"IT'S MINE -- ALLLLL MIIIIINE," he said, self-indulgently.
Posted on 05/30/2007 11:21:26 AM PDT by qam1
Contradictory messages about women's fertility are breeding like rabbits this week. In largely-Catholic Brazil, the government is subsidizing birth control pills so poor women can afford the contraceptive, despite a recent visit by Pope Benedict XVI, who mainly used his time to condemn abortion, contraception and sex outside marriage. In China, officials are rounding up rural, pregnant women and conducting forced abortions to enforce the mandatory one child policy.
In Canada, on the other hand, I'm the problem. Thirty-something. Childless. And a threat to Canada's future economic well being. The nation's fertility rate has plummeted to 1.53 children per woman, and Maclean's has published the latest cry of alarm: "Hey Lady! What will it take to make you breed? Your government needs to know."
The culprits, according to the article, are female education and fiscal autonomy, secularization, birth control, Sex and the City, a heightened desire for personal freedom and the angst that comes of bringing a child into a dangerous world. "In a hyper-individualistic, ultra-commodified culture like ours, motherhood, for better and worse, is less a fact of life than just another lifestyle choice."
You don't have to read much between the lines to discern the big class bias behind all of this hand wringing. Stats actually show that young, unmarried, uneducated, non-professional women are doing just fine in the baby department. The elitist worry seems to be that the "right" kind of woman is forgoing kids. Read: middle class and up.
Baby economics?
The Maclean's story goes on to crunch the economic equation such women face -- and believe me, I've done the numbers myself.
The cost of a kid ranges from $260,000 to $1.6 million depending on whom you talk to. Women lose income when they have a child, unlike men, the "motherhood penalty," of about 20 per cent per year. Kids are the "new glass ceiling," only 74 per cent of women who leave the work force are able to return, and only 40 per cent of those return to full time, professional jobs. Mothers are 44 percent less likely to be hired than non-mothers with the same resume, experiences and qualifications. So not surprisingly, while the majority of male senior execs have kids, the majority of female execs don't. In short, women bear the costs -- financial and career -- of having children. "These days, it's not just a matter of a woman wanting children, it's a matter wanting them at the expense of everything else she's worked for."
What solutions flow from this analysis? Cash incentives don't work to address the problem, (paging Mr. Harper) but the French experiment does. Among many other benefits, the government provides an extensive, free child care system where parents can leave children on a moment's notice, a calibrated income-tax rate for families, and a tax deduction for in-home child care help. The fertility rate has soared to 2.0 from 1.8 in just two years. And some feminists say the real victory is that women no longer shoulder alone the social burden of reproduction.
Fine, let's say we wave a magic wand and make all that happen in Canada. The financial and career barriers have disappeared like a stinky diaper in one of those diaper genie things. There's stimulating, free daycare. I can keep working part time and spend time with my pretend child. I can keep climbing the career ladder, rung per rung, with my child-free sisters....
All well and good. But next time my friends and I get together to discuss the baby question, I'd invite the editors of Maclean's, and any wonk they'd like to bring along, to join us. They would hear a conversation very different from the one reflected in their input-output, incentives-driven analysis.
They would hear women struggling to reconcile head and heart.
Real conversation
When my other child-free but child-keen friends get together we don't talk about having kids to stimulate the economy, provide skilled workers and pay for boomers to have hip replacement surgery. We don't consider it our duty to solve the "crisis" caused by boomers retiring without enough young people to pay for their medicare. We don't lie awake at night fretting over the looming labour shortage, even if Canada does wind up, as projected, 1.2 million workers short by 2020.
We don't imagine it our purpose in life to produce labourers, consumers and taxpayers.
What we talk about a lot is whether it is morally right to have a child, given what we know about the state of planet.
My friends and I talk about how people like us in developed countries are vacuuming up the world's resources. We belong to the 10 per cent of the world population who consume 90 per cent of the Earth's resources. We talk about global overpopulation. We talk about children in other countries who don't have enough to eat or access to medicine.
Kind friends have soothed some of those concerns. Some have offered, brightly, that we might find real solutions to looming environmental apocalypse quicker than we think. Others have told me I should feel entitled to do what makes me happy. Hey, you're only here once! And some have provided this reassurance: if I create and raise a happy, healthy person with a small footprint who respects others then that's a kind of service to the planet.
Thanks, everyone. So far, though, your lullaby is still not quite strong enough to convince me.
What I would need to breed are reasons based on ethics not economics. That's how I've approached other personal decisions like which career to pursue, or even what clothing to wear.
"IT'S MINE -- ALLLLL MIIIIINE," he said, self-indulgently.
So You Want Me to Breed?
My friends and I talk about how people like us in developed countries are vacuuming up the world's resources. We belong to the 10 per cent of the world population who consume 90 per cent of the Earth's resources. We talk about global overpopulation. We talk about children in other countries who don't have enough to eat or access to medicine.
I wish all Liberals would take this line of thinking and not breed!
No, Vanessa, DO NOT BREED, you are too selfish to be a mother.
Leave the breeding to me and my family.
Ah, but the problem is these people have the energy saved from not raising kids, which they use for protesting and contaminating the minds of other people’s children. They miss out on the reality and immediate feedback they would get from a real child. Instead they are filled with untested and unrealistic fantasies of how the world works. If they spent some of their energy raising their own children, they would find their liberal positions impossible to square with reality. And then maybe there would be some hope for them, and the rest of us.
It should be mandatory for women to have children??
It’s OK, lady, you’re excused from the program. We don’t need more of you and you’re so narcissistic you’d make a rotten mom anyway.
This is a real concern. Every functioning society needs the correct balance (within reason). Look at our current situation. Our growth as a nation is being driven by 3rd world immigrants and their offspring.
Regardless of race or ethnicity, we can't function properly with an unhealthy over-abundance of poor people, just as we'd also be out of kilter if too large a percentage of our population were all rocket scientists.
I don't know how we can optimize a proper balance of class, but I do know you can't abort 35 million babies and then import that many or more 3rd world immigrants to make up the difference.
Love your new tagline! You’re my idol :-).
Blah, blah, blah.
And if the right guy proposed, all that horsecrap would go up in a puff of smoke. As it should. Pointy-headed women's environmental fear is a projection of their fear of being married and vulnerable in a human "environment" that no longer respects fidelity and sacrifice. The fear is justified. But do it anyway—the early Christians did. When you act with steadfast courage, you'd be amazed at who joins you.
And shut down the motor-mouth, please!
Kournikova: New Balls Please
IT’S GAME, set and match for ANNA KOURNIKOVA and heart-throb ENRIQUE IGLESIAS.
Spanish crooner Enrique and Russian tennis beauty Anna have parted after five years together.
He confessed: “We’ve split. I’m single now and it’s OK. I don’t mind being single.”
Enrique hinted KIDS were a factor. He said: “I’m not ready for children.
“I don’t feel like taking on such a responsibility yet. But in the future I’d like two children.”
Only recently he revealed that he had no intention of marrying feisty blonde Anna because “it wouldn’t make a difference”. But now it seems his reluctance to commit was a sign the relationship was rocky.
The glamour couple had been dating since Anna starred as Enrique’s girlfriend in the video for his No3 hit Escape in 2002. They went through a tough time a few years later when Enrique was accused of having a fling with an Australian girl.
But three years ago Anna was spotted wearing a huge diamond on her ring finger.
Enrique coughed to the separation in Swedish capital Stockholm on Friday, where he was doing interviews. Anna, currently in the States, reacted by hitting the town in Vegas. ...
>>Just when was the world ever not dangerous?..............
<<
Yes, dangerous as opposed to what? Raising a child in 17th century Europe where you had to have 20 of ‘em just to get one that would survive to get married?
I read some info a few months ago that suggested that liberals are a dying race because they don’t create enough chilluns to replace themselves. Conservatives, on the otherhand, are creating more than 2.0 kids per marriage.
The Orthodox Jewish community pitches in to help couples with children. There are organizations devoted to baby clothes, food, tuition, medical expenses. I’m wagering these people who have no children are not only secular but total loners. They are not involved in any community.
“And if the right guy proposed, all that horsecrap would go up in a puff of smoke.”
But what decent guy would want to propose to and reproduce with a woman whose mind is full of such absolute rubbish? You can just imagine what kind of wife and mother she’d probably make.
I thought I’d find you here . . .
To paraphrase the Yellow Book commercial, the answer is to be found by looking within. We should not pass laws that require people to reproduce but we should encourage those here in America who are already inclined to reproduce. And we should encourage those who raise children who are non-toxic to the republic.
If we had ten times the number of fundamentalist Christians such as the Amish, Quakers, Hutterites and Mennonites that we do now, we would have a stable population without the need to import immigrants who may or may not respect our values.
All they really need is the real estate to expand and laws and tax structures that do not punish land owners and families. These are people who are willing to do everything that illegals do now.
It could be done. The Amish have increased their numbers by a factor of 36 in the last century. The important thing is that their children, when they leave the fold, do not have a tendency to clutter up our court system with viscious street gangs.
I bred and I widh could afford to breed more.
I’m behind you, but Der Prinz is starting to feel frisky, so ....
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