Elizabeth Kolbert writes in The New Yorker that having kids is kinda’ selfish and probably shouldn’t be left up to you.
You’ve really gotta’ read the whoe thing. It’s just sickening.
Just check out this nugget:
Global population is expected to hit eight billion around 2025, which is to say about ninety-five years later than Knowlton predicted. No one in his right mind supposes that it could reach sixty-four billion without horrific consequences, except perhaps a few economists.
The decision to have a child, or one more child, or yet another child may seem to be a personal one—a choice about how many diapers you want to change in the short term versus how many Mother’s Day cards you hope to receive later on. But to see it in these terms alone is to be, as Caplan points out on the cover of his book, selfish. Whatever you may think of Overall’s and Benatar’s conclusions, it’s hard to argue with their insistence that the decision to have a child is an ethical one. When we set the size of our families, we are, each in our own small way, determining how the world of the future will look. And we’re doing this not just for ourselves and our own children; we’re doing it for everyone else’s children, too.
How horrible is this line of thinking? This is the same kind of logic that gets us the government takeover of healthcare. Because every healthcare decision you make affects others, the government should get involved and tell you what to do.
Using this same logic that having babies is just selfish and that it affects others, is it really a big jump to have the government start limiting the number of children one can have?
Go read the whole thing and then come back and share your horror.
