Mother's Day

On Mother’s Day R2 took us and our dogs to visit some friends in Woodside, a small town on the peninsula just west of Palo Alto.  Appropriately, the topic of overpopulation came up again (see Freedom, Dec. 2010).  Actually, the husband of this pair brings it up every time we visit.  He’s on the faculty at Stanford in Earth Sciences and is convinced that the carrying capacity of the planet has already been exceeded; the human population needs to be reduced by at least 30%.  (Like us, they have no children, only dogs.)  He said: “It’s all well and good to honor your parents and the sacrifices they made, but as a culture we need to stop holding parenthood up as an ideal, something everyone ought to aspire to, because excessive breeding is destroying the human future.”  This is why imagined futures have been dystopian for decades now.  Unless we can stop population growth, there’s little hope of things going well for us.  It’s the root cause of all our ecological issues.  We are rapidly depleting natural resources, especially fossil fuels, but also water and minerals.  8,000,000 hectares of forest are being lost every year, resulting in increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and diminished levels of O.  The amount of arable land is dwindling while deserts are spreading.  Other species are being exterminated as we gobble up their habitats; perhaps as many as 100,000/year.  The world is filling up with our trash.  We may be fast approaching a tipping point with regard to climate change that will take us down a rabbit hole from which there will be no return or escape.  We’re headed for environmental catastrophe unless we can kick the compulsion to breed.  Choosing not to have children is the single most efficacious step an individual can take to try to avert disaster. 

Religious and ideological opposition to birth control is a big part of the problem.  Worldwide, 40% of pregnancies are unintended (50% in the US).  That’s 80 million unwanted children every year.  Bush’s AIDS program (PEPFAR) in Africa (the foremost continental driver of world population growth) intentionally withheld birth control information from women, focusing instead, as the Republican brand of sex education tends to do domestically, on abstinence.  Studies have shown that when women take control, birth rates go down, especially when they have other options in their lives.  Republicans and the Church in their campaign against contraception represent the old patriarchy in a rear guard action against empowering women and the new, more gender balanced, multivalent, panpotent culture that is struggling to be born.  They do all in their power to further the obsolete belief that women who choose not to have children are defective, because in their view the whole point of women is to be baby-factories.  Our friend said: “We should hold a non-mother’s day to celebrate women who have foregone motherhood.” 

Of course, in democratic countries a 1-child policy can’t simply be imposed by proscription as it has been in China, but having children can be made less alluring through tax policy and by means of moral suasion, because the decision to have children has now taken on profound ethical dimensions.  It’s not just a choice about the quality of your life and your children’s lives, but about the quality of everyone’s lives, the quality of life of everyone who will ever live.  The choice to have children has moral weight; it may well be the most fraught ethical decision of most peoples’ lives.  Prospective parents need to think long and hard about what they’re about to do.  What’s needed is a media campaign to put the brakes on breeding.  If only some civic-minded billionaire would get behind it, a sea-change in awareness could be effected, whereupon the askance glance of others would discourage reckless breeding.  At least, if Franzen’s view that it is merely the freedom to breed that is ruining the planet were true, but it may be something else, something more insidious and more difficult to combat.  In the US, at least, children have become sacraments in an informal religious cult conceived to transport the faithful beyond the individual limits of sex and death.  This persuasion may be the most difficult obstacle to overcome on the road toward Zero Population Growth.