Children as Enemies of the Environment? A Good Riposte

Joanna Benn ponders in the BBC web site if “baby decisions” are “adding to the world’s woes”.

Yeah, right.

Luckily among the general doom and gloom, there is at least one reader making a very important comment to Benn’s absurdist thinking:

Hearing Ms Benn wonder aloud “how green it is” to have a child is chilling. My parents lived in a time when certain people asked each other, in deadly earnest, how “Aryan” some personal choices might be. One might turn and ask Ms Benn “how green it is” for HER to continue to walk the earth. After all, Ms Benn, with a residence of her own, undoubtedly consumes more valuable resources than an infant who simply
lives with its parents. But that is what we come to when we start running life by the numbers.
Seajay, Seattle, Washington

What Ms Benn does not realize, and what many people concerned about overpopulation don’t realize, is that it is one thing to wish a more manageable number of people to roam the world; but it is another, wholly different thing to behave and to reason as if children were things to hate.

And the latter is, frankly, monstrous.