To their credit, after a barrage of childfree responses to the post, they put up a lovely collection of childfree people championing their lifestyle that you can see here.
I think people generally misuse the term selfish.
As a satanist I believe that everything each one of us does every day of our lives is a selfish act. You eat because you are hungry, sleep because you are tired, and scratch your nose because it itches. These are things we do for our self. Even charitable acts are done with the intent of feeling good about ourselves.
Since everything in life is selfish I have to assume that the author defines selfish as something that we do to benefit ourselves without respect to the fact that it negatively impacts others.
So who on earth is on the receiving end of the horrible consequences of me not having a child?
The Daily Beast would have me reproduce to sustain the economy. The great endeavor of Capitalism needs my ovaries! Just think of the big banks that won't collect my kids' money, and the Universities that won't collect my kids' money, and the shopping malls, and the restaurants, and the Drug companies that won't collect my kids' money! Who will man the grocery store cash registers? Who will deliver the mail? Who will brew the Tim Horton's Coffee? There's no way that the exploding population of Earth is enough to sustain these most important of matters, so I must give birth to enough children to do each one of the menial tasks that runs the country. Quick, pop out another one! We don't have a garbage man yet!
You can't honestly be referring to the child itself, who doesn't even exist. In that case we had better extract every single one of our eggs and artificially inseminate immediately because the potential loss of life is in the THOUSANDS.
Who would be so selfish as to not produce thousands of babies per parent?!
Well except for the part where the human race would be completely extinct at this point because of the complications from having more people than square inches of land on earth.
Oh! You meant the negative impacts on all of the people that my offspring would have benefited.
Because there's such a good chance that my child will cure cancer and become a retirement home nurse to take care of everyone else.
I can't imagine a better motivation for giving birth than to have someone to maintain the baby boomers. Of course you'll have to force your child to take a post secondary education that's to the benefit of others. You wouldn't want them to pursue their dreams of becoming an artist or anything like that.
Oh! You meant the negative effect on my poor childless husband. It has always been a life long dream of his to take up a second job in order to pay for me to stay home and raise our children. He wants nothing more than to change diapers and watch Dora The Explorer while the football game is on.
Oh! You were referring to my parents not getting any grandchildren. Yes the 20 hours per year that they will visit is certainly proportionate to the 20 years that I will lose breeding.
Oh! You were thinking of the people out there who are already parents, exhausted and overweight, in a sexless marriage, driving a minivan to soccer practice, where their kid who hates them can learn to play a game that they will be tired of in six months, who need reassurance that their decision was the correct one. Well, you got me there. I don't give a fuck about their mistakes, because I'm selfish.
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