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Even Dr. McCoy only fathered one child
Aug. 4th, 2009 11:33 amI expect this may piss off more people than my political ramblings. Namely, because I expect most people who read this journal agree more or less with my politics - not because they're my opinions, but because they agree with opinions I happen to state that others before me have held, too.
But we liberals tend to be a touchy-feely "you do what you want with your body, go ahead" bunch, so when one of us says "I don't know, I think limiting reproduction might be a good idea," there will be screeches of OMG111!!EUGENICS-BABYHATER from others. However, I've said it before and I'll repeat it - I'm pretty much the opposite of your mental image of a pro-lifer, who is adamantly against abortion. I have almost no problem with any woman who wants to terminate a pregnancy (I won't even qualify it with "in the early terms" because 99.9 percent of women are not STUPID ENOUGH to wait to have an abortion during the final trimester - pretty much the only reason a "late term" is performed is to save the woman's life or because some debilitating illness has been detected in utero. Plus, I imagine it would be close enough to birth to hurt like a sonofabitch, and why go through all that for something you don't want?). But people who want to reproduce? I'd kind of like to see them prove they can handle the end result, before conceiving.
Plus, I don't discriminate. When a good number - not all, mind you - of pro-lifers go on about saving fetuses, what they mean are white fetuses. Many would be perfectly happy for brown people alone to stop multiplying and taking us over. I'm all in favor of everyone making better breeding decisions. Unlike a lot of people, I don't care if you can financially afford to give birth to 19 children - just because you can do a thing, it does not always follow that you should do it. My uterus is still in prime condition, but I have no desire to fire up the factory for even one (besides, somebody has to balance out OctoMom and the Arkansas Vaginal Clown Car).
For those of you who feel we need to keep exponentially multiplying so we'll have enough young people to pay for our Social Security and Medicare in our old age - what do you expect those young people to do when they're 60? Lean on an even bigger pool of younger people? And so on and so forth? Is the Earth going to magically expand to accommodate a bigger population? Let's not forget that despite all its above-water living space, not every square inch of land can be successfully pillaged for food and resources - there are millions of acres of desert and scrub and marshes and frozen tundras where nothing can grow or live for long. (Then, of course, there's the minor matter of us not being the only species using Earth's resources, even though we pretty much think everything's here for us.) Plus, not everybody is extroverted enough to enjoy being crammed into living spaces together. I visited Hong Kong many years ago and was poleaxed by the number of people expected to live in a 600 square-foot apartment with each other, because the island is only so large. Nobody needs a mansion to themselves, but some people are not social creatures and need to live alone or at least have a lot of alone time.
But we liberals tend to be a touchy-feely "you do what you want with your body, go ahead" bunch, so when one of us says "I don't know, I think limiting reproduction might be a good idea," there will be screeches of OMG111!!EUGENICS-BABYHATER from others. However, I've said it before and I'll repeat it - I'm pretty much the opposite of your mental image of a pro-lifer, who is adamantly against abortion. I have almost no problem with any woman who wants to terminate a pregnancy (I won't even qualify it with "in the early terms" because 99.9 percent of women are not STUPID ENOUGH to wait to have an abortion during the final trimester - pretty much the only reason a "late term" is performed is to save the woman's life or because some debilitating illness has been detected in utero. Plus, I imagine it would be close enough to birth to hurt like a sonofabitch, and why go through all that for something you don't want?). But people who want to reproduce? I'd kind of like to see them prove they can handle the end result, before conceiving.
Plus, I don't discriminate. When a good number - not all, mind you - of pro-lifers go on about saving fetuses, what they mean are white fetuses. Many would be perfectly happy for brown people alone to stop multiplying and taking us over. I'm all in favor of everyone making better breeding decisions. Unlike a lot of people, I don't care if you can financially afford to give birth to 19 children - just because you can do a thing, it does not always follow that you should do it. My uterus is still in prime condition, but I have no desire to fire up the factory for even one (besides, somebody has to balance out OctoMom and the Arkansas Vaginal Clown Car).
For those of you who feel we need to keep exponentially multiplying so we'll have enough young people to pay for our Social Security and Medicare in our old age - what do you expect those young people to do when they're 60? Lean on an even bigger pool of younger people? And so on and so forth? Is the Earth going to magically expand to accommodate a bigger population? Let's not forget that despite all its above-water living space, not every square inch of land can be successfully pillaged for food and resources - there are millions of acres of desert and scrub and marshes and frozen tundras where nothing can grow or live for long. (Then, of course, there's the minor matter of us not being the only species using Earth's resources, even though we pretty much think everything's here for us.) Plus, not everybody is extroverted enough to enjoy being crammed into living spaces together. I visited Hong Kong many years ago and was poleaxed by the number of people expected to live in a 600 square-foot apartment with each other, because the island is only so large. Nobody needs a mansion to themselves, but some people are not social creatures and need to live alone or at least have a lot of alone time.
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