On Malthus and Children as Accessories

Even if you don't know who Thomas Malthus was, you can recognize his present-day descendants in those that claim human beings should restrict reproduction due to the danger of over-population. Predictions of dire consequences for an earth burdened by too many people have been around a long time. That alone should tell you about the quality of their predictive ability.

Brendan O'Neill at spiked has a witty and withering take-down of Malthusians new and old:

What this potted history of population scaremongering ought to demonstrate is this: Malthusians are always wrong about everything.

The extent of their wrongness cannot be overstated. They have continually claimed that too many people will lead to increased hunger and destitution, yet the precise opposite has happened: world population has risen exponentially over the past 40 years and in the same period a great many people’s living standards and life expectancies have improved enormously. Even in the Third World there has been improvement – not nearly enough, of course, but improvement nonetheless....

The language used to justify population scaremongering has changed dramatically over the centuries. In the time of Malthus in the eighteenth century the main concern was with the fecundity of poor people. In the early twentieth century there was a racial and eugenic streak to population-reduction arguments. Today they have adopted environmentalist language to justify their demands for population reduction.

If you hear this argument about the population scare and are inclined to believe it sounds reasonable, stop and go read all of O'Neill's piece. If you are one of those folks that has restricted reproduction out of fear of global over-crowding, I'm glad to hear it. I don't think YOU should have any more children on whom you can inflict your muddled thinking.

Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but I couldn't help but see a connection of some sort between the need to put the Malthus hysteria to rest again and Slate blogger Mickey Kaus' coverage of the new trend in child-bearing:

Pink Is the New Blue: Maybe I'm out of it, but I was unaware that parents now want girls, not boys. That's the buried lede in Ruth Shalit Barrett's mildly horrifying Elle piece on "Gender Disappointment":

Seventyone percent of American families who use MicroSort—which is still in clinical trials—want a daughter. ...[snip] ... “The era of wanting a first-born male is gone, not to return,” founder Ronald Ericsson, MD, has said....

“The way society is now—I feel there’s a preference for girls,” says Linda Heithaus, a marine biologist from Hollywood, Florida, who has two sons and is contemplating doing IVF/PGD in the hope of getting a girl. “They can do everything a boy can do, plus you can dress them up. It’s almost like, to fit in, you need to have one.” Girls, in other words, are boys plus. They can play sports and have careers, and you can dress them in pink and take them to tea at the American Girl café. What’s not to like? [E.A.]

Others link the yearning to women’s belief that they’ll have a richer lifelong relationship with a daughter than a son. ...

Girls are boys plus? That's one way to look at it. I don't quite believe this trend (though some of my Westside yuppie friends confirm it).

At least Kaus demonstrates a shred of sense when he highlights the crucial portion of the text and calls such a notion "horrifying," even if he does modify if with the capitulatory "mildly."

Regardless of your views on religion, family size, gay marriage, or any other of those cultural questions, I would hope that you could agree that children are not an accessory.

They are not to be trotted out and paraded around for your own aggrandizement, regardless of where you stand on the issues. They are individual human beings. Deserving of all the respect that status entails.

I hope that the long efforts of those, like Malthus, who seek to diminish life haven't taken so deep a hold that their effects are irreversible. Comments like "you need a girl to fit-in" though, make me wonder if that isn't the case.