From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Population and Community
Date: 22 Jul 92 11:42:48 GMT
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison

In association with the epithet "breeder," many people have
branched out into a discussion on the ecological disaster of
overpopulation in general and Ailsa Murphy's (paraphrased)
remarks to the effect that "if you're against parents, you're
not my community" in particular.

I don't get much sense that anyone's against children _per
se_.  Any child that exists deserves love and nurture.  The
issue as I see it is whether there's any special virtue to
the common notion of raising children who are of your own
genetic issue.  But there are also *many* related issues,
most of them not being addressed in the discussion.

For example, it isn't necessarily overweaning ego to want to
be the natural parent of a child.  I suspect the number of
women who make a conscious effort to become pregnant *and*
have among their motives "oh wow, 'success' for *my* genes"
is vanishingly small.  But I believe the number of women who
discover there is a special bond with the being who grows in
and issues from your own body is very large.  Accounting for
that bond surely is in part a biological matter and a
cultural matter.

It's not a simple question to wave it out of the domain of
discourse on this vitally important topic by calling it
"just" ego.

However, the adoption issue is obviously of major
importance, it being true by any measure that there is no
shortage of available infants.  It's apparently true that
healthy white babies are relatively scarce in the pool of
potentially adoptable infants, and this fact is commonly
cited as support for the notion that racism is a major
factor in the adoption arena.  I myself think it *is* a
major factor, but there are also other factors, some more
commonly recognized than others.  It doesn't seem to me
excessive, when one is considering adoption, to want to be
aware of as many pertinent factors as you can be, especially
given the irreducible number of imponderables involved in
rearing a child to near-adulthood.

On a somewhat different tangent, I think people who manage,
especially when the conditions have been tough, to overcome
all sorts of obstacles in the process of doing their best to
raise children deserve our admiration and respect.  I know
what my mother went through, and I cannot find anything
suspect about Ailsa's witness to the difficulties she's had
(and continues to have).  In that regard (as distinct from
factors that are less directly pertinent to men than to
women), there are also many men doing their best to be good
single parents, and that too merits respect, I think.

On the cultural side, the idea of handing out condoms
(speaking of birth control, not STD control) wholesale is a
naive approach to population problems for or in many
cultures.  I certainly think there are *way* too many people,
but as I said earlier, only long-term approaches of
considerably complexity can address all the issues, and ones
that fail to address key issues are worse than useless.
Unfortunately, the problems daily grow more urgent as the
toxicity of the environment has started to rise very fast.

Then there are social, political, and economic issues of
major importance.  Religion is surely one of these.  All of
these thorny issues are inextricably linked together.
Adoption, healthy babies, racial and cultural biases,
parenting, genetics, social/political/economic issues,
pollution, and all the rest (other factors as yet
unrecognized included) are all part of *one* giant problem,
informed by and touching upon the lives of every living
thing.

Whatever else one might say, I think we (all of us) *must*
make dealing with all this one of our highest priorities.
As important as I think the LGB community is, for myself I
can certainly say that my membership in the community of
*all* living things is even more important.

<> Don't require that we all look like Joe and Jane Average just
<> so that the bigots won't have an evidence to support their
<> bigotry.  The bigots are going to find their evidence no matter
<> what we do.
<> -- Jeannine Marie Pinto (jmp8p@fermi.clas.virginia.edu)
-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
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