I wasn't going to bother with another Pandagon post. There's just way too much nuttiness at that site to comment on every, single nutty or stupid post. But this post on the benefits of being childless or restricting oneself to one child is patently ridiculous.
Amanda (who else would write such junk?) starts out with the somewhat valid point about overpopulation and conserving resources. She even pretends that she's not advocating coercive government policies, although she doesn't seem to understand what, exactly, is wrong with such policies.
For a woman who spends a lot of time blogging about the fun of sex and that anyone who acts like an adult must not enjoy it, she has a real hang-up about having children. I'm all for people who don't want to have kids not having kids. There are ways to avoid having kids when you decide having a child is the absolute worst thing that could happen to you:
1. Don't have sex
2. Get sterilized
That statement will get the nutroots howling, but there's nothing else that prevents pregnancy like not having sex or only having sex after sterilization. Every other contraceptive measure fails, even abortion.
But the point wasn't about sex or abortion. The point is that Amanda thinks having children is a really big problem. She points out the very rare cases of extremely large families as though these are the norm, or that not condemning such families is advocating that every person in America go out and have 17 kids. Neither of these insinuations is true, of course. Given that the U.S. birth rate is at an all-time low, you'd think Amanda would just 86 a post like this but nope, she really thinks we need to know why having more than one kid is more traumatic than cancer.
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.
It's a novel argument, I must admit. Why have two children? You'll have to provide twice as many toys that end up broken the day after Christmas! And you'll have to buy two Volvos, cuz the little darlings can't be deprived of the most expensive of everything or else they will be disadvantaged.
It's tempting to psychoanalyze Amanda after you read posts like this. I know she has a sister. Perhaps she always resented having a sister. Maybe sister got more toys or attention or better grades. Who knows? But every anti-child post she writes comes down to some ridiculous statement like "only have one child so you can send him to a private college. You wouldn't want him scarred for life by going to a state university."
Amanda should know by now that people with children are happier than people without children (just as married people are happier than single people). And people with multiple children have made the same choices Amanda approves of (only in reverse). And above and beyond whether having children makes you happy (the study says one child provides as much happiness as multiple children), as a civilization, we consider having children to be an intrinsic good not associated with personal, selfish motivations. In this post, I discussed a woman who has six children and confronts directly the "Why have more children?" obnoxiousness. She says:
What happens in larger families? Children are more tolerant. They learn that they are one part of a whole much larger than themselves and that the common good usually takes precedence over their particular desires. They also discover the principle of scarcity; they learn to conserve. Their clothes are on loan and passed on to others when they are done. They have to share their toys. They cannot take more food than they can eat, or someone else will not have enough. They can't take long, hot showers, or someone else gets a cold shower. They learn that their singular behavior affects multiple people. They are not the center of the universe.
Children with multiple siblings are also more accepting. They practice living with a variety of temperaments, quirks, and ages. Older children cannot stay safely within their own peer group. They learn to hold babies, sing lullabies, and change diapers. A teenager cannot retreat, morose, into his bedroom every afternoon to listen to his music—his 3-year-old brother will jump on his back and demand a gallop around the room. A 16-year-old girl will trudge through the door from school, worry on her face, to be greeted by a flying 18-month-old jumping into her arms.
Children from larger families have to work together. Every morning, the grump, the overachiever, the early riser, the dreamer, the snuggler, and the toddler must negotiate their separate concerns toward a single goal: to get out the door and to their respective schools on time. In summer, for a family with a commercial fishing operation like ours, the goal is to pick all of the fish from all of the fishing nets before the next meal. The children have to help each other. They have to work together in storms on the ocean.
I'm not advocating that people have children without putting a lot of thought into it. But I find it disturbing that people like Amanda argue constantly about women's choice, then bash the choice some women make to have children. "Teh Patriarchy Made Me Do It" isn't really much of an argument in this day and age, and trying to say that women only want large families because of societal pressure is myopic. We've never lived in a time with more choices for women. That not all women choose the way many liberals want seems to be a problem for the Left.
UPDATE: Amanda was getting a lot of flak about this post in the comments. While many of the people weren't as blunt as I am, a fair number were arguing that it's hard to support choice then slam a choice you disagree with (although someone said this is perfectly acceptable; I'll remember this the next time abortion comes up). Amanda answered this way:
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.
In other words, the people most likely to be able to support their own families should be discouraged. Huh?
UPDATE x2: She just keeps sticking her foot in her mouth. Here's another attempt to excuse herself:
I’m glad there are people with children who reduce their (environmental) impact. It would be even more reduced if they didn’t have children.
There's just not much you can say to someone who has her foot rammed in her mouth up to her knee.
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