship I am ensuring that at least one less child is born.
As to (ii), that depends on how many different men women have reproductive sex with, on average. It can matter immensely whether a large number of men decide not to reproduce. It really depends on cultural values.
But I’ve got to admit that I am disturbed by your wording of (i). “The flipside of abortion rights,” sounds like you’re saying that if we advocate for equal rights for women’s that we deserve (or should expect) to have women targeted for sterilization. Either that or that the pro-choice movement advocates sterilization of women. I don’t think that either one of those is true.
Jake,
To a degree, males’ fertility matters less than females’ wrt population growth (as generally applied to sexually reproducing populations of any organism). HOW MUCH less depends on the mating strategies used by that population.
Which isn’t to say that men shouldn’t be held accountable for the children they produce, as much as women.
There are plenty of mothers’ sites that cater to your irresponsible point of view.
Darling? Your slip is showing.
this is an example of how policy rewards fertility
People are having multiple children because their job-based health insurance doesn’t go up after the first one? Is that actually your argument?
which is that no one can afford three kids and two should be drawing stares.
If you have ONE biological kid that you bred on purpose, your entire moral capital on the “ooo babies hurt Mother Earth” argument is precisely zero. Pretending that you’re more virtuous because you added fewer consumers to the planet is self-indulgent hogwash.
But you’re actually correct; people such as you are always happy to stare at women whose reproductive habits don’t match what they think a Proper Woman does.
I agree with Betsy, re: enjoying this blog and the unnecc. obnoxious comment to Sarah (though apparently Sarah was armed with her own response!).
Leigh, that comment Amanda made was to sharon, not Sarah.
And sharon deserves that and more for her turd-ish contributions to our little discussions here, if you’ve seen any of them…
MikeEss, I take your word for it that Sharon has trolled here before (I have a bad memory for these sorts of things). But without knowing that, the response came across as startlingly hostile, since her particular content didn’t strike me as terribly objectionable.
Mythago, I don’t see how my decision to adopt a living child, rather than risk having the miracle of IVF create three babies for me, impacts my argument in any way. For or against, I don’t think that I have a special right to have an opinion about population issues that was conferred on me along with the adoption decree.
No one can afford three kids. Not the couples who feel entitled to them and not the rest of us. It’s a tough problem that developed countries are accustomed to a standard of living that cannot be maintained unless we tackle the problem of population growth, and it certainly leads to a lot of emotional name-calling–have you *ever* used the phrase ‘people like you’ before? Something got your goat there.
It’s a tough problem, but it’s not a complex one. It’s unbelievably simple. We can’t afford for anyone to have three kids or Cthulu forbid more than three. It’s wrong because excessive population is ruining a perfectly servicable planet for everyone, not because I didn’t do it.
I want my kid to be able to feed herself and her child, to live in a world that has polar bears, to buy tomatoes at the farmers’ market or grow her own in her own yard. I want my daughter and my niece to live long, productive and enjoyable lives. That’s all this is about to me. (To the extent that i give a cone of Ripple Shit what exactly a Proper Woman does, it’s for the purpose of defying the edict.)
Too bad Amanda brought up my pet environmental issue after I ran out of pain pills, huh?
Sharon doesn’t usually get bunnied, however, because she typically stays on topic, rarely rants for long, is entertaining and provacative, and sometimes even contributes effectively or compassionately to threads.
In other words, her Underbridge Index Combined Score is less than one bunny.
Whether I am fertile or not has no effect on the number of children born?
Essentially, no. You’re male - as far as human population dynamics goes, you don’t matter much at all.
Surely, if I’m sterilized and in a long term committed relationship I am ensuring that at least one less child is born.
Therein lies your problem. It is not your decision not to have children that matters; it is her decision not to have children because of your relationship. If she made the choice to go off and live with someone else because she wanted kids, or to get artifical help or to have a one night stand, that’s the only decision that counts population wise because she has the womb and sperm is easy to come by.
Your influence comes in persuading her in making her decision.
And to follow up on that, if you wanna target population growth, you target women.
And what works to reduce women reproducing is - female education, female control over their reproductive choices, female careers. Dreadful policy choices all, but ones I’m sure we can learn to live with.
I’m pretty late to this discussion. Oh well.
1) I absolutely do not believe that population issues should be tied to the environmental issues. Populations aren’t especially tied to the environment beyond the very shallow top levels.
2) There isn’t really a way to decrease our population in a just manner. All that would happen, AT BEST, is some other large scale distortion effect similar to the mortgage tax deduction. It would shift resources and profits to areas of the economy that doesn’t really need it. Any attempt to craft an insightful bill is going to get scuppered and turned into sausage in the political process. The process would also entail really frightful discourse as well. People tend to believe that children reflect on them, whether they should or not. Telling people that some people can reproduce when they can’t isn’t going to bring out the best in people.
3) We don’t really need to decrease our population. If anything, we probably need to *increase* population. Think of the perpetual BMI discussions. It’s constantly misused, set around our obsession about being thin, and used to tell perfectly healthy people to slim down to weights very unhealthy for them. What I’m saying here is that there is a difference between having a high population or a low population, and a healthy population.
4) Generally, societies that are *losing* population do so because things are going very very wrong, and the reasons why are not incompatible with a purposeful attempt at losing population. Societies have to deal with a myriad of problems associated with keeping things in good order. Even for issues derived from environmental stresses, the more heads and hearts together, the better the likelihood that the problem can be solved. Don’t think so? Why don’t one go to the center of town/city, and pick out people we don’t need around. The girl tapping at the keyboards at a Barnes and Noble? The police officer directing traffic? The gang lieutenant standing trial in a courtroom? The probability is that one will have a hard time saying that certain percentage (that could make a difference) of people shouldn’t be around, if one takes a birds eye view of society.
5) Shrinking the population ultimately means that there will be many jobs that go wanting. Many of the said jobs are those that really, really, probably should be filled, or bad things will happen. Moreover, nobody has enough view of an economy to judge which jobs are truly important and which isn’t.
6) If one goes by history to judge what happens in the slower scaled depopulations, in every case *I* could think of, the dominant societies and the skilled artisans(like most of whom who comment here) associated with them were utterly destroyed. Blacks moving out of the Deep South in the 1930s-1950s did a number on the viability of most of the deep south, and the South as a whole were the last to emerge out of the depression and bloomed pretty late in the 1970s. The depopulation of N. America cut across all class lines in the 16th century. The Peloponnesian wars set the stage for Macedonians to take over. I can go on and on. In cases where population growth was slowed or decaying, like the Spartans, the helots and Thebans eventually wiped them out.
7) If population retardation is for some reason absolutely necessary, then we’d have to do it *very* slowly, much slower than any environmental incident is going to hold off. Ultimately, there isn’t a point in coupling population growth and environment.
8) I would aggressively pursue economic justice issues, and I would aggressively improve mass education. Those two, with an increase in conservation efforts would do so much more. We should focus on *surviving*, and not *delaying* and especially not *preventing* what comes forthwith. It’s too late to prevent anything.
9) If I were to try for something controversial, I would argue for eugenics. It would be alot easier to tie it firmly to populist and humanist agendas. That means prenatal care for every, and genetics testing for every pregnant woman that wants it. It would mean aggressive science funding for correcting the easy to mend fatal mutations. I.e. eugenics movement that is entirely focused on basic children’s health, and health only. Not smarter, not prettier, just healthier.
To me, threads like this are inherently thoughtless and classless/ist.
Oh, and I have mostly have faith that the people armed with the facts of reproductive health will do the best they can. I’m in favor of education and then getting the heck out of their business.
Bakabot
Actually the older children of the Duggar family are assigned a younger Child of the Duggar family, and mommy Duggar is assigned the newest member of the Duggar family.
The older children are responsible in making sure their charges are washed, dressed etc. And since they homeschool the older at times is responsible for teaching their younger charges as well.
We have an interesting take on this with those leading my little city. They are not bothering to address our school over crowding, 8th grade rentention, MCAS scores, etc. while they continue to approve every subdivision propsal infront of them… becuase. . .
“Successful singles and married couples will want to move here from Boston and commute since we are right on the commuter rail line. However they are going to be too poor to have children.”
Sometimes I think of running for office in this place . . . .and then I come to my senses.
Marguerite -
You talk as if many of those women have a choice. They don’t. For many their husbands live and work in the city (and have a sex with the women there) they come home and want/demand sex with their wives. If their wife says no she is beaten, and he has his way anyway.
Insisting on a condom is a 50/50 battle… most often the husband says no and the wive contracts HIV and becomes pregnant. Sometimes he agrees and those women have a chance to be HIV free and not have a heard of children
There is actually a vein in communist thought is it’s overview of capitalism, that capitalist employers do not want their workers to have children because it takes them away from making money for the employer in the time used to have, care and raise them.
Nope, my choices are my own. They were made due to a hell of a lot more background information than I am willing to divulge (or more than you want to read) here. I am , however, tired of being told that my choice to have 4 kids makes me less of an environmentalist, less of a progressive, less of a feminist, and less responsible, than someone else.
10 years ago when this thrown up at me I objected saying that people were being obnoxious and judgmental because they see me with 4 kids. But they can see a male friend of ours with 2 kids and think that’s just fine — except that what they don’t know is that he has a total of 5 kids with 3 different women.
I defend and applaud my sister’s, my daughter’s, my cousin’s, my ex-sister-in-law’s and even Amanda’s decision not to have children.
When I was sixteen I said that I didn’t want to have children. Unfortunately at the time I said this I was in my grandmother’s presence. She spun around and said that I “was being selfish.” (I don’t think I said “hell” in the reply but I know I thought “Selfish hell! I’ll be the one changing the diapers!”) Circumstances and unforeseen events change what I thought my life was going to be like.
Um, what? Perhaps you’d care to brush up on your ecology.
The totally non sequiturial comment above was in reference to
GotDaFeevah’s
And btw I sooo love being called a “breader,” makes me sound like a nuclear reactor, at best.
of and Entomologista
Bless you Saint Entomologista! I can’t tell you how many rants from the wilderness of Kansas I’ve made on the same topic. I felt so alone.
All of this discourse is lovely and optimistic on some level, but it won’t amount to a hill of beans. Humans, for all their intelligence and ability to communicate, won’t collectively make any meaningful changes. The population will continue to expand rapidly, and our reckoning will come brutally, with or without the polite conscience so many maintain in such conversations.
Denial is our only collective escape, however temporary or prolonged that escape may be.
We even have some suggesting what *we* really need is more people so *we* aren’t taken over by those *other* people, or at best, to prop up some ludicrous financial and/or social pyramid scheme. Then denouncing the discussions as thoughtless or classist. Really, it would be laughable if it wasn’t sincere. It is, and it’s a pretty good reflection of the species.
WTFever. My only consolation is in not producing another person to witness this insanity as people cling to their notions of the birth right to an easily accessible Happy Meal, the need to repel invading Mexicans, or some inexplicable fear that US citizens are being mind controlled by the evil scientists into wasting away.
Yeah, the species will get its act together. Really. I’m sure of it. Any day now, or as soon as Lord PissyPants is out of office, or maybe December 21, 2012 or something.
Also, this may make me unpopular, but…though I love this blog and usually agree with Amanda, I thought the response to Sharon (”don’t you have some men to obey”) was incredibly rude, unproductive, and uncalled for, given the original comment.
Betsy,
There’s a lot of history here between Amanda and me, which is why my comment which struck you as not particularly incendiary caused that flare up.
My problem with Amanda’s post isn’t merely the inherent racism–it’s ok to tell white women not to have children but we can’t tell anybody else–it’s more that telling people how many children they should be allowed to have is immoral. This is why so many people object to China’s one-child policy and coersive enforcement (which Amanda did not entirely reject). I don’t spend enormous time worrying about the Duggers with their 17 children anymore than I worry about the dozen women I know who don’t have children and don’t plan on having any.
It’s already been stated here that people have fewer children as they move up the socioeconomic ladder. Middle class white women are already having fewer children than their mothers did. I don’t really think aiming population control discussions at them is particularly effective. Try spending more time talking to crazy teenagers who think they are invulnerable. That’s where you will make a difference (I hope).
I spent the day thinking over this post and was somewhat amused that the position advocated is pretty much the flip side of the pro-life position (with a couple of important differences, but bear with me). Pro-lifers want the government to disallow abortions and pro-choicers see this as “forcing” women to have children they don’t want. On the other hand, the position advocated here includes the idea that it be permissible for the government to “force” people who want to have children to not have them. It’s a bit ironic.
Finally, someone else mentioned this but it bears repeating: Amanda talks about having children in the abstract because she has no experience with having children of her own. She has chosen not to have them, and has obviously given a lot of thought to that decision. But because of that, it’s a bit more difficult to understand why someone wants 3 or more children. Believe me, very few people who decide to have 3 kids do so because of “societal pressure” or demands to raise the white population. They do so because they see having children as an intrinsic good, whose value isn’t measured by who goes to which university. Frankly, I never thought that providing siblings for my oldest child was somehow depriving her of a college education. That problem didn’t enter the discussion, and I doubt seriously it does for anyone else.
Also, this may make me unpopular, but…though I love this blog and usually agree with Amanda, I thought the response to Sharon (”don’t you have some men to obey”) was incredibly rude, unproductive, and uncalled for, given the original comment.
Betsy,
There’s a lot of history here between Amanda and me, which is why my comment which struck you as not particularly incendiary caused that flare up.
My problem with Amanda’s post isn’t merely the inherent racism–it’s ok to tell white women not to have children but we can’t tell anybody else–it’s more that telling people how many children they should be allowed to have is immoral. This is why so many people object to China’s one-child policy and coersive enforcement (which Amanda did not entirely reject). I don’t spend enormous time worrying about the Duggers with their 17 children anymore than I worry about the dozen women I know who don’t have children and don’t plan on having any.
It’s already been stated here that people have fewer children as they move up the socioeconomic ladder. Middle class white women are already having fewer children than their mothers did. I don’t really think aiming population control discussions at them is particularly effective. Try spending more time talking to crazy teenagers who think they are invulnerable. That’s where you will make a difference (I hope).
I spent the day thinking over this post and was somewhat amused that the position advocated is pretty much the flip side of the pro-life position (with a couple of important differences, but bear with me). Pro-lifers want the government to disallow abortions and pro-choicers see this as “forcing” women to have children they don’t want. On the other hand, the position advocated here includes the idea that it be permissible for the government to “force” people who want to have children to not have them. It’s a bit ironic.
Finally, someone else mentioned this but it bears repeating: Amanda talks about having children in the abstract because she has no experience with having children of her own. She has chosen not to have them, and has obviously given a lot of thought to that decision. But because of that, it’s a bit more difficult to understand why someone wants 3 or more children. Believe me, very few people who decide to have 3 kids do so because of “societal pressure” or demands to raise the white population. They do so because they see having children as an intrinsic good, whose value isn’t measured by who goes to which university. Frankly, I never thought that providing siblings for my oldest child was somehow depriving her of a college education. That problem didn’t enter the discussion, and I doubt seriously it does for anyone else.
Entomologista:
I AM brushed up on my ecology, and I have a pretty good layman’s idea of it.
*sigh*
The more I thought about this thread, the angrier I got. I got to thinking about how Larry Summers thought about women, and how he must’ve gotten it from the feminists.
Do ANY of you know or even understand how fucked up this thread is? Do ANY of you know that talking about population has been a part of idiotic bourgeoise patoise over the centuries? Larry Summers would the fuckyeah *know* we’ve HAD this discussion about Malthusian limits. And he would know WHY the fuck Malthus was wrong. He’s probably enough of an historian to know just how fucking lethal and ultimately racist this discussion typically becomes. Ireland in the 1800s, Rwanda and Burgundi in the 1990s, oh jesus christ and the disco ball itself, has ANYONE the fuck read Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal? I swear it was a part of everybody’s English education. Can ANYONE link threads like this current one to the audience Swift was trying to reach? AAAAaaarggh!!
To put this bluntly: The Earth can easily support double our numbers. Population is an *amplifier*, not an input to the question of how we can deal with our environmental problems. When people are talking about too many people, they are usually talking about too many evil and lazy people. I.E., this kind of discussion will almost ALWAYS feed back into the oppressive matrix.
Population is not a first order issue and never has been. What cures Malthusian pressures is greater social justice and collection/application of new knowlege. Even of Europe was rising in world economic power in the 1800s, during the first half of the centuries, Europe was operating under rather *extreme* malthusian pressures, even with all the food and suger it was importing from the new world. England was closer to losing the Napoleonic conflict due to revolution from the starved masses itself than is commonly understood! What changed things, beyond fossil fuels was greater civil rights and greater access to social and financial capital for the masses. Robert Owen is more of a hero to the British Imperium than David Ricardo. The collective work of him and many like him to make capitalism more tolerable and effective played a crucial role in evening out food distribution, which as Amartya Sen shows, is the crucial aspect of malnutrition and starvation.
Middle class people have always talked like this when they are under financial stress. It’s one of the ugliest facets of Babbits.
Oh and one more thing:
Get a grip on the idea of sizes and the relation of size to the issues that one is trying to deal with!
We’re not in trouble because there are more of us than the Earth can care for. That isn’t especially true. Like I said above, The earth is able to care for *double* our population. It’s a matter of living conservatively and living wisely, and living both a life of mind and a life of earth. It’s a matter of judging the interrelationships between our desires and what is available to sate them. The Earth is HUGE relative to us.
We are in trouble because we are massively overproductive in the wrong stuff, and underconsuming much of what is plentiful. We have to really grokk the idea that we’re bad for *ourselves*, not bad for the Earth.
The Earth doesn’t need our help. It’s a combination of all the little things that need our help, the nondescript wetlands, a creek watershed here and there, small forests in tennessee and big forests in Brazil. We have to deal with each problem at the proper level and attention.
Shah8:
How, exactly, do you get around the fact that is a limit to how much food can be produced/acre and that there is a limited number of acres with which to produce food? There is ALWAYS a carrying capacity. How can there not be?
Please explain to me how you think populations behave, since apparently the collective evidence of the past 70 or so years of ecological study haven’t convinced you.
So we’ll be double what we are now in 50-100 years. Then what?
So we’ll be double what we are now in 50-100 years. Then what?
Well, then we triple, obviously ! I mean, the earth is, like, really really big. We can live underwater.
/sarcasm.
Space colonies! Move all the people into space and make the Earth a park. We’ll come down on weekends for picnics until the sun explodes and destroys the planet.
Anyway, by the time pollution and overpopulation do their really big damage, I’ll be dead. And since I don’t have kids, I shouldn’t even care.
It’s wrong because excessive population is ruining a perfectly servicable planet for everyone,
If we have excessive population, then we should be staring at anyone who chooses to have biological children. Period. We have TOO MANY PEOPLE, correct? Then anyone who has a child is adding needlessly to that population. Adoption is the only ecologically-sound path to parenthood.
I assume that, like most people, your pretense that one or two kids is OK is based on replacement rate. We’re trying to reduce the population, not maintain it at the current level, right?
have you *ever* used the phrase ‘people like you’ before
Yes. For example, in reference to people who are so careful to draw the line of Good right outside their own toes, and to use that as an excuse to be assholes towards everyone outside that line because, you know, if you’re outside the line you’re a Bad Person and all bets are off.
You certainly fall into that category, since you think it’s fine to encourage public shaming of people with what you consider to be the inappropriate number of children. And let’s be blunt here–by “people” we’re talking about women.
“Oh, you’re angry!” is the kind of argument I am used to hearing from antifeminists who think ladies should always be hesitant and deferential.
sharon, I don’t see Amanda arguing that poor white women should be told to stop having kids, but that if the Duggars were African-American, she wouldn’t dare say a word about them. You’re turning the race argument exactly backwards: the issue is that who should have children, and how many, is always made about how many children WOMEN should have, and is affected by race and class. (Nobody cares about how many children a man has as long as he’s supporting them financially.)
I don’t understand why Amanda needs to have children to contribute to the discussion. She’s not mocking parenthood or saying she has special knowledge about the desire to have children.
This question answers so much.
1. Only affluent Americans would ask this question.
Poor people assume their kids won’t go to college, will go to state and that will be great, or will get scholarships.
Non-American universities work differently and kids with talent often get education regardless of Mom and Dad’s financial resources. It’s built into the education system, much like high school is in the US.
2. Guess what? State’s OK.
Maybe the real life education received from a state school is better life preparation than Harvard, Sure, Ivy Leagues get your more and better job opportunities, but money doesn’t buy happiness. A college education isn’t necessary for happiness.
I went to state (because my parents didn’t pay for my education) and I’m doing fine.
The real motivators, for most people who choose not to have (more) children are the current costs, not the future costs. Things like food, shelter, and healthcare cost a lot now. And the personal costs of childcare are large.
3. If I adopt kids, I’ll still have to consider paying for their college tuitions.
The question doesn’t get at the root of your idea that we ought to produce fewer children. The question only deals with caring for children, which is different.
Shah8,
The trouble is, population expands exponentially. So we can very quickly go from 7 billion to 49 billion.
However, I completely agree with you that we ought not to be concerned too much with population growth. We certainly shouldn’t breeder-shame the way Amanda is. We should be encouraging people to consume less: to get rid of their cars and embrace mass transportation, to eat locally and lower on the food chain, to live in high density urban spaces, to leave large portions of the environment untouched, etc.
As feminists, we ought to be far more concerned with providing and maintaining people’s bodily autonomy than with overpopulation.
You certainly fall into that category, since you think it’s fine to encourage public shaming of people with what you consider to be the inappropriate number of children. And let’s be blunt here–by “people” we’re talking about women.
“Oh, you’re angry!” is the kind of argument I am used to hearing from antifeminists who think ladies should always be hesitant and deferential.
Two thoughts:
1) I think, and I said quite carefully, that right now it’s socially acceptable to stare and point at me because I don’t shave the hair that grows on my legs…and not socially acceptable to provide that type of negative reinforcement to families with three or four kids.
Not only is that bizarre on its face, it’s also the of problem that the science of making people behave irrationally known as marketing has a lot of influence on.
My suggestion is that it ought to be the other way around and that we have the technology to make that happen. Unlike exponential reproduction that has zero impact on the earth’s resources, which we don’t have the technology to achieve.
2) The ad hom ‘you think you’re better than everyone else because you actually followed your ethics! you should be ashamed of mentioning that fact, not raising it as a possible path!’ crap is just crap, and it’s beneath you. It’s hardly anti-feminist to mention that the personal attacks based on my choices seem quite out of character.
My opinions on this topic, about which I know quite a bit, are not in fact undermined by my knowledge or my informed choices. While my choices may be different than yours, and while my reasoning may well offend you, I think it’s valuable to advance this conversation by revealing the reasoning behind my choices.
Does that make me an asshole? Not so much.
What made me an asshole was the day that I ran into a mom at the gym and responded to her choice to have a third baby with ‘If you wanted a girl, I would have been happy to help you navigate the paperwork’ rather than the condolences/congrats she felt entitled to for having grown a third boy in her very own uterus. That was me being an asshole.
Phoenix, what you actually said was that “no one can afford three kids and two should be drawing stares”. (Not ‘three or four’.) In other words, as I said, you’re fine with gleeful public shaming of those who make what we perceive to be the Wrong Choices; you just think all that energy should be directed away from non-leg-shavers and should be redirected towards those who have more than one or maybe two children.
I’m not sure why you think that is ad hominem, nor why you think it is a bad, bad thing to condemn “let’s find reasons to act like assholes toward people less virtuous than we perceive ourselves to be”. I’m also not sure why you think such behavior is effective. Women, as your gym example shows, are fair game in our culture for everyone’s judgment about their reproductive choices. Do you really think that shaming the bitches for having too many is either new or successful as a population-control tactic?
This isn’t about my family size, by the way; when I decided to grow any children I was aware that I was making a selfish, Earth-hatin’ choice. I didn’t choose to sooth my conscience by saying, oh well, that’s fine because MY family size is RESPONSIBLE, unlike SOME PEOPLE’S.
This has been an educational thread for me. Mostly about the degree to which sexually active straight women have to think about the question of family size in a way I just don’t have to think about it, and the extremes that some feel they are pressured to reach in justifying something that isn’t completely in their control regardless.
I never said that I’m right because I made the right choices, or claimed that I’m more right than anyone who disagrees with me based on their different choices. That’s as inaccurate as the folks I know only through adoption who assume that I share their anti-choice views, or the arguin’ liberals who accuse everyone in my circumstances as racist assholes with a savior complex.
I contemplated quite seriously whether it was ethical to make the choice we did. Ultimately, my decision was to do something that I think is wrong at some level, which was to contribute to the problem of overpopulation by saving a human life that without intervention would have ended by now.
That was a selfish choice, and at many levels an immoral one, but the only one I could live with. Obviously I don’t expect everyone to think about this as much as I did or to come to the same conclusions, because this issue is highly personal and specific.
However, my point wasn’t that I am sometimes an asshole, though that is also true. My point was that our society shames me for neglecting to shave but praises my cousin who had three kids on purpose, and that I think that’s insane and backwards. Not that I think shaming is effective or even necessarily ethical–it clearly doesn’t work on me–just that it’s insane to apply it to private choices that have no effect on anyone else.
The desire to have children, or not, is akin to a sexual orientation. If you do not desire to have children, you cannot imagine how strong the desire to have children is. It is every bit as wrong to deny people the right to bear their own children as it is to deny people the right to have gay sex, for much the same reasons. And shaming people for having kids, if it becomes a majority opinion, *always* turns into shame carried onto the children. It is wrong to shame people for having kids out of wedlock, and it is wrong to shame people for having four kids when you thought they should have had two, and it is wrong to shame people for having biological kids when you thought they should adopt, for the same reason that it is wrong to shame people for having sex with consenting adults you thought they shouldn’t have sex with.
Women seem to have a natural cut-off mechanism for reproduction. Many have pointed out that middle-class white women (and Japanese women) already reproduce at less than replacement rate. Giving women education, the right to say no to sex and to reproduction, access to birth control (including abortion), and the cultural value to do something with their lives that isn’t motherhood, and they freely choose to do so. Overpopulation, per se, is *specifically* a disorder of sexism. When women are only valued for their ability to breed, and denied the right to do anything else, overpopulation occurs. Given that sexism is the reason for overpopulation, it doesn’t seem to make sense to fight overpopulation with more sexism, by demonizing women who choose to be mothers. Either women are humans and can freely choose to do as they damn well please with their own bodies, or they are subhumans who must be controlled. You cannot have it both ways. (And the pressure *will* all be on women, because you cannot visually see a man reproduce. Emit sperm, yes, but reproduction happens inside the woman.)
You want to reduce population? Empower the women who currently do not have the power to choose to be childfree, and remove disincentives (for instance, make legislation that protects doctors from lawsuits if they should sterilize an adult woman at her own request and she later experiences remorse; this would help women who really do want to be sterilized get the snip much more easily.) But I can really tell that this conversation has a huge number of people with no children in it, because I’m hearing quite a lot of the entitled-childfree-whine, “It’s so *haaard* to be childfree! People, y’know, bug you to have kids! And then you have to work hard at work! And you don’t get that tax break! Won’t someone think of how *haaard* it is to not have baybeez?” The truth is, you have more of your own money to spend and more freedom to spend it as you like; you get the hairy eyeball from a lot *fewer* people than mothers do, because the only people who criticize your child-freedom are people who personally know you, but everyone feels free to criticize strange moms and their kids; the fact that you have to work harder at work translates to you making 96 cents to the male dollar (if you are female) instead of the 77 cents mothers make (of course if you are male you may actually make less money than dads do, but you still get to spend more of it.) And not, y’know, having a full-time second job you get no vacations from, ever.
There are currently very, very powerful disincentives to have children operating in our society. Adding more would be cruel, and cause considerable human misery. It would be disproportionately applied to the poor and the non-white and the people with ADD and the non-religious and whoever else doesn’t fit the conformist norm. It would spill over onto the children brought into such a world. It would cause violence against women. (In “Stand on Zanzibar” by John Brunner, draconian anti-population measures are adopted by society, and as a result, a man whose wife’s second pregnancy turned unexpectedly into twins, and she was then unable to lose weight and continued to look pregnant, was beaten, sexually tortured and murdered for breeding too much. The only thing remotely implausible about this is that it happened to the man; in real life it would have happened to the woman who couldn’t lose the pregnancy weight.) And it is NOT FUCKING NECESSARY. Because the population control can already be accomplished by empowering women; if the existing humans consume too much, that’s more easily addressed by talking about the overconsumptive lifestyle. Because, frankly, you will have better luck getting people to forgo plastic bags than you will getting them to give up their dreams of having a baby. People who want a baby will be miserable without one; people who want three will be miserable if you dictate by law that they can’t have three; and you don’t need to *do* that. Most of the world’s population is generated by women who are coerced. Remove the coercion, free those women to make their own choices, and they will have a lot fewer kids. Trying to persuade the American middle class to have fewer kids to save the planet is like bombing Iraq because of Saudi terrorists in Afghanistan; totally misapplied force because THAT’S NOT WHERE THE PROBLEM IS.
Oh, and invent a male pill. because while the decision of any one man not to have kids won’t have an effect, the decision of huge, huge numbers of men to not have kids will have an effect close to what the invention of birth control did in the first place.
Very well said.
My point was that our society shames me for neglecting to shave but praises my cousin who had three kids on purpose, and that I think that’s insane and backwards.
I’m betting that your cousin is not a young, single black mother living in part on public assistance, because if she were, she’d almost certainly be catching a hell of a lot more flak than you are about unshaven legs.
Saying that this is “backwards” is to approve of shaming and of judging women based on whether their reproductive behavior pleases others. If what you mean is that judging on leg-shaving is crazy, I’m with you there. But to turn it around and say that kind of misogyny is fine, it’s just misdirected, then yes, you’re dead-on wrong.
I know you didn’t say here that your choices give you superior virtue, Phoenix. You saved that for the woman at the gym. But my comment was that a person who has chosen to add to the planet’s population in any way has zero moral standing to say “But you added more. I rule, you suck. You make Gaia weep.”
A good way to keep the discussion from getting personal is to talk about the replacement rates of specific demographic populations, not of individuals. A population can accomodate the choice to have 4 children, and still not have a replacement rate above 2.
Also, I don’t see that having a 2-child ideal necessary leads to “shaming” of other choices. Positive incentives can exist without negative ones, so it certainly doesn’t have to.
Alara Rogers said it. That was the most comprehensive and correct response in this thread yet.
The level of institutionalized sexism — the devaluation of any role for women other than that of breeding — is the controlling parameter on population growth. Remove that, and the problem will solve itself.
Thanks Alara Rogers. You hit the nail on the head for me withthis:
“The desire to have children, or not, is akin to a sexual orientation. If you do not desire to have children, you cannot imagine how strong the desire to have children is.”
I have a strong emotional and even physical desire to have children. Trying to explain this to someone who does not feel the same way is just impossible. And no amount of discussion can talk me out of a desire that is internal to my body.
1) Worried about that only child being lonely and not having anyone to play with?
Daycare. Quality daycare, early. Because it is true that for most of human history kids have grown up in groups of other kids, and look! We’ve created safe, supervised environments where they can be around a lot of children their own age! How appropriate.
If we’re worried about losing intergenerational interactions, we could even put childcare and eldercare facilities together, or, hey, put both in workplaces so that parents and children don’t have to be isolated from each other just to put food on the table.
2) It continuously peeves me how our culture manages to reduce complex environmental concerns to personal market decisions. Too many carbon emissions? We don’t try to rezone to make cars less necessary, we try to sell individual people more efficient cars - and make the people who can’t afford them feel bad. Organic food vs. conventional? You get to _choose_ to whether to give farmworkers cancer, not live in a society where farmworkers are protected whether or not you, individually, can afford Whole Foods.
Overpopulation? Assuming we could even agree that it’s a problem (I feel like I see a lot of news items encouraging me to Breed for the Economy), I doubt that we’re going to seriously think about how to improve the social safety net so that a single child isn’t responsible for supporting two aging parents and any number of childfree aunts and uncles, or how to make the work world more family-friendly or public life more child-friendly so that those only children _aren’t_ isolated.
No, we’re going to make it a Personal Matter that women get to negotiate in between hoofing it to the once-weekly farmer’s market, preparing the budget-organic food, and scrubbing out the toilet with low-toxin cleaners made of baking soda and sea salt.
Maybe by that point we’ll be too tired to breed anyway.
I think this has already been covered (so many comments!), but the whole idea of ANY state involvement in family size is well, skeevy to me. I would rather concentrate on making the choice to have fewer/none easy, by making contraceptives, abortion, etc. easily available and cheap, and by increasing opportunities for all women. And by reducing our environmental footprint in the dozens of ways that *don’t* involve the state, once again, getting between a woman and her own uterus.
Campaigns about family size seem paternalistic, patronizing, and downright offensive to me. We have plenty of evidence that most women don’t have lots of kids if they have other opportunities–in other words, that *women can be trusted* to make a wise decision for themselves given the chance to do so. If women are feeling coerced (which doesn’t jibe with my experience, except in the mildest of forms) then maybe some campaigns to get people to lay off of women for making their own reproductive choices are in order. And certainly, campaigns that educate women that no one else has the right to tell them what to do with their bodies…be they husbands, boyfriends, or family members. Or child-free types, or people who want to tell them their uterus is destroying the planet.