I just want to take something I left in the comments and push it up here:
[L]et’s be clear that I am not in favor of forced contraception, for anyone, even though I’ll admit it sometimes strikes me as a fantastic idea. I think that’s how you “respect” a woman’s decision to have or not have a baby. It is, in the end, her decision, and I respect it in the same way I respect a woman’s decision to have or not have an abortion, in the same way I think that goddamn retarded Octomom DOES HAVE the right to have those eight babies, awful as it all may be. I will fight for women to have the rights to these choices. That doesn’t mean I agree with them.
I hate how, no matter what I say, the response from commenters is “I thought you were all about women’s rights,” like it’s some kneejerk argument everyone keeps in their back pocket. I am a supporter of women’s rights. I vehemently disagree with “women’s rights” as they’re practiced and preached today. So, yeah, I’m all about women’s rights. I just think what most people consider being all about “women’s rights” is stupid, parroting and unexamined.
“Women’s rights” is such a broad concept, and everyone interprets it how they want to, and most people interpret it in some way they heard it from someone else, who heard it from someone else, who read it on a website, which was just parroting something they read in a book published twenty years ago, and no one along that chain actually sat and thought deeply and creatively about what is and is not beneficial about championing certain aspects of a woman’s potential. And what was true then, in that context, is not necessarily true today, although we continue to form “feminist” arguments as though the supporting tautology had not long ago decomposed.
Things I am also not in favor of: Murdering babies, or murdering your baby specifically. Things I am in favor of: The right to choose an abortion, even late-term; and the right to ask a doctor to implant eight goddamn fertilized eggs in the uterus of a woman who doesn’t have any money or any foreseeable capability of making money or, really, any sustainable runs at sanity. Because if I’m going to support the right to choose, it’s got to work both ways.
And I don’t think people make the decision to have children maliciously, or with any sort of ill intent, I just think it’s a largely unexamined decision, or at least one examined from all the wrong angles. Why do we want to have our own children? Why, exactly? Why today, when we have so many other options and childbirth is no longer in any way necessary — but, rather, detrimental — to the survival of the species? Who, really, benefits from the birth of a child? Does the child? Does the parent? Does the world? If you say the child is a beneficiary, how do you know? How can you claim to know what is beneficial to a non-existent life form? Your child never got any say. Your bio-baby is now stuck here, in this mortal coil, for eight or ninety or more years, because of a decision you made on behalf of the child. It was the most important decision anyone will ever make in the history of his or her life: You decided to conceive and birth her. You decided to put her here and it’s a mostly irreversible decision. You never asked her permission. So how can we talk about a fetus’s right to life without taking about a fetus’s right to pregnancy termination? About a fetus’s right to have never been conceived in the first place? (Getting a little ridiculous here? Yeah. That’s because the fetus right-to-life argument is ridiculous.)
Why are we not having this conversation in larger forums? Why, when I raise the question of “Is it really a good idea to biologically reproduce?” am I shot down by blindly furious mothers who want to tell me, specifically, how horrible I am as a human? No one is saying we should kill your existing kids. No one is saying you weren’t making the best decision you knew how to make when you had them. No one is even saying you’re not a good mom. But why can’t we have this conversation objectively? Why does everyone involved have to focus all their fear and doubt into anger toward me.
This planet does not have the resources to support its existing humans — not even close. We know this; it’s not a secret. Why do we need to create more humans right now? There is no easier way to increase your carbon footprint sky-high than to birth another human. You can drive a hybrid for the rest of your life and it won’t even come close to cleaning up the harm you did to this planet by having a child.
If the planet’s trees were taking up too much of the planet’s C02 and producing too much oxygen, we would, like, stop planting trees. No-brainer. We’d all be like “Hey! Stop planting trees! We have enough! If you want a tree on your patio, just go get one at Home Depot! Don’t plant it yourself!” and that’s what would happen.
So, again — why can’t we just have this conversation? Why can’t we talk about how maybe, just maybe, we should be having fewer kids, or none at all. About the pros and cons. Like reasonable people.
It makes me insane to see couples spend tens of thousands of dollars and endure countless tearful, sleepless nights, relationship endings and hospital visits and ALL THE ENDLESS DRAMA just so they can have a shot at reproducing their own biological material. It’s so blindly egomaniacal. Like there aren’t enough fucking babies on this planet. Like what this planet REALLY needs is the VERY SPECIAL baby that you and your partner feel UNIQUELY CAPABLE of producing.
Listen: My dog is, hands-down, the coolest dog that ever lived on earth, and offers more value to the planet than any dog in the history of time. And he already existed when I decided I wanted him. He was born with about 50% of his awesomeness, and I loved him into the remaining 50%. I’m no less a mother to him because I didn’t birth him. He is no less my child. He will never be as good at math as I was, for sure, but he is a true joy and a life I can be proud I raised.
Why does everyone need their bio-babies so very, very badly? Why, other than pure, unadulterated ego? I know we don’t see it that way — it’s disguised under layers and layers of trickery, and we firmly believe that it is our absolute purpose in life to gestate and vaginally recover a human life. Again: No one does this maliciously. The ego is a cunning and quiet thing.
But what is so special about your biological material that it absolutely must be merged with your partner’s and reproduced to create one of a billion potential outcomes, most of which won’t be what you were expecting or hoping for anyway. But you’ll love that baby no matter what — even though it didn’t get your eye color, or your husband’s patient disposition, and instead has a funny chin that no one can quite account for and a total inability to get through the school day without winding up in the principal’s office. You will still love that child with every cell in your body. Why does that child have to share half your genetic material when you’re gonna love it no matter how that genetic material manifests? Why is it not better for the planet, and equally good for you, to adopt a baby that already exists? Why can’t we at least talk about it like adult humans, and not like Angry Mama Bears out in the woods; Mama Bears who keep the “women’s rights” argument in their pocket because, as long as you don’t pull too hard at it, it holds together about as well as toilet paper.
