Monday, January 12, 2009

On the Decision to Remain "Child Free"

Van Zan, one of my commenters, made an interesting observation yesterday about my repertoire of posts:

I like your posts when they are in common sense non-ideological mode - where everything is not somehow a Left-wing post-modernist plot of equivalence without moral clarity. Refreshing.
So, let me throw this out to readers: Does the passage below on child-bearing and family values raise questions of common sense or postmodernism (or something else)?

My understanding of reproduction is that it is the basis of the institutions of marriage and family, and those two provide the moorings to the structure of gender and sexual oppression. Family is the social institution that ensures unpaid reproductive and domestic labour, and is concerned with initiating a new generation into the gendered (as I analyzed here) and classed social set-up. Not only that, families prevent money the flow of money from the rich to the poor: wealth accumulates in a few hands to be squandered on and bequeathed to the next generation, and that makes families as economic units selfishly pursue their own interests and become especially prone to consumerism.

So it makes sense to say that if the world has to change, reproduction has to go. Of course there is an ecological responsibility to reduce the human population, or even
end it , and a lot was said about that on the blogosphere recently (here, and here), but an ecological consciousness is not how I came to my decision to remain child-free.
Because reproduction is seen as a psychological need, even a biological impulse, that would supposedly override any rational concerns arising out of a sense of responsibility, ecological or otherwise, I would like to propose emotional conditioning to counter such a need or impulse to reproduce. Using my own life as a case study, I conclude that I came to a resolve not to reproduce through largely unconscious emotional reactions . I like children, but every time I fantasized of having one, I felt pangs of guilt over how for this 'impulse' of mine, someone else would have to put their body on the line.
Cassy Fiano has this (via Memeorandum):

Modern feminism is no longer about equality or letting women choose their own paths; rather, modern feminism is a hate group that looks at all men as potential rapists and abusers, sees a traditional nuclear family as dangerous, wants to make stay-at-home mothers a permanent thing of the past, and wants to force all women to make the lifestyle choices they dictate they should have.

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