Well…let’s just admit it. I’m not pro-choice in the abortion sense of the word. Let’s just say I’m pro-choice in a different way.
In my estimation, I’m pro-choice too because I have made a choice that results in not having children. Quite possibly, mixed into the batter may be reasons that are similar to why some women choose to abort.
Just for the record, I am an older single woman with no children and little chance of having any of my own now. For better or for worse, I too have made a choice not to have children.
The reason?
For me, besides believing that marriage is the proper context for having children, I’d want any children I had to have a good daddy as well, and not only a mom. I know what can happen when kids don’t have a good daddy’s regular input into their lives.
After children grow up, seemingly insurmountable difficulties can result if their daddies gives them little, no, or negative input, even if they otherwise have a lot of good qualities.
With every choice in life, there are consequences.
Some of the consequences I could be looking forward to could also be some of yours someday, if you are pro-choice.
In my own life, I see the consequences of not marrying and having children as possibly ensuring that I will not have close family members around to take care of me when I am old. I don’t particularly want to be a burden on society or distant family members.
But there’s a good chance I will be, as I have never learned to manage my money well enough to save a significant amount up for retirement. And though I’m finding my way in a different way now, regular employment no longer seems to be an option after I interrupted my “career” by moving across the country to be available for my elderly mother.
When I was younger, I was among those who did not want to have to deal with children.
As precious as children can be, let’s just admit it: little ones take a lot of work, and each one creates a lot of expense we wouldn’t otherwise have to pay for.
It’s possible this reason came into play, as well: I might have to think of the well-being of others besides myself if I had children!
Besides, the best time to start a career is when you’re young.
I also treasure “quiet” and “stress-free” a little too much sometimes. Unless there’s something wrong with children, having them might guarantee considerably less of both!
Observation tells me that for a parent, raising children might well be the hardest work on earth. It’s not easy bringing kids up right so they have a good chance to compete well with others, make a healthy contribution in some way, and learn the values that will serve them well throughout life. It’s challenging to have to keep coming up with solutions for them and addressing the issues of growing up!
I think it’s possible that even those of us who choose to ”have a life” over the lives of the children we could have had may one day wish we had chosen to have some, or to keep and cherish them.
The rhythms of life seem to guarantee that if we live long enough, we women will have a chance at freedom and life once we have empty nests (providing businesses would be willing to give us jobs then, that is!). Most of us could have a chance for the freedom of a having career then, too, if we were willing to wait for it and maybe go to school later in life. (We could have the best of both!)
Observing my own family members growing old and dying shows me that at the end of life, what matters most is our wonderful memories of family and the quality of our relationships, at a time when it’s probably too late to create many more.
Billions of dollars in the bank or great careers, once they are in the past, just can’t take the place of friends and loved ones and any difference we were or were not able to make in the lives of people around us.
By choosing to rid ourselves of our unborn, I think we may as a nation be choosing things we ultimately don’t want, leaving behind the things we might have cherished most.
By ridding the country’s current majority in this country (I’m speaking of Caucasians here) of the offspring that would rightfully belong to it, we may ultimately give our country over to those who typically choose to have more children than we do: it’s the majority vote that counts in our country, you know.
From reading I’ve done, this could very well mean that, say, Hispanics or Arabs will be in the majority in our country by the time our children or grandchildren would be voting, at a time when the rest of us are old and need people to stand up for us.
In other countries, decisions are being made now that, besides abortion, are giving doctors and others the right or responsibility to take the lives of other innocent people: some are sick people who could recover if given a chance, and some are older people who are euthanized simply because they happened to be considered a drain on their country’s resources.
(Don’t visit Holland–if you end up in the emergency room there, you may never come back.)
And by the way, countries who are adopting these policies are typically those who have chosen to have socialized medicine.
In societies that allow these kinds of things, when they first begin (typically when abortions are allowed to be a normal choice for every woman), they tend to progress into other things. The results may not be in our favor, whatever way we voted, once we start eliminating other members of our society that we consider to be worth less than we or our comforts are.
Should we decide to choose socialism, we could be choosing those very same things for ourselves.
Do you know what I think?
If it was my decision that counted, I have a strong recommendation to make.
I think every citizen in America should take two years of Spanish and two years of Arabic before they reached adulthood, and refresher courses periodically thereafter.
Why?
I think someday the official language in America may very well be the language of those people groups: there might not be enough of us Caucasians to replace those in the current majority, and if we have another war, I guarantee other cultures in our country will come out ahead of us, at our standard rate of population growth. …Or possibly, at our standard rate of population reduction.
We may need to make friends among other ethnic races or language groups in our country someday, especially if we are to maintain an influence of some kind.
Many of us have already made the choice to be childless. (I’m one of them, as I choose to wait for a husband first. In my way of thinking, the right one has not come into my life yet.)
I think that kind of choice may very well affect our future and our nation in ways we can’t today fathom.
It’s hard to know all the circumstances under which a woman would feel a need to get rid of her unborn. Though I can’t think of too many circumstances under which I’d find it acceptable, I can say I’ve noticed there can be exceptions to just about every rule.
I do find it hard to understand, though, how a woman could depersonalize any baby she carried with her while “it” was in the process of starting to become someone, enough to be able to do away with it. As women, isn’t bringing forth life a part of who we are, on some level? Why would we even allow anyone to take that away from us?
Besides, I see population control–whether it’s of trees in the forest, of wild animals, of rats in the city, or of people in the world–as being one of those inbuilt rhythms of nature.
Studies have shown that rats are much more aggressive when they are put into a space that is too small and then their population grows until there are too many of them in that space. That’s when they start killing each other off and bringing the population down to a bearable level.
We used to raise gerbils. It didn’t take long for gerbils to multiply astronomically. Gerbil parents seem to eat their young when their population balloons out of control, too.
We humans tend to do that too on some level.
Not fun, but true.
There can be more than one reason people go to war. Among other things, reasons for a war might include conflicts in beliefs, lack of the basic necessities of life, getting even, or a need for liberty.
Or…when the frustrations of having to deal with way too many people and the resulting complications cause life to overwhelm humankind, someone, somewhere may eventually say or do something that really ticks somebody else off. People might start to take sides, and next thing you know, there is war.
As a religious person myself, I think I can probably say this: if my religious beliefs tell me that someone else is wrong! wrong! wrong! if they don’t do it my way, and I think the only way to get everyone else to do it “right” is to force them to do it, I could very well be a force in the world to foreshadow the next bloody war.
(If you know anything about history, you know it’s been done before, and you’d know that there’s a good chance it will be done again.)
All it takes is a lot of people who all think differently (especially people who don’t know how to give and take in the press of life), living in a small amount of space so that no one person can easily get away from the others, and voila! Instant population control in the form of our next war!
War is neither fun nor pretty. Countries can’t be blamed for wanting to find ways to keep the population down. Trying to curb a population artificially has its own drawbacks, though.
People in China are finding out some of the negatives of China’s requirement that couples have only have one child. Even those who do what the government says are suffering on many levels.
Negative consequences in taxes or jobs are given to couples in China who have “too many children” (more than one). Unwanted children (typically girls) are discarded (sometimes killed), and orphans and anyone who cares enough to try to help them are beaten and treated like criminals.
Woe to you if you get married again and both you and your spouse each bring a child with them, or they decide to have another one between them. One of the children has to be discarded and becomes one of the outcast orphans there.
If a woman in China becomes pregnant more than once, she has to go into hiding because she is now a criminal, and police may burn houses of their relatives or beat them or force them out of jobs… (This information is from a recent e-mail I got from a publication called “Voice of the Martyrs”.)
I’ve heard there’s a whole generation of men growing up there who will have very little chance of ever finding a woman to marry.
I sympathize, in more ways than one.
If there are mostly men in a culture or only men have the say, a society typically becomes much more aggressive.
Where there are far more men then women in a culture, the competition for the few available women as potential marriage partners is typically fierce.
History shows that such situations have at times induced war.
When there is a true need going unmet, something has to give. Somehow, we all have to have a way to obtain what we really need in life, or there will be problems in one way or another. Being able to find and keep a good mate is one of those needs.
Who knows? A war could take place someday so that most of the wifeless generation of men in China would be able to obtain wives from somewhere else, overpopulation or no overpopulation.
Men and women need each other, however much some of us may protest otherwise. All of us would benefit if we were able share the best of who we are and what we can do with each other in the right ways…through our own choice, not because anything was forced on us.
Where one lacks, the other can take over. Where they lack, we can cover for them.
That’s the way it was meant to be, as I see it.
