is perhaps lacking in compassion and understanding for other women and many men. She is feminist and stands upon the shoulders of feminist men and women from the past 200 years in:

• wanting an education before marriage;

• waiting to marry and give birth until her 20s (would she want to have been forced to start bearing at 15 and have four by now, perhaps with several miscarriages along the way?);

• planning to work both at raising her children and an "outside" career of her choice;

• possibly even wanting these choices for her own daughters, and wanting her sons to support female partners in these choices - if she can have any children (we all assume we can but a lot of women AND MEN can never have children.)

• VOTING for politicians who support her right to have these choices (women couldn't even vote until the 1920s...)

There are probably fifty definitions of feminism out there, and not all the historians will lump all these women's rights issues under feminism. However "non-feminists" need to be a little clearer about what they are talking about, unless they like being brainless parrots for Rush Limbaugh.

We humans all share most of our genes - we are about 99.9% genetically identical, according to the human genome project. We apparently went through a population bottleneck in the geologically recent past. So all this focus on "my genes, my reproduction, my eggs, my sperm" while partly valid in a strictly Darwinian view, may not be quite as crucial even were that framework all that mattered. Evolution does tend to operate on the small differences, it's true, but there is also a lot of randomness involved. Helping other people is also helping a lot of "your genes", especially if you help the species keep going instead of self-destructing - as someone already pointed out here.

It is a very difficult "Darwinian contradiction" in our Globally Warming World that the more children an individual has, the less likely anyone's children may be to survive long-term.

Many people feel that their ideas, beliefs, treatment of people and the planet, and world view are a larger part of what they can pass on to children than their eye color - the idea of "memes" (R. Dawkins) is a very interesting one that I'd recommend everyone read about. There are a lot of children of all ages who need to be adopted. Memes have no parental Expiration Date.

We humans all share most of our genes - we are about 99.9% genetically identical, according to the human genome project. We apparently went through a population bottleneck in the geologically recent past. So all this focus on "my genes, my reproduction, my eggs, my sperm" while partly valid in a strictly Darwinian view, may not be quite as crucial even were that framework all that mattered. Evolution does tend to operate on the small differences, it's true, but there is also a lot of randomness involved. Helping other people is also helping a lot of "your genes", especially if you help the species keep going instead of self-destructing - as someone already pointed out here.

It is a very difficult "Darwinian contradiction" in our Globally Warming World that the more children an individual has, the less likely anyone's children may be to survive long-term.

Many people feel that their ideas, beliefs, treatment of people and the planet, and world view are a larger part of what they can pass on to children than their eye color - the idea of "memes" (R. Dawkins) is a very interesting one that I'd recommend everyone read about. There are a lot of children of all ages who need to be adopted. Memes have no parental Expiration Date.

Another issue that the "selfish-women-who-delay-childbearing" oriented writers have ignored is this... When did all this research about womens' declining fertility get published, and how were women supposed to know in advance?

When I was in my 20s, I distinctly remember being told that women could have children until their mid 40s. Now my friends and I are in our late 30s and early 40s, and some have been successful and some have not, of those who wanted children. Now a lot of research is coming out that shows it is impossible for many women by this age. So a lot of women in my generation made choices based upon incorrect information. We needed this information 20 years ago, not last year, or even five years ago. Yet certain writers and "non-feminists" seem to blame the women involved (not their male partners, of course, who might not have any motile sperm but it's still the woman's fault).

Does this mean that young people who can make choices based upon recent research are superior? If such people think so, they are going to have some very rude awakenings in life. The bottled water they are drinking may give their children all cancer at age 6, or some other bizarre, terrible, unexpected event will undoubtedly occur in their lives. All it takes is time. Perhaps they will manage to forget the lack of compassion they had for others and find some new way to feel superior, or perhaps they will learn something.