Our species needs to ask women these days to take responsibility for their attitudes and choices in reproduction, and to sacrifice personal desires for the global good. I say this as a woman with 2 children. After my second child was born, I underwent elective surgery to end my fertility. I chose this as a conscious, deliberate choice to *not* contribute to the problem of overpopulation.
It may be politically incorrect to say that women who have more than 2 children are irresponsible, but it is nonetheless a global reality. As a species, we say that our ability to think and reason sets us apart from the "animals", but in reality we are just as relentlessly driven by biological instinct. We have a genetically coded urge to reproduce. For many, the urge is literally irresistible. But if our reason is what makes us different, we need to start to demonstrate that. We need to decide, as a species, that there are too many of us to sustain us all. We need to collectively choose to reduce our numbers, before the planetary system chooses for us. (Mother Earth can shakes us off like a bad case of fleas, whenever she chooses. Our hold on her skin is fragile...) We reduce our numbers ourselves by exercising reproductive self-control (which means every woman on the planet needs to choose for the greater good), or we overproduce ourselves until the system collapses on us all.
Hrmmmm.... It should be a clear, logical solution. A simple births to deaths ratio. If a woman has 2 children, then those children replace the parents. Population neither increases or decreases. If a woman has only one child, the overall population will decrease.
According to my beliefs, I should have stopped at one child, but I caved into the various pressures and urges I felt to have another. That biological urge to reproduce is intense and seductive. But if our culture *really* nurtured and supported the options of being "childless by choice", then I think we would be leaning down the path of deeper wisdom.
I love being a mother, and my daughters are more precious to me than gold. I know I was meant to be their mother, and I sense a real sense of purpose in their incarnations. I really feel then as souls with a purpose. So I'm not a bitter mother that feels victimized by my own reproductive urges, nor am I saying that women who choose motherhood are somehow less than women who resist their ability to reproduce. Absolutely not! All I'm saying is that we need to step outside of our own personal needs and desires, look at the needs of us all, and choose for our collective survival.
~Flame RavenHawk
June 29, 2002