There it was: slosh, slosh, slosh, slosh — a quadruple or octuple-time rhythm reverberating through my lower abdomen. It was the sound of a tiny, vibrant being camping out inside of me. My eyes widened. Patrick’s filled with tears. Seamus — now almost 14 months and a full-fledged toddler — was nonplussed. He was more interested in the large drawer full of plastic gloves and gowns. Here we are: a 31-year-old husband, a 39-year-old wife, a big first grader who lives with us half-time, the world’s most charming and confounding toddler, and a 5-month-old fetus. Life is about to get very interesting.
It was not planned. But it wasn’t a total accident either. I’ll let you figure out what that means in practical terms. Patrick and I were both surprised by the blue lines on the pee stick though. Seamus still nurses — a lot. But I should know better than most — considering I have a brother who is one year and two weeks younger than me — that nursing is not a prophylactic.
Before we were married, we used to talk about having five kids — at least five. Now that I am looking down the barrel of “two under 2,” I am less enthused. When Seamus and I are having a hard day — like when he is teething, feeling lousy, on nap strike, and desperate to be physically connected to me all day, or I am on deadline, feeling lousy, have four projects that I want to finish and the house is a mess — I stop and breath and say to myself: “At least it is just the two of us.” I can say that for a few more months. But then everything changes.
We have a big house. It was a foreclosure that had been empty for at least two years. The former owners installed a Jacuzzi bathtub and neglected to repair the roof. We bought it for less than some people pay their nannies. It has four bedrooms, a little study, a full attic, a full basement, a nice yard, and a back and front stair case. We thought we would never fill it — not even with the five kids. Well, guess what? We are not sure where the baby will sleep once he or she graduates from the co-sleeper — especially if we still want to have a guest room (and we tend to have lots of guests).
Still, not the worst problem in the world. But our little where-will-the-baby-sleep quandary made me think about a much larger and more intractable problem: overpopulation and our family’s small contribution to it. There are more than 7 billion people on Earth today, with another 375,000 born every day. The United States is the third most populated country in the world and although China and India have more people by orders of magnitude, each U.S. citizen out-buys, out-eats and out-drives each Indian and Chinese person by orders of magnitude. According to Facing the Future, the average person living in the United States uses 300 shopping bags worth of raw materials every week.
Overpopulation keeps a lot of scientists and policy makers up late worrying about the global food and water supply, deforestation and global warming. Today, hundreds of millions of people are hungry and tens of millions do not have regular access to an adequate supply of clean drinking water.
Here in the United States, overpopulation is not a can’t-sleep-a-wink kind of problem. Like Western Europe and other developed countries, we have a relatively low birth rate. Until recently, immigration has kept us from noticing that fact. But a December 2012 report from the Pew Research Center found that “immigrant births fell from 102 per 1,000 women in 2007 to 87.8 per 1,000 in 2012, bringing the overall U.S. birthrate to a mere 64 per 1,000 women — not enough to sustain current U.S. population.”
The issue in this country is not so much too many births, but too many unintended births. Nearly half of the births in this country are unplanned, unwanted and unheralded with trumpets, banners and parades. But I’m not talking about our kind of unintended oops-that-happened-sooner-than-we-thought-it-would pregnancy. I mean something more like, “Wait, what was that guy’s name again?” Or, “What am I going to tell my mom, I’m only 15?” Or, “How could I ever love and care for the child of rape/coercion/incest?”
In 2006, the last year for which I could find full data, at least half of these pregnancies ended in births (at a cost of more than $11 billion a year to taxpayers). As a mother who loves her kids and is excited to welcome another one into the world, I worry over their future. What will the world look like when they come into their own? What issues and problems will they face? What can their dad and I do to prepare them? And, the most fundamental question of all: Is it right to bring more children onto a planet that cannot provide for all the people who already live here?
I guess that the best Patrick and I can aim for is to really, really love our kids and to really, really want them in our lives and in the world. We are trying to raise them to be people who will consume fewer bags of raw materials, not rattle sabers for war, and help foster resilient and sustainable communities of people. Hopefully, they will play a part in resolving, rather than exacerbating, the problems of the world. But all of that can wait a few months. Today, I will just say: Hurray, I am pregnant!
Thanks for the post Frieda.
How to raise children who have a social conscious is a really important challenge. I was encouraged when Transition Newcastle (in Australia) held a forum on Raising Resilient Kids for a Better World and it was a very well attended event. It was refreshing to see so many parents out there who were interested.
My favourite line was “We are not raising children, we are raising adults.”
There’s some more reflections on the forum at http://sustainingcommunity.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/parenting-for-a-better-world/.
Congrats, Frida! Having two is definitely a challenge, but having them so close together is awesome. Our boys are like peas in a pod. Enjoy your pregnancy and thanks for being so prolific!
For a good laugh, read my 5th grade essay, RAISING KIDS FOR FUN AND PROFIT. Congrats Frida and Pat! Hi Ho!
Hi Frida,
I’m glad you’re excited about the prospect of a new baby. And I’ll talk with you offline about the personal side of this. I’m writing this, not so much to you, but in hopes of spurring dialogue about these long term issues.
Here, I want to discuss the “overpopulation” frame. I don’t like it. I think the issue is treasuring each person, not having too many. Yes, there is the issue of carrying capacity, and there are important debates about what the earth’s carrying capacity for humans is given a particular technological energy extraction regime.
But we have enough resources and are productive enough as a species to feed, house, and provide adequate health care for everyone in the world. We don’t face a population problem. We face an exploitation and domination problem. More specifically, I think we need to continue to confront the systemic problems of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism.
In terms of patriarchy, when women’s rights for control over their bodies are better recognized (including access to birth control and safe abortions when wanted), and women’s rights to some of the fruits of their labor are rewarded, the birthrate always falls dramatically. Perhaps one of the most important social developments of the last 200 years is the demographic transition to lower birth rates – it means that with additional economic and feminist empowerment the birth rate falls – and thus we are not doomed to exceed earth’s carrying capacity and face a Malthusian apocalypse – if we can sustain and accelerate the feminist revolutions transforming our world. More conceptually perhaps, I agree with the radical feminist insight that the intimate model of patriarchy almost all of us on earth grow up with is paradigmatic for and sustains many other systems of domination, including militarism and political repression.
In global demographic and public health terms (and in so many other ways), our global system of racism is appalling. To put it baldly, almost all white babies in the world have access to clean water and essential medicines, whereas roughly one out of four babies of color are deprived of these necessities in a world of plenty.
And in terms of capitalism, a system of allocating food, water, and medicines in particular based on who can pay the most for them, thus out-pricing (meaning starving to death) tens of thousands of babies every day, is fundamentally immoral. Yes, one of the most exciting stories of the last 30 years is the rapid reduction in the rate of these infant deaths (partially due to rehydration therapy, partially due to increased immunization rates, and partially due to better access to cleaner water, if I understand the global trends correctly). But the systemic problems remain.
“the most fundamental question of all: Is it right to bring more children onto a planet that cannot provide for all the people who already live here?”
Why is WN promoting the overpopulation myth as an explanation for poverty, when the problem is not a lack of resources but the unequal distribution of the surplus, and profit-based production?
Hello – Not to get all religious on you – but – in the gospel their is a spiritual truth about children that Jesus spoke about. It goes something like this, ‘…even in the last days people will still be marrying, having children and celebrating…’
Me and my wife have a 7 month old son! He is so gosh darn awesome I can’t imagine living without him. He is actually crying right now and I am still smiling on the inside!
I would not want to live on a planet that would not accept children. To me it would be a fascist kind of nightmare. We should of been exploring space by now, living with solar power, alternative resources, better civic planning – lots more affordable public transportation, etc. Instead we were duped about weapons of mass-destruction in Iraq, sold our treasury notes to China, and developed drones and lessened the freewill and light from human beings. It is a travesty. We even screwed up benevolent ideals of caring for one another as a form of Socialism or Communism.
We need room to breathe, we should stop micro-managing others and we need to drop the raft of social advice and really get moving somehow. Our earth is a gift that is unfathomable.
My 2 cents, anyway.
When I was living in the US last year, I was shocked by the young girls having babies. Back here in India, I read articles from NYT and other American news outlets, on various subjects, and often, it goes like this: “20-year-old XYZ holds 2 jobs, and then has to find time to read night-time books with her 5-year-old.”
And I thought sex-ed was taught in ALL schools in USA. I am 28, and we never had a sex-ed class in a very good convent school in Mumbai, the equivalent of NYC, in India.
This doesn’t sound at all like the “Amazing USA” we are kids in India were taught. This sounds as bad as too-poor-to-choose-between-food-and-condoms India.
Hi Priyanka – You have to understand most Americans that actually root and live here and who have at least 3 familial generations on this soil do not go around gloating about their country. At least they do not nowadays. It was a projected media dupe on how Americans felt when beamed to other countries. Since the American military went into Iraq, Americans woke up a lot. A lot of us were already awake, but we had to drudge thru the collective minds of our nation and battle just to think.
I think the advent of social media and rampant porn use on the internet had a lot to do with teen pregnancy. It is not like it was 20 years ago or so when you could steal your Dads Playboy magazine or try to buy one at a new-stand as a young teen. The adolescence of today are smarter than you think. They can Google search http://www.momridingadonkey.com – or even http://www.eighthgradeteacherandherstudent.com – or even http://www.grannysmokingacigerette.com at a moments notice. These images and stick for a long time. I used to be a cameraman for broadcast news and I watched on the internet Al-Qaeda severing the head of Wall Street reporter Daniel Pearl. That 15 second video sat with me for a long time and it affected the way I thought about, felt and I made decisions from it out of fear. I was like 32 years old when I watched it. I can’t imagine watching something like that or raunchy porn or even some of the commercial advertising that is on over and over again during adolescence.
We hurt our adolescence in a big way. There should of been more awareness of the negative and aggravated aspects of kids watching pornography and using social media. It still is a huge problem – but – I think there is a bigger awareness now of the negative aspects of it all. At least I hope so.
Hi Priyanka – You have to understand most Americans that actually root and live here and who have at least 3 familial generations on this soil do not go around gloating about their country. At least they do not nowadays. It was a projected media dupe on how Americans felt when beamed to other countries. Since the American military went into Iraq, Americans woke up a lot. A lot of us were already awake, but we had to drudge thru the collective minds of our nation and battle just to think.
I think the advent of social media and rampant porn use on the internet had a lot to do with teen pregnancy. It is not like it was 20 years ago or so when you could steal your Dads Playboy magazine or try to buy one at a new-stand as a young teen. The adolescence of today are smarter than you think. They can Google search mom riding a donkey – or even eighth grade teacher and her student dot com – or even granny smoking a cigarette dot com at a moments notice. These images and stick for a long time. I used to be a cameraman for broadcast news and I watched on the internet Al-Qaeda severing the head of Wall Street reporter Daniel Pearl. That 15 second video sat with me for a long time and it affected the way I thought about, felt and I made decisions from it out of fear. I was like 32 years old when I watched it. I can’t imagine watching something like that or raunchy porn or even some of the commercial advertising that is on over and over again during adolescence.
We hurt our adolescence in a big way. There should of been more awareness of the negative and aggravated aspects of kids watching pornography and using social media. It still is a huge problem – but – I think there is a bigger awareness now of the negative aspects of it all. At least I hope so.
Many years ago, a friend on the WRL staff greeted similar news from me with the remark, “It’s a crime against humanity! You already have one and one’s enough.” The particular crime against humanity is named Wendy and is currently doing peace work in the Balkans as regional director for Musicians Without Borders, and now is also a mother herself with an under-one named Julia.
I appreciate Frida’s acknowledgment that the planet is facing serious environmental catastrophe and that population is part of the cause. I wish those who commented could have agreed on that. Sure, consumption, inequality, capitalism, patriarchy, and lots other isms are a cause of many of the world’s problems, but so is having more people on this earth than the planet can handle, especially at a US lifestyle level. And the countries that are not as materialistic, like China, India, and just about every other less over-developed country, are trying to emulate us; we in the US are not cutting our consumption.
It is sad that all those who are strong believers in nonviolence don’t view overpopulation as a form of violence. Most I know seem just as unwilling to talk about this soon to be 9 or 10 billion elephant in the room as those in other parts of the political spectrum. This has to be accepted as a part of the problem if we are to avoid ultimate climate catastrophe.
If I know someone (even a good friend) is having a child, I don’t congratulate them. I do congratulate those who have decided to live child-free, because theirs is a decision that will help the planet to avoid possible collapse at least a bit longer.
I hope readers of this will look at the group Population Connection as a possible resource. It does not scapegoat immigrants (as some population control groups do). Instead, it focuses on strategies of family planning, supporting those who decide to be child-free, and recognizing that we need to respect the limitations of our planet’s resources.