There are many wonderful and rational reasons that we shouldn't reproduce: The world is overpopulated as it is... There are already so many children in the world who need a loving home... Raising a child in North America is often such a resource-intensive endeavour, that we can't possibly justify it in light of current environmental conditions... The world is such an awful place, why bring a child into it to inevitably suffer, only to satisfy our own selfish desires... Trust me, I was an annoying IDS kid in school, I get it.
There are also a host of arguments that people use to defend their primal, instinctive need to have a baby. Some of these are utterly ridiculous, but we partially subscribe to some of them if we like to fancy ourselves an optimist: Well no, actually, the world is a beautiful place, and my child will be a flower that thrives among flowers, rendering it even more beautiful... Maybe they will even be the one to cure cancer, HIV/AIDS, world hunger, or, you know, like, the next Gandhi ... Life is too short to worry about other people so I'm just going to carpe diem... One child won't make that much of a difference to the numbers so if we're screwed, we're screwed either way...It's not about the numbers, it's how we live that's the problem... Humans are animals just like any other, why should I be expected to suppress my reproductive instinct? That's not fair!
Call me pessimistic, but the odds of me giving birth to the child who will grow to give global food distribution a complete makeover, or unearth the cure for symptoms of social dis-ease, are slim to none... and Slim just got disappeared by the thugs for the New World Order. Besides, that's a lot of pressure to put on my child.
And that's odd... It's only after having a baby that I've become open to giving this a really good think. Maybe deliberate ignorance is an evolved trait, just like women's tendency to forget the pain of labour around the time their body is ready to bear another child.
Before I met my reproductive mate, I was sure I'd spend my life travelling the world, acquiring infinite knowledge, wisdom, and yoga moves... attaining spiritual enlightenment, at the very least. Then, in my last year of school, I got incredibly dissatisfied. I didn't feel the slightest sense of accomplishment upon graduating from university, and a trip across the country didn't scratch my itchy feet. The thought of going to India for a fourth time didn't even do it for me. To me, the trippiest of all trips would be to build a home with the man I'd fallen in love with over the phone over the course of the past year.
Okay, fine, you say, but there are a lot of cohabitating heterosexual people of the opposite sex who don't reproduce. There is a lot of other stuff to do before you have kids, right? It was a choice, it didn't "just happen", and it was a choice that we didn't wait very long, by some's standards, to make. I'm not going to suggest that everybody is so old-school as to insist that marriage, a mortgage and a station wagon must precede the baby choice. But if you are so-old school as to make the insinuation that a couple's readiness to reproduce can be measured through their material acquisitions, then you'll admit that our two-out-of-three is pretty impressive, considering we seem to be perma-broke.
So we got hitched, moved, got knocked up, moved again, got a new car suitable for our 6-member canine/human unit, and had our baby (still no mortgage). The end.
At what point in there do I make my point? I don't. The moral of the story is? Don't. Judge.
Yes, the world's messed. Yes, it's going to get worse before it gets better. Yes, having a child was a selfish choice, and it is one that I didn't so much make with my mind as I did surrender to with all my being. Even if my dabbling in the rational argument of it all had resulted in my being unequivocally against having children, I wouldn't regret my actions.
If anybody ever hears of a convincing argument as to why it is a good idea to reproduce, let me know, I would like to use it. Until then, I'm just going to hang out being happy.
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