The “choice” is the right to not have your children.
Important distinction. You should make it.
Balls are not for money shot fluid. Wombs are not for beach body support.
Both are for producing new humans.
We’re raising a generation of men and women who view having children as entirely optional, and I believe this to be a big error. Until we have other means of sticking around in this indifferent universe, reproduction is the thing.
Countries with low natality should beg the women in that country to have children. All of them. This is no joke. And not in a nationalistic or racist manner. All women in countries with declining natality should have reasons to have children and should also have the required support.
It is very easy to dismiss this argument as mansplaining or MRA bullshit. I am not trying to achieve either. The argument is that for upcoming new members of western societies the message of the pro choice movement sounds a bit distorted and that shows.
The distortion comes especially from the loudness of the pro life camp who is losing battles all over and screams like a dying beast. They make every part of the pro choice message sound as if it is a fundamental right to not have children.
It is important to clarify that no human alive can define or defend such a right. All members of a society have a complicated situation to solve. Kids need parents, parents need kids, the poor need the rich, and the rich need the poor. You can’t cut these things like you’d do with a Gordian node. Because if you do you’ll hit the problem of complexity. You fuck up stuff you don’t understand. Natality is one such complexity.
Reproduction is a species wide inclination. However we’re human and as long as the rich will keep making the economic game suck for 80% of the population, people will avoid or delay raising the difficulty setting of the economic game by bringing in new folk around.
The problem with low natality is not solely economic. You know what else dies too with human groups which do not replace themselves? Information. All the information in all the things that are not recorded in anything else aside from social dynamics and social interaction. Ways of life, common sense assumptions, common expectations.
Also, all these weird messages! That the planet is too full of humans. That a career is endangered by kids. That freedom is lost because of kids. Folks! Kids are like the most normal things, the problems are in shitty capitalism fucking up resources, corporations inventing a new society where work is the definition of happiness, the financial chaos of having all the wealth in the hands of so few. These are the reasons you loose your freedom, carriers are hard and Earth got sick of us altogether. Not children!
This is not an argument about women. It’s mainly an argument directed at men, especially at the men who fear kids as if they’re a ball and chain to their ankle or have them and then run away or have them and they stay filled with a form or regret that the child ends up feeling as guilt.
The kind of attitude above worked fine when women were mandatory child production facilities. It didn’t matter. Whatever we men joked about in our congregations didn’t matter. The world move on because half of the world had no choice but to give birth.
When choice exists quality is top priority. Just like business. In the business of natality money hand outs do not solve the problem. In the business of natality quality is about the experience of conceiving, birthing, rearing and raising children. Complex shit. Folk could start to want those children in an authentic way and start at least replacing ourselves.
Could the pro choice camp take on this thing too? Encouraging everyone who doesn’t have to choose to not choose? Lobbying for better support for women to have kids … wait they’re already doing that. What’s the other side doing again, other that cutting out Jesuses made of cardboard?