Some time ago, I posted here a video quote of the Gates Foundations' family-planning message. I mean, you say "family planning" and I will acknowledge your efforts, no matter how feeble, superficial, and confusedly motivated. Yet, it's important for me to clarify that my own position on family planning is a bit stronger and much wider than those of the philanthropists behind the cute video. Essentially, the title I chose for the animated citation intended to hint on my personal focus - after all, I did use words like "Key to Economic and Social Survival."
You see, the majority of charitable efforts and government aids are focused on the prevention of unwanted births and directed at either the "third-world" countries or our own domestic lower-income classes. This is because the predominant idea behind these undertakings, granted too radical for Catholics and the conservative right, is still incredibly human-centric and terribly inadequate with respect to the ecological and other planetary concerns.
It is basically limited to one straightforward notion that those who cannot afford to provide multiple children with sufficient sustenance, housing, clothing, education, and information technology shouldn't have them (the children). So, disadvantaged people in poor countries and counties should stop reproducing (and they should, no question about it!), so that the emissaries of the bleeding rich hearts would stop sending to their bosses the unpleasant images of starving, sick, infested, and dying children. Meanwhile, nobody is paying attention to the violent overpopulation crimes committed against our precious Earth not in some far away land but in so-called centers of "civilization."
12 years ago my place of residence, a Manhattan high-rise, was famous for having more pets than children. Today, the building is flooded with infants, toddlers, preschoolers, preteens, and teenagers. Only after midnight you can pass through the lobby without stumbling into well-off pro-choice parents with the broods of two, three, even four children.
Practically every single business owner I ever worked with has three children (I swear!). How about the democratic billionaire couple that cares so much about the family planning in underdeveloped countries, i.e. Bill and Melinda Gates? How many children do they have? You guessed it - three! And their philanthropic cohort Warren Buffett? Also three! It's some sort of a magic fucking number! And the funny thing is, they probably think that they are doing right by the Planet – they can afford a whole school of children, but they limited themselves to "just three!"
So, now let me tell you what I think. It is my firm believe that in the current state of ecological deterioration, unstoppable depletion of natural and fiscal resources, exponential mental and emotional degeneration of an average human, complete disappearance of merit principles, and overwhelming crumbling of social liberties - it is nothing short of a crime for anybody (and I mean, ANYBODY) to have more than one child!
This is simple arithmetic, folks: Why the hell my one child must share air with these endless triple offsprings? Use your imagination for a second and replace those triples and duos with ones – how much air, food, resources, personal attention, and devotion would we have per each individual child then? I don't know about you, but this mental picture seems like a much healthier and somewhat less doomed present and future to me.
I cannot even begin to describe how angry these fucking people with multiple children make me, regardless of who they are – those with sufficient household wealth and those who keep popping them out because our federal and state governments throw our taxes at them (the more dependents, the higher the welfare payments); those who claim that they do it for God and those who "cement their marriages" using babies as cinder blocks.
And, of course, I always fumed at fertility doctors endlessly pollinating multiple eggs with abundant sperm to ensure successful fertilization, thus exponentially increasing the probability of twin, triple, and even quadruple births. But, as it turns out, the doctors, who take upon themselves the appalling task of correcting Nature and giving children to people who were meant to have none, are not the worst of medical offenders against our Planet.
The whims of my life spared me from being exposed to child-bearing and births for the past 20 years. As a result, I was sheltered from the macabre reality of what I can only call a large-scale bolstering of "civilized" overpopulation. Until the last year that is, when one of my subordinates got pregnant for the first time.
We are fairly close and she frequently asks for my advice on matters outside of our professional relationship. So, in the last trimester she approached me with the following: "My doctor asked me if I wanted Epidural." "Why?" I asked innocently, "You are not having a C-section." She shrugged her shoulders, "Well, they give it to everyone who doesn't want the pain now. And they've been doing it for years. But I've read it's not good for the baby."
What???!!! They give it to everyone? Even to healthy young women who are built to go through natural labor without any complications? No wonder these people think nothing of having one child after another. Why not? But do they ever dwell on a pretty obvious concept that there might be a reason why Mother Nature intended for the birth of a child to be a labor of pain and love? And don't even get me started on what all these drug-induced and anesthetic-aided infant extractions (you cannot seriously call them labors at this point) do to these newborn humans.
Obviously, these parents don't care much about the future of their children. And it's not shocking to me that the drug-pushing doctors and their sponsors, i.e. big pharma, don't care about the survival of their own descendants either. It should be, but it's not. The opportunism has become the blinding principle of everyone's existence and it always prevails – all they care about is their bank accounts' balances today! As they say in French, Apres Moi, le deluge (After me comes the flood)!
And here is another angle. The conveyor birthing and ballooning families are among the main causes for the perpetually increasing health insurance rates. Do you realize that in addition to the terrible effect they have on the global environment and economics, these multi-child families are basic larcenists? Daily they steal hard-earned money from single individuals and one-child parents who are forced to pay exorbitant premiums inflated by these thieves.
I thought that I would never align my interests with those of any big public organization, but in the fight for our Planet's survival any allies count, even those who take the right actions for the wrong reasons. In their unyielding pursuit of stock "value" inflation, health insurers do whatever they can to assist those who want to stay childless or keep their families small: a vasectomy is covered 100%, so is a once a year abortion performed by a network provider. Obviously, in the long run these procedures are far more economical than prenatal care, birth, child healthcare, etc., etc.
Thus, inadvertently, the insurance companies actually contribute to the fight against overpopulation. But they can do more! How about they stop covering the goddamn epidural administered to absolutely healthy women? The last I've heard, each shot costs about $2,000. So, c'mon HMO, let them feel it, both in their pockets and, as Nature intended, in their birth canals. Maybe this will make at least some of them to stop at #1.
The Frustrated CFO 