Stop Having Children, All of You

One of the topics on a talk show I produced once was open birth records, and whether or not adult adoptees should have the right to seek out their birth parents, even in closed adoptions. There were a lot of adoption stories, from every perspective, and then there was this one caller. She didn’t make it on the air. She cried, and unloaded a tragic tale of having eight babies when she was very young, and how she had to give them all up for adoption, and she thought about them all the time, and could I please tell the whole world for her?

I was disturbed on a few levels, not the least of which was the extent to which the crying made me uncomfortable. Most of all I couldn’t get past the eight children. EIGHT. Even pre-birth-control-pill, I can’t forgive it. Gross overpopulation of the planet combined with the economic realities of having children should be enough to discourage rampant breeding, but it’s not. Just because we are biologically capable of bearing multiple children doesn’t mean we should ignore all of our higher brain function. We aren’t animals, and a litter of mini-me’s (mini-them’s?) only tells me that a person is narcissistic. It isn’t people like Stephen Hawking or Joss Whedon or Tina Fey who are having five kids. It’s Jethro and Lita in the rental house on the corner with the toys all over the lawn, and the stolen cable, and the kids all covered in canned cheese product. I can’t make sense of encouraging that.

What does make sense, if someone is wired to want a large family and has closely examined his or her motivations, is to do everything in their power to adopt a child. I know it’s hard, I know it’s expensive, I know little white babies are scarce and Angelina Jolie adopted the rest. But it makes more sense to share some of that love and attention with children who weren’t wanted when they were accidentally foisted onto the planet. They have no one to love them, to tuck them in at night and cherish them. That, to me, is profound, and worthy. I get that some people don’t think they are capable of loving a child that they didn’t make in their image; again, examine the narcissism and look deeper. We are all capable.

Originally written 11.07