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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

…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.

Very well said.

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.

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.

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.