Have you noticed the state of the planet these days? On every continent, on an incredibly pervasive basis, the activities of humans are killing virtually every other species, decimating the environment, and wrecking the natural systems we inherited. The number of humans on the planet has now clearly overshot the carrying capacity of the world to support our numbers. We must voluntarily reduce population, and do so immediately, or we will soon be forced to do so by the scarcity of resources. If you doubt this, and/or if you want the theory and numbers, then read William Catton’s classic book entitled Overshoot: The Ecological Basis Of Revolutionary Change.
But we are a reasonably self-aware species, we have known for some time what it is that we are doing, so how is it that we have allowed this to happen? As it turns out there are powerful forces prohibiting our public and open discussion of overpopulation. One of the notions that blocks us from rationally controlling our numbers, which blocks us from publicly discussing the need to change our prolifically procreating ways, involves the “sacred” notion of motherhood. Both men and women now erroneously agree that there is something special, something to be revered about motherhood. We believe motherhood must never be questioned, maligned, or disrespected. It is no mistake that one of the synonyms for something that is “wholesome and American” is “motherhood and apple pie.”
For a woman to push out from her birth canal yet another human being, when our sheer numbers are so clearly the cause of so much of what is the matter with the world, that is nothing special. It requires no talent, no intelligence, and no advance planning. Vast numbers of women dream of becoming mothers, as though it is somehow the ultimate fulfillment of their femininity and womanhood. And vast numbers of men are willing accomplices, enabling these women to have still more children. Even when the presence of a man to support and enable the process is not part of the equation, an increasing number of women are choosing to be single mothers, choosing to raise children on their own. We should not be celebrating these women as “liberated” or “progressive.” We should instead be identifying them as selfish, self-absorbed, and ignorant. All ecological arguments aside, every child who is brought in to the world should have the benefit of both a mother and a father.
Our culture’s reverence for motherhood, our desire to respect and protect mothers and the children they beget, that is evident in many of our traditional American ways. For example, we will often take special efforts to open doors, or give up our seat, for pregnant mothers or mothers with children. In those situations where only some will survive, we still commonly say: “women and children first.” There is a deference to, and respect for women with young children that once may have had its place, but this sentiment has now become malignantly dysfunctional and clearly outdated.
We men can and should look specifically to how men have contributed to this sorry state of affairs. Men have been led to believe that being “responsible” fathers was somehow a socially desirable state. When it comes to the cold hard reality of our overpopulation problem, we can see that it is no better than being a childless husband, or for that matter, being a childless man who is not married.
Men have thought it was their enshrined and hallowed role to financially support women when women wanted to have children. Thanks to feminism, the traditional male role as provider is now in tatters, if it perchance still exists in its rare pure traditional form anywhere in America today. The traditional male role is instead these days frequently exploited by selfish women who want men to support them financially. It is, for example, now common for a young woman to get pregnant with a guy who she is having sex with, and then banish him from her life, and have the baby on her own. Women like this only want the man’s sperm and his child support. His wishes don’t matter, in the eyes of these women and in the eyes of the law.
Even if men were not incensed by the exploitative family courts that look at them solely as wallets, offended at the double-standard process of theft known as alimony, and outraged by the laws which otherwise are used to separate men from both their property and desire to be good fathers — even if all that was not enough to get them to be suspicious of motherhood — they should seriously consider the ecological angle. For men to continue to unthinkingly support women in their selfish desire to have children contributes to the degradation of the earth. Men must be the word of reason used to overcome gender role traditions, to overcome the instinctual drive to procreate, and to overcome the procreative “fulfillment” fantasies of women.
It is time that men stepped up and said “no” to the women who would use their sperm to bring yet more hungry and consuming human beings into the world. Men also need to say “no” to women who want to live the rich-and-famous lifestyle. It is these high consumption lifestyles that are also ruining the planet. If men do both of these things, they can free-up a great deal of their own personal time, which in turn can be used to pursue their own goals and aspirations. Men need to stop putting their own goals and aspirations aside; they must stop supporting women in the latter’s desire to have children and raise families. They can, for example, work more intensively on the men’s movement. Besides, when men really honestly and diligently look at what’s happening to the world’s ecology, and what kind of a future their prospective children will have, many will be reluctant to bring any further humans into the world.
It is time that men en masse got vasectomies, it is time that men more consistently used condoms, and it is time that men regularly used other birth control methods like spermicidal foam. It is time for men to invent, manufacture, and then use, on a widespread basis, new and different male methods of birth control. Far too much procreative decision-making power has been placed in the hands of women, and this must also stop. The pendulum of procreative power has swung way too far in the direction of women, and in many cases, they have shown us that they used this power in ignorant, selfish, exploitative, and myopic ways.
Men need to stop giving their sperm to sperm banks so that people who are otherwise unfit to procreate (because they are sterile) can then have children. This not only weakens the gene pool, but this further aggravates the overpopulation problem. Men in America need to start a widespread conversation to restrict couples to one child only, a conversation similar to the one that the Chinese have already enacted into law.
Married men need to be willing to say “no” to their wives when their wives want to have children, or want to have more children. Men need to change the laws so that women do not have financial incentives to have more children because payments for welfare are larger if you have more children, and because payments for child support are larger if you have more children. Men must likewise criticize and abandon the feminist notion that women have any special rights to decide what to do with their bodies if these same decisions mean increasing the population. Men must also gain the right to jointly decide whether a conception will be carried forward to birth (via the day-after pill, abortion, putting babies up for adoption at birth, etc.).
Tax breaks need to be given to people who have no children, or who have only one child. No matter what your religion says about it, a much larger conversation about how to reduce our numbers must be initiated, and maintained, and we must then follow through with efforts to reduce population. We must also dispense with all vestiges of our belief that there is anything special or sacred about motherhood. It is just a biological function. And it must be constrained if we humans are not going to ruin what remains of the planet.
