Letters to the Editor
Laurel962
Published Letters: 486 Editor's Choice: 37
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Why this really does matter
[Read the article: Million-dollar babies]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Because having much larger families is not simply a "choice", like what do we watch on cable tonight -- it affects ALL of us. The planet is vastly overpopulated, at six billion plus. Anyone remember ZERO POPULATION GROWTH??? You are supposed to do no more than replace yourself and your spouse, i.e., the two child family (it did not become the standard by accident), and that was actually a reality for many decades.
What affluent, educated families do in this regard matters, because we tend to emulate the upper crust (even as we make fun of them) -- their behavior becomes "the new standard". Divorce was expensive and rare, until wealthy people started doing it casually -- now people at all levels of society divorce without much thought or consequence. Giant houses used to be expensive oddities, Victorian leftovers from the gilded age...rich people in the 50s and 60s built elegant, modern ranches. Then McMansions became the style. Now everyone wants a giant house again, and the ecological consequences be damned! Ditto for the giant SUV. Where do you think THAT trend came from?
I have seen this in my own family. My parents were big-time into ZPG, and passed this goal onto us. But my brother's wife, newly moved to a very affluent suburb, decided to have a third baby. Why? Because her other two were in school and getting older, and she couldn't justify staying home full time without another child. With two children, it's hard to justify full-time SAHM-hood after about 8 years, as both kids are in full day school. But with THREE you can stretch that out to 12 years...with FOUR, you can stretch that out to 16 years and beyond.
It would be MYOB...except that this impacts the environment. It affects your taxes -- more kids, more schools, more taxes. And affluent families use ten times the resources that poorer families do...they gobble up the spaces in pre-school and Ivy League colleges, ensuring that talented middle class kids have no shot at all of attending. They burn mega-gallons of gas riding their giant broods around in huge SUVs. They take the major vacations by plane. They furnish their McMansions with giant furniture, decimating whole hectares of rainforest with every home purchase.
Affluent women are VERY well aware of their precarious situations, actually. They know they can be divorced and replaced by their hedge fund manager hubbies in a nanosecond. Another reason for more kids -- men are less likely to leave when there are really young, dependent kids at home. Or a pregnant wife. You can extend your tenure as trophy wife for years by pumping out more kids. And if your plan fails, well, more kids equals more child support (troll alert!). (As far as all the mania about manicures and hair styles and workouts: hey, if your entire future was hinged on your physical appearance, and you were constantly threatened with being replaced, YOU would be pretty obsessed about these things too.)
The ultimate point is that we are all going to pay for the selfishness of these super-size families with decreased resources, global warming, and the middle-class being increasing shut out of opportunities. The affluent class's bad habits and selfish behavior WILL trickle down to middle, working class and poor families who will want to be "cool" just like the rich people (how else do you explain such families driving Hummers and SUVs they can hardly afford the payments on?) How can we talk inteliigently about what we want to do about global warming when we can't talk intelligently about Zero Population Growth, when we put our desires for "another baby" above national or global sanity?
We are a nation of the most pathetic hypocrites in this regard.
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Oh, and reread Betty Friedan while you are at it
[Read the article: Million-dollar babies]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Because Ms. Friedan talked about this ALL in great clarity and apparently foresight back in 1963!!! When she wrote The Feminine Mystique....the problem is perhaps that she is no longer with us, and the book is no longer the feminist icon that it was in the 60s and 70s, hence most Gen X and Y women have not even read it.
Betty talked long and hard about the uber-moms of the 50s, upper class and highly educated, who immediately married after college and set about procreating without even thinking about the consequences, for the women, their families and for society at large. The huge over-population "boom" created by this behavior became the baby boomers, and we all know how well THAT has turned out for the world!!!! The uber-moms of the 50s managed to reverse gains for women that had started early in the century, with suffragettes, voting rights, and women entering many professions and turned that all upside down.
She interviewed many women, and you could see the emptiness of their lives that they try to fill with multiple children, excessive "homemaking", volunteer work, clubs and so forth.
I am sure this is a cycle and like all cycles, it is merely "coming around again". But this time it is truly dangerous and destructive, not to some artificial feminist ideal but to our entire planet and way of life.