Children ARE a Choice

I have received World Pulse email Magazine for May 2013. Well done in addressing maternal and child mortality issues!

However:

We have created a system that pits women against men out of lack of ability to face the truths about each other. We are all vulnerable, and need community. We need to be taught to bond with our sacred opposites, not with those who mirror our own fears and failings. We allow our young men to be treated as bulls on a beef farm and roosters on a chicken farm, rather than as very vulnerable human beings. No wonder they are afraid and angry. We allow our girls to be treated as milk machines and brood hens, simply to produce progeny and nurture to take care of the vulnerable. No wonder women are worn down.

My concern is that we still focus too much on the maternal issues of women and not enough on the idea of a child's right not to be brought into this world by people who have no way (or perhaps no will) to care for them, body, mind, and spirit, while they are being formed in the womb and after they are born. This is a human rights issue that can only be addressed with honest reevaluation of procreation as a human choice, not an animal imperative.

No matter what the "sacred" scriptures say, children do not choose (through karma or any other cosmic consciousness method) the family into which they will be born. Neither are babies placed in the wombs of women by any action that, at this point in human history, does not require both male and female participation in the conception. I dread the day we take men out of the procreation experience through the sterile system of cloning the most self-satisfied few.

It is the right and duty of a man to wait to procreate until he is capable of supporting himself and others, and to then have an equal say in the number of children he will support financially, and otherwise, even in the event of the death or disability of the mother of his children's mother. It is the right and duty of a woman to wait to procreate until she is capable of supporting herself and others, physically and financially, even in the event of the death or disability of the father of her children.

Parents push their children to pretend that they can go out on their own, as if adding to a failing family will improve the abilities of the family to survive. Our world is long past the need to be fruitful by multiplying our human numbers. We must respect ourselves and others by telling them the truth. Men are frightened, so they lash out at those more vulnerable than they. Women are frightened, so they bring babies into the world and hide behind them to obtain their own nourishment and protection. This cycle must stop.

Males and females must be taught to use their brains before sharing their bodies in procreative play. There are safe ways to relieve sexual tension which don't create new children. Let us stop segregating them so that they never learn the needs and ways of each other. Let us supervise them as they learn to take care of each other. Only then should they be allowed to attempt creating new family. If this takes universal access to conception control while we change our society, so be it. Somewhere we have to stop acting as if we are dumb animals and allow humans to rethink the right to have a supportive society preceding conception of progeny. It is the very least that we owe the children of the universe..