Drew Robert Winter’s column Consider planet when having kids (SN 7/11) is immensely shortsighted, viewing children in immediate environmental and financial terms without considering the broader picture. Winter notes, as confirmed by a figure recently put out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, that raising children is expensive, and in a post-industrial society where children are no longer needed as farm labor, poor families, who no longer derive economic benefit from their children, bear a particular burden. Certainly it is true that our present 2.5-child household reflects the decrease in a need for children as workers. He also claims that having children decreases parental happiness. He claims that we are selfish to have children who will only consume our salaries, use environmental resources and decrease our happiness.
Regarding the environmental costs of children, Winter seems to think that they are larger culprits than adults. Our culture is a consumer culture, and it certainly bears the burden of proof on the author to show that an excess of children is a significant factor in environmental degradation. Discouraging reproduction to further our economy and society by lessening its burden is a similarly faulty argument. Over the past few years, Americans — as well as many of our European counterparts, such as France — have struggled with the social welfare system in light of the demographic issues of supporting the far larger baby boomer generation via taxation of their far less numerous offspring.
Declining birthrates, however, have not necessarily produced the depopulated Eden of Winter’s imagination. Italy is an excellent example of the dangers of overextending these attitudes towards reproduction. In the 1960s, Italians had an average of two children per family, the standard replacement rate for population maintenance. The current overall fertility rate is 1.3 throughout Italy and less than one in some towns, the effects of which have been highly visible in the formerly thriving villages-turned-ghost-towns of rural Italy.
Similarly, the increase in immigration to Europe can be, in part, causally linked to the relatively small proportion of young working-age Europeans in these countries. The RAND Corp. research institute projects that 30 million Europeans of working age will “disappear” by 2050. America’s birthrate is indeed higher than the European average and perhaps in terms of economic revival, in the long term, we are better off outbreeding Europe. Despite their one child per family policy, our concerns about the rise of China as an economic giant similarly reflect a strength-in-numbers understanding of economic production.
Environmentally and economically, there are certainly weaknesses to the idea that decreasing the American birthrate will be the panacea for our society’s ailments, but equally as dangerous are the ideological ramifications of this idea. By emphasizing the financial costs of children to parents, we bring ourselves closer to the dangerous paternalism of social Darwinism. It is no secret that the birth control movement in the early 20th century, best represented by Margaret Sanger’s founding of Planned Parenthood, was originally designed to check the population of the immigrant and urban underclass, whose poverty was perceived to be a consequence of their unbridled burgeoning. If we apply Winter’s population control ideology, rather than fighting the war on poverty through welfare reform or urban planning, we can stop it by discouraging “undesirable” socio-economic classes from procreating. This is particularly unjust considering that in urban America poverty does not necessarily visit equally all ethnic groups, which tints population control measures with a colored lens.
Even if we underestimate the economic importance of children to a society, and acknowledge the resources children consume, attempting to place a Band-Aid on our social and environmental problems with reproductive policy is not merely doomed to failure but could lead us down a dangerous slippery slope, affronting individual liberty and causing us to ignore underlying structural deficiencies and inequalities in our nation. What we need is not to demonize American parents as evil super-consumers but to understand and attempt to remedy why we live in a nation that cannot “afford” to value and support its children.
Jen Burstein is a State News columnist. Reach her at jenburstein@gmail.com.
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