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Sigh

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In my youth, when the new reproductive technologies were still new, I remember hearing the argument that surrogacy and certain other forms of reproductive technology would lead to the “commodification of children.”  The people discussing the issue seemed interested in that viewpoint in a academic sort of way, but most people did not seem to find that abstract risk a compelling enough reason not to allow people to realize their cherished dream of children.  We certainly wouldn’t want to tell people what they should or should not do.

Which lead us to where we are now – parents pressuring a surrogate to abort a baby following a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome.  “The child is seen by the commissioning parents as a product, and in this case a substandard product because of a genetic condition,” said Prof. Francoise Baylis, a bioethicist at Dalhousie University.  No kidding.

So, that is what the commodification of children means in practice  – a child in utero is branded a “substandard product” of which the consumer refuses to delivery.

Contrast this impoverished view of humanity and human relationship with that of this parent of a “defective” child.  This article was written in response to the televised comments of a British advice columnist stating that “it was better to terminate a pregnancy than to condemn a disabled or unwanted child to a lifetime of emotional or physical suffering”.  But that’s another eugenics story.

Sigh.

And now for some real discrimination against women

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According to this report, thousands of Indian women took to the street this weekend to protest sex-selection abortion. Good for them. India is described as the heartland of sex-selection abortion and the numbers certainly are disheartening. For example, in 2001, there were 921 girls born for every 1000 boys in India; in some Indian states, the ratio was lower still — 793 girls for every 1000 boys in Punjab. A IDRC co-authored report found 300 girls born for very 1000 boys among high caste urban Punjabis! And census data from 1901 to the present show that in recent years the disparity has been getting worse, not better. One would have thought it was getting easier to be a woman and therefore to raise a daughter in India. But apparently not.

I think that most women, pro-choice or not, realize that there is something wrong with aborting a baby just because it’s a girl. But if sex-selection abortion is wrong, because it undermines the value and equality of girls, isn’t eugenic abortion just as wrong, as it undermines the value  and equality of the disabled? Is it worse to have an abortion because you’re expected to bear sons for your husband and family or because this just isn’t the right time to have a baby?

This must be a tricky path for the abortion advocate to navigate. It must be hard to argue that abortion is a purely personal matter when it can result in more than 5 million missing Indian baby girls.

Martha Mason, RIP

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I always check the obituaries in my morning paper.  The world is filled with people who have lived interesting and extraordinary lives and the obits offer a daily reminder of what a piece of work is man. 

Here is  a wonderfully inspiring story of the triumph of the human spirit over physical limitations. 

There is also a video interview with Martha Mason here.

Thanks, CTV

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I realize it’s a bit heart-sinking to realize that there is out there an “online dating service for cheaters” (i.e., adulterers).  But at least they won’t be advertising during the Super Bowl.  I guess that’s something to feel good about.  (Work with me here, people.)

So, on behalf of parents, married people, and all Canadians with even a modicum of public decency, I would like to thank CTV for this decision.

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Rebecca adds: The phrase “defining deviancy down” springs to mind.

One day, I want to write a book on the need for stigma and shame. No government should be in the business of policing people’s extramarital activity, but no healthy society can afford to condone adultery. In an era in which non-judgmentalism is one of the major virtues, necessary concepts like ostracism and social disgrace have lost all meaning, and a desire not to hurt people’s feelings by passing judgment on their behaviour has created a culture in which hearts are broken and lives ruined.

What is that, Mama?

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I realize that I haven’t blogged for a month because of the frantic level of activity in my household as the school year ends and summer activities ramp up. And here I am back –  with a cranky old prude comment. 

On Saturday night, I attempted to watch the hockey game with my two oldest daughers (11 and 9), both hockey mad. I am not hockey mad but can tolerate it at this stage of the season and was prepared to take one for the team in the name of good old Canadian family togetherness (if you can call watching TV “togetherness”).  

I lasted not quite one period. Not because of the game, but the ads. It seemed at every break in play, we were subjected to this little treasure or perhaps this variation of the same theme. 

Look, I am not sure that viagra represents any kind of moral issue, but how many kids do you figure are watching game 4 of the Stanley Cup final on a Saturday night? Do they really need this? Does Pfizer and the CBC really need to do this to all of us? Perhaps I should have been more prepared to take advantage of the “teaching moment” so kindly provided to me and my children by Pfizer and Hockey Night in Canada, but I just wanted to watch the hockey game with my kids. And, from giant billboard bra ads to beer ads to jean ads, I do get a bit fed up with my children’s sensibilities being assaulted with “adult” sexuality (usually presented in its most puerile form) every time we turn on the TV, walk down the street or get on a streetcar or subway. 

Look, at 9 and 11, I recognize that my daughters are ready for some serious discussions about sex. But what they don’t need and can’t get away from is a barrage of tawdry sexual images that don’t really have anything to do with a mature (or maturing) understanding of human sexuality, and are no doubt very unhelpful in achieving it. 

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Tanya adds: You sound as comforted as I am, knowing my 11 year old nephew crosses the bridge to Montreal daily, every time facing a billboard like this.  I fear for his concept of sexuality, and for the risk these ads pose as far as contributing to traffic accidents. I can barely take my eyes off them!

Note: Click on ‘bikinis’ to see actual ad images.

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Veronique adds: That reminded me of an older gentleman I knew. When walking through a shopping mall with is wife, he would stop in front of the La Senza displays (you know, those ceiling-high posters of women in underwear?), look at his wife and announce: “Look dear, just like at home!”

The world without…

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Barbara Kay has an interesting piece about having children, or rather not having children, in today’s National Post. 

As she describes the anti-kiddists views, it seems that not only does having children make you less able to self-actualize and increase your standings on the happiness index through career achievement, peak experiences (climbing Kilamanjaro) and material acquisition (see Véronique’s post below), it also destroys the planet. 

Sigh. I would like to think that such views are marginal but there is an element to the environmental movement that depicts humanity as a parasite or a cancer on the earth. And I worry that its influence is more mainstream than we think. Check out “The World Without Us” website. Or the calls of Tim Flannery, Australia’s 2007 Man of the Year and one of Time Magazine’s “Heroes of the Environment” for decreased population. Or the charming Paul Watson, Toni Vernelli and David “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence” Benatar, all described in Kay’s column.  

It seems to me it’s all part of the world view that kids just weigh us down, prevent us from becoming what we really should be. And they just weigh down the earth, too.   

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s wrong to misuse the resources of the earth. Don’t waste and don’t litter. I think that about covers it for environmental policy. 

As for the impacts of more kids, the irony is that many of the practices that the environmentalists seem to want us to adopt come naturally in a household filled with children. Sharing space and resources, remembering to think about the needs of others, consuming less so there’s enough for everybody, all these habits are almost second nature for the person who grows up in a full household.

Alas, many don’t see this. Instead, they argue for more regulation, more legislation, more public officials to enforce the laws and regs to meet our environmental objectives. One has to ask though, if no one is having kids, where are they going to get the bodies to fill those jobs and the taxpayers to pay their salaries? And for whom are we saving the planet?

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Tanya adds: On the up-side, if they do go so far as to implement a global one-child policy, pro-aborts will need to find a new platform. “Pro-choice” just wont have much of a ring to it when you have the choice to have one child or less; not two; never three!

http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2008/04/05/ted-turner-pushes-one-child-policy-pbs-interview

 

Sympathy for Hillary?

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hillary.jpg       edwards.jpg

 What do you make of this? An op-ed writer for the Washington Post makes the point that Hillary Clinton suffers a disadvantage on the campaign trail because “on top of everything else, [she] has to spend an hour and a half getting ready for each day’s campaigning”.  And by getting ready, he means the getting yourself presentable part of getting ready – that part which, for most women, means doing your hair, putting on your makeup, deciding what to wear or, if you have someone else to pick outfits for you (as Hillary probably does), deciding if that person has made a reasonable choice.

Even John Edwards, the “Breck Girl” of presidential candidates, probably got away with half that amount of time. 

This could be a point about which I actually have some sympathy for Hillary. 

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Brigitte can’t resist posting this video:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AE847UXu3Q]

British Embryo Research Bill

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I cannot pretend to begin to understand the science of this, but I’m not sure how much technical background one needs to feel that there is probably something very creepy going on here. 

Among other things, the proposed bill would allow researchers to “create inter-species hybrids by injecting human DNA into a hollowed-out animal egg cell. The resulting embryo is 99.9 percent human and 0.1 percent animal.” The point of creating such an embryo is to give scientists the large number of embryos they need to make stem cells to help find cures for a range of diseases. 

Again, I’m no scientist, but the government’s defence of the bill doesn’t seem to jive with the description of what actually goes on in this kind of research, at least as it is described by Reuters. The British Health Minister, Ben Bradshaw, has defended the bill by saying that it concerns the use of “pre-embryonic cells to do research that has the potential to ease the suffering of millions of people in this country”.  

In another Reuters article, a researcher defends the practice as follows: “The aim of our experiments is to discover ways to make stem cells for anyone that will be invaluable in treating human diseases, not to give birth to some abnormal chimera.” In other words, don’t worry, none of these embryonic “chimeras” (his word, not mine) will actually survive such experiments. How reassuring. 

On the other hand, the Roman Catholic Cardinal in Scotland has denounced the bill as a “monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life”.

Gee, I wonder who’s right?

By the way, according to Reuters, Canada is one of three other countries (besides the UK) where scientists carry out “similar work”. 

Canada needs more babies

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That’s not just me talking. That’s StatsCan, as quoted in the Calgary Herald.

Well, I’m doing my best. I just hope Mr. Harper and Mr. Flaherty are paying attention to the point about “much more needs to be done” to make things a bit easier tax-wise for younger families.

I’m not entirely comfortable with governments getting too caught up in “no baby no nation” policies. One thing that I do think is private and a matter of “personal choice” is the decision to have a child, or another child, or another child again (and so on), assuming of course that the means one uses to avoid having that child aren’t contrary to fundamental human dignity. (I am prolife, after all.)

But an aging population and a low birth rate do have broad social implications, so I guess some policy maker somewhere should be thinking about the whys and what-to-dos, if anything, of the problem. If he or she is out there, I would be interested in what he or she comes up with. Canada’s low fertility rate has always puzzled me. (I guess that’s not surprising to many of you, given that I have chosen to have five kids.) Here we are in Canada, living a life of prosperity and freedom; if you look at the sweep of human history or even the conditions that much of the world labours under today, we are at the top of the humanity heap, and this despite the tax burden that is fingered in the Herald editorial as part of the fertility problem. Yet we don’t seem to be able to welcome children into our lives.

I know they’re a lot of work and expense, but so is running a marathon, travelling to Bora Bora or even having a fulfilling career, all of which are things that a lot of people do routinely these days. And I know that there is a standard trajectory for young women (and men) to stay in school for much of their twenties, then work to pay off their school debt and then work some more to buy that first house (which seems to be a required asset of all prospective parents). All of this inevitably leads to delaying children to a point where it is naturally much harder to have a large family (and by “large”, I mean more than 2 kids). But in the past, people lived with much more severe economic constraints and still managed to have kids.

So, what changed? I have a few theories, none of which are entirely satisfying because they always seem to raise more questions. Do people see large families as undesirable or just unachievable? (When I go out with all my kids, from the people who actually comment (thankfully, few), I get about equal parts “are you crazy” and “you are so lucky”). Maybe large families have always been undesirable to most people and the explanation is as simple as the improved technology of birth control. But I think there must be more to it, because adequate birth control (especially between married couples) has been with us for a long time and the bottom basement fertility rates are a relatively recent phenomenon. Is that just because we cannot imagine a “good life” beyond the materialistic one so idealized in our consumer culture and that is only within our grasp if we ration out our fertility? Again, I’m not sure I buy that as a complete explanation, although it’s certainly got to be part of the problem. Is it typically women or men who are more reluctant to have children? That must be relevant to understanding the issue at hand, but how would you ever find that out? Is it because children have gone from being an economic asset (more hands on the farm) to a big liability? I am reluctant to attribute any trend of human behaviour entirely to economic motives.

So, what is it?

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Rebecca adds: I have a lot of thoughts on this, which I can’t discuss too much now since I’m preparing a paper on policy implications of pensions given demographic change. (Seriously.) But I think a big, big part of the picture is marriage, or more precisely the lack of marriage. While the number of babies born to unmarried mothers is high and rising, very few unmarried women, or even unmarried couples, explicitly plan pregnancies. And since a depressingly high number of marriages end in the first decade, that depresses childbearing rates as well. If you’re thinking of divorce, or worried that your partner has one foot out the door, you’re not likely to have a second or third child.

I remember reading that families with four or more children were much less likely, statistically, to divorce than families with three or fewer children. The author’s (dismal) conclusion was that the financial cost of divorce was too high with that many children involved, so parents stuck it out even if they wanted to divorce. Other possible explanations, all of which strike me as more likely: large families correlate with religiosity, which correlates negatively with divorce; couples who choose to have lots of children together are just plain more happily married to begin with; people who choose to create a large family clearly see family as a central part of their identity, and thus may be likely to put more effort into their roles as husband/father and wife/mother, than do people who define themselves more by their careers, interests, or something other than their families; or, people with lots of children are too tired to break up.

(Did I mention that my five month old has slept for more than 4 hours exactly twice in his entire life?)

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Andrea’s two cents: Sex ed in high school hammered home on “don’t get pregnant, don’t get pregnant, DO NOT get pregnant.” They never discussed that there will be a context, one day, in which it will be both appropriate and desirable–to get pregnant. By the time one is settled in some extremely meaningful career, and has spent so many years “not getting pregnant,” it’s late in the game and one simply cannot have a large family. So many young women, myself included, were taught that the really meaningful and difficult things to do in life don’t involve having kids. And I personally learned that lesson well.

I’ve also been having  discussions lately with someone about how the western world now demands a two income family just to get by. I don’t buy it, especially since I’ve started to meet families with ten kids living on one income (and the father in one case was a journalist, not a hedge fund manager). I only started to see these sorts of families after I left Toronto, though. So if the economy doesn’t truly demand two working adults in one home, then the culture is picking up the slack and creating pressure. Two working adults means less kids, I’m convinced. I work hard all day, and if I had to face children when I got home instead of going for a run and hitting the hay, I don’t know what I’d do. It would be too taxing, and I’d say no to a large family too.

Maybe that was more than two cents.  

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Tanya’s personal observation: Many large families got that way one child at a time. A woman will more likely desire an additional child if the previous experience was pleasant (including pregnancy and the infant stage).

Part of enjoying those early stages of parenthood is spousal support. When a woman doesn’t feel like she’s got to do everything herself, but that her mate is right in there with the diapers and the laundry, she’s more likely to take on the challenge of additional children. Additionally, she and that helpful spouse of her’s are less likely to want to get rid of each other. There you have it! Supportive spouse = long, happy marriage with the open option of many children.

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