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How many babies are too many?
I think the question is the wrong one.
My husband and I frequently debate whether people — with our planet in trouble and pandemics still to come — whether people should have babies at all.
I fully understand those who don’t wish to have kids. I try to understand those who want several kids. I truthfully have less comprehension of the latter choice.
Of course, our culture does not support mothers, childcare, affordable housing, earnings, and healthcare, but none of these are sole reasons why women should think about having fewer kids. Like everything else on Earth, there are too many factors to name.
Should struggling parents — which usually means moms — have more children?
I reluctantly vote “yes”, if they really understand the projected Earth over the next fifty plus years. But, even then, so many births are unplanned, that I think the very idea of choice is compromised.
What kind of world will your baby girl have?
Will your baby girl have just as much freedom as your baby boy?
The primary reason that I believe a woman should have as many children as she wants is this: She is a human being. She should have full autonomy to have the family size she desires. (Nature, of course, weighs in as neutral on this, not all of us — me, for example — can have fertility as an option.)
A full human being has every right to make her own choices, but with the very reality of freedom of choice being stigmatized, I cannot fully believe that any women are being given the luxury of full personhood. At least, not yet.
If given all the evidence, accurate data, and full access to real choice, I believe fewer women would choose to give birth in poverty, or in extremely difficult times, such as we now face.
Girl power to woman power
I am always curious about women who are carrying babies to term amid a global pandemic. I salute their strength, courage, determination, and ability. Given how few women are allowed the proper tools to really guide a new human life into this world, I can offer nothing but admiration.
However, I also have empathy, and strong feelings also, for those women who did not plan a pregnancy. She may feel that she already has enough mouths to feed.
She may not know if she can count on the father, or society for help. She may, or may not, have the healthcare and education needed to understand all the ramifications of climate crisis and pandemics from here on out. And, that’s just the beginning of uncertainty.
A civilized society, one that values autonomy, would put everything in place to meet the needs of those who are vulnerable. There is a nonsensical mythos that says the unborn fetus is the most vulnerable thing on Earth. This is misleading.
Lions, or tigers, or bears — or reefs — for example, are far more endangered than human beings, and human beings often fail to acknowledge that every apex predator, or marine life base, creates the balance which allows life on Earth.
Those who would protect this “inequality” use womanhood as a weapon to convince people that maternity equals womanhood. But only women between 15 and 35 years can give reliably give birth. So, what value do we give pre-teens and women over 40 years? Not enough value, I think.
World powers that be
Let’s allow those women to help create a nicer world. Love of whole world is of as much, if not greater value, as baby love, in our troubling times.
I think our skewed view of motherhood is misleading for a reason — to keep a domination and exploitation system in place, not just of oppressed humans, but of an overly consumed world.
There is a political stigma that lays blame upon women who regard freedom as human right. In fact, as vulnerable as an unborn fetus is, she, or he, is no more or less vulnerable to the sometimes selfish and inhuman whims of human culture.
Any culture that doesn’t value human rights perhaps has no business encouraging more babies they have no interest in protecting.
Earth’s New Now
I know that all of these arguments are somewhat old and tired: We should all be wanted, and we should all recognized as human and fully provided for.
But I truly believe we are in a New Now Earth. That a Tuesday of any week, is just as susceptible to danger as the height of a global pandemic is. Denial is so strong about our separation from nature and destruction of a supporting biosphere, that it took a pandemic to shatter the system.
And even now, there are people who won’t look at reality. They don’t see the ways we need to mend the social fabric, and fight to have a non-toxic, non-domination based, supportive biosphere. Some don’t even view the collaboration of science across borders as crucial to support civilization.
Some people are still just stuck downloading reality television, because facing what we face IS difficult. It requires the ferocity of woman love.
If we face our future with a ton of lessons about how interference with habitats brings pandemics, how equality is essential for a thriving, inter-connected world, how human rights must apply to all sapiens no matter their faith, color, gender, or wealth, we will be fine.
The trouble is, we are not there yet. We likely won’t be there by next Tuesday, and the question as to how many people are too many people, is still being addressed to women with wombs more than to men with semen.
Human rights, the ones that will allow us to Make Earth Great Again (MEGA 2020!) have to be front and center in the giving birth of the new world we create.
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Previously published on Medium.
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Photo credit: Unsplash