Having kids: it’s the world’s biggest ever Ponzi scheme.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090914/joyce/single

Parents who merely hope to ‘re’populate the earth with replacement people, and so live on through eternity do not, IMHO, have ‘quality’ motives for producing children. I think it has to be about the kids and not ‘us’ since having kids requires a large degree of self-abnegation.

It is about deciding to have children in order to continue the evolution towards a sustainable and equal existence for all. That is, the intent to rear children for a ‘quality’ existence of self-actualization and promotion of the same to others. The quality issue is in the mind of the parent, rather than the achievements of the offspring. How kids will turn out is never predictable but the odds for success can be increased. Abortion rights aren’t about population control but about the decision not to bring a child into the world by people unable or unwilling to provide a quality existence for them. Again, parental intent (often called, choice), is the subject and not the children themselves.

We need more people free of old-guard fear and restraint to promote ‘quality of life’ philosophy and practice. Most of us are too damaged and limited to make sufficient impact. Contributing ideas that others can run with is about all a lot of us can hope to do. Some do it better than others which is what brought us to IBTP.

Sorry for the poor editing of this hasty post but the eugenics reference required immediate reply.

The point is that any life can contribute more than it consumes if you look beyond food and fuel as the measure of their footprint. Individuals will alter the manner in which consumption exceeds supply. Consumption is currently a competitive issue, strictly artificial in nature. Supply is dictated by the male-led corporations (try reading Michael Pollan on agriculture), determined to stop the promotion of sustainable living for short-term gain. If you have left-overs, do you send them to the Sudan? Even if we stopped having babies, the world’s poor and oppressed wouldn’t benefit from because they would not be the recipients of any excess left to the wealthier powers. They would still lack the where-with-all to buy it under existing rules.

I am suggesting that educated young people, free from the experience of early, crippling pain and abuse (emotional and/or physical) will be able to skip decades of evolution and go straight to effective advocacy while still young and strong. Few victims manage to surmount their experiences as Jill notes in her latest blog post about the sex trade. Victims do wait in the wings, but for whom?

Seeing the world for what it is from the ‘get-go’, is a real time-saver. No Ron, not all will ‘get’ it just because it’s presented. However, the odds increase with such a start. Anyone with the guts and ability to do so should not feel disenfranchised from feminism or humanism if they raise a child to shape better lives for themselves and, hopefully, their cultures. The descendants of those who escaped genocides from many places and cultures have had an important impact in recent history. The denial of such events across cultures is part of the revisionist history that people swallow whole once the actual survivors die out. Descendants of survivors were likely instrumental in saving lives in Kosovo. Too bad Darfur doesn’t appear to be on any map published by western civilizations despite there being more advocates for it than in previous generations.

Look at Iran’s youth, educated even as rights were taken from women with the silent or enthusiastic support of Iranian males. Largely powerless for that very reason of surrendering those rights. (see op-ed in today’s Times on that topic) Funny how revolutions only succeed when you have the support of women who a) engender those values, b) pass them along to their children. Guess that’s why history is full of many cultures which separate boys from their mothers early on, physically in the educational system or mentally as in the US (boy versus girl attitudes and past-times). Females ‘warp’ the Male mind. Translation: Females demonstrate the obsolescence (and obscenity) of the traditional male orientation.

‘Quality and not quantity’ refers to how a few individuals can hasten change. It is not an endorsement of over-consumption nor a religious mandate to ‘go forth and multiply’. It is a rationale for the reasonable desire to do so if it can be done ‘well’. Sure, Ron, you can do that for existing children – but just how much time do you have to be a big brother or sister? Or, perhaps, a spinster Aunt?

We do persuade others, which generally convinces them not to actively work against those trying to make progress.

What you mean “we” here? Do you honestly think that “active” feminists are all that way from birth or bringing-up? Who on earth started this whole thing?

But passive people don’t alter policies (hence the Prop 8 vote in California which might have gone the other way but for stay-at-home voters).

Here’s another logical leap. First, the assumption that I-don’t-quite-know-who (non-cradle feminists?) are “passive” and that non-voters somehow lost that election. In fact, the November 2008 election in California brought out a lot of first-time voters. Unfortunately lots of those voted for Prop. 8. I blame the godbags, in particular.

Your parents aren’t reading this, are they?

My parents are long dead. What on earth would that have to do with anything?

Odd though it may seem to some, they both came some distance in my direction over the years. Mom got good and pissed-off and left the church about the same time I was doing the same. I wish everyone here could’ve listened in on my dad’s telling me about his jury-duty stint, in which he persuaded the rest of the jury to find a serviceman of some stripe guilty of rape. Defense had argues that since the victim was a prostitute, she couldn’t be raped. Dad maintained that that’s like saying a storekeeper couldn’t be robbed. Might be primitive reasoning but it worked on that group. I was so proud.

And just how much change have you wrought?

Interesting question. I suspect I’ll never know. I’m clearly a failure as a nurse, or at least a burn-out. (I saved a few lives, I guess. Don’t know whether they were the “right” lives; some of them were even being raised Mormon. Helped get some kids away from abuse; how do you count that? Trouble with hospital work is that it’s mostly team stuff, very little lone-ranger opportunity.)

I’m a failure as a landscaper and, worst of all in my estimation, as an arborist, both because I can no longer physically do the work. I was one of the first wave of women in my specialty here, and there are lots of us in the club now. (Literal club; very good, physiologically sound, artistic techniques.)

Currently I’m being a failure as a columnist, partly because so many publications have gone under or are circling the drain; partly because I’m enjoying persistent chronic anoxia and a drug load that wipes my brain now and then.

Haven’t passed any laws lately. Have managed to promote feminists interests in all of those fields above, though. I’d like to think I’m a small part of the reason why nursing, for example, isn’t quite the profession it was in the mid-’70s when I started. What went on started without me and continues after me, but I was in there pulling for a decade or more.

Might you have accomplished more (not to say you haven’t, I have no knowledge of you or your life)

Well, that’s true enough. Interesting that it didn;t stop you from this rhetorical tack.

if your parents had started you on the ‘right’ road at an earlier stage of your life?

My parents thought they were starting me on the right road; that’s the point. Just like everybody’s parents. No exceptions, including everyone here.

I was a self-identified feminist by the time I reached adulthood; I’d been a feminist for a long time but didn’t have the word to describe it. Like a lot of us, it was a relief to hear other women saying what I’d been thinking and saying for years, stuff that had been dismissed as my private craziness. Knowing all this would have saved me lots of pain, but I’m not sure it would have made me somehow more accomplished a feminist. Being raised Catholic cost me a lot but it sure as hell honed my politics.

How many got to this point due to tragic events and abuse teaching us, rather late, about what needs to be fought?

Quite a few, I’d imagine. Do you have some fantasy that someone else’s having babies will somehow reach back in time and cure that?

Lastly, if we are doomed, then it doesn’t matter what anyone does so there are no limits to impose.

Hey, that word was your introduction up there. Here’s the point: We’re not the only beings on the planet. Kids being raised in a feminist fashion still consume, still take up space——especially “First-World” kids. And there’s no more guarantee they’ll live out feminist ideals, as self-evident as we might find those, that there was that I’d be a Good Catholic Wife’n'Mother or Sister of Mercy, as I was raised to be.