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older mums - just say no!
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Merrick
Merrick
2148 posts

Re: older mums - just say no!
Oct 31, 2006, 15:38
It's not just about your urges, it's about taking responsibility too. My non-parenthood is political.

I don't hold with the hooey about it being too morally corrupt a world to bring children into. It's always been this good (or bad) in that sense.

But the overpopulation is terrifying. My grandparents were born into a world of 1 billion people, whereas (if I live a normal lifespan), I'll die in a world of 10 billion. I look at a picture of my grandparents and imagine 9 other people stood behind my gran, another 9 behind grandad. Then the same for every other person of every age, right out around the world at that time.

Those ten billion are all going to need to eat. This crunch will come at the same time as oil and gas supplies will have peaked so the agrichemicals they make that give us our bumper crops will have become prohibitively expensive.

Exacerbate that with rising sea levels ruining much of the most productive land and the middle of this century starts to look pretty ugly. We need as few people as possible competing for those resources.

In the meantime, our children wildly overconsume. By the time it has its first birthday, a Biritsh child has already consumed more resources than a Tanzanian consumes in a lifetime.

Even the most switched on people I know do it. A very aware household I know with a baby are using cotton nappies rather than disposables. It means they use their washing machine more times in a week than I do in a year.

If I drove an SUV I'd be (rightly) vilified. Yet a baby consumes way more reources than that. Procreation is the greatest act of unnecessary resource consumption a person ever commits. But somehow it's always bad form to mention it.
In reply to:
Re: older mums - just say no! (Popel Vooje)		 Replies:
Re: older mums - just say no! (Jane)
Re: older mums - just say no! (Popel Vooje)
Re: older mums - just say no! (laresident)
Re: older mums - just say no! (laresident)
Re: older mums - just say no! (Rhiannon)
Re: older mums - just say no! (Daminxa)
Re: older mums - just say no! (shanshee_allures)
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