… women are so often blamed for the overpopulation of our world?
Last week, when I saw an online news article about a pregnant mother of two whose marriage had broken down after the onset of her third pregnancy, chastised by another woman—or at least a person using a woman’s name—for burdening the welfare rolls by producing yet another child, I got to thinking. Whose responsibility is it to support that child? There was, in the chastising commentary, only passing mention of the father of the children, and not so much as a hint he, not the taxpayers, should be bearing the burden of child support. This led me to further thinking, about dead-beat dads as we tend to call them in North America, and “father unknown” in many other parts of the world.
Where I live at the moment, I’ve seen reports claiming that sixty-seven percent of children do not know who their father is. Of those who do, a large percentage see no support from them, leaving the mothers to live in deep poverty with their progeny. Is it because most rules, and most standards of behavior are set by men both in society and in religions of all stripes? Recently, I’ve read two novels, both written by men, in which the solutions to the problem of world population rapidly outstripping our resources is either to sterilize and/or kill off women as if they reproduce through parthenogenesis.
This attitude has long puzzled me. One woman, from the onset of menses to the time of menopause—roughly a forty-year, plus or minus, span of her life—takes approximately two-hundred-eighty days to produce one more human being. Okay, so a small percentage of those can and do produce two, three, four and very rarely, more than that in the same time period. In those same two-hundred-eighty days, the woman cannot become impregnated again, unless she miscarries, and the incidence of that is fairly low. Of course, if she miscarries, there is no new human being to add to the populations statistics.
However, in two-hundred-eighty days, a lone man can, conceivably—no pun intended—impregnate at the minimum, two-hundred-eighty women if given the chance—as many of them are. Women are fertile for a relatively short period each month of their forty or so child-bearing years. Men can squirt out viable sperm every day, and often for far many more years than women can produce ova. For those reasons, to me, the solution to world overpopulation appears obvious. Sterilize men. Easy-peasy! Administer a small amount of local anesthetic by hypodermic syringe, wait a few minutes, then snip-snip, and it’s done. To sterilize women requires at the very least, penetrating the abdominal wall in one way or another, which is considerably more dangerous a procedure and can require general anesthetic.
Yet, the very suggestion of sterilizing men is met with outright horror by many people from all walks of life, from all religions, from all races. And why is that? Because men, who make the rules and set the standards, put extreme value on their personal ability to “prove their manhood” by impregnating women. Some take it even farther, becoming unbelievably anthropomorphic to the point of not permitting their male dogs to be neutered. One man of my acquaintance even went so far as to refuse to have his male dog “fixed” as a puppy, saying, “He hasn’t even had a chance to use it yet, and you want to take it away from him?”
In a word, yes. At least applied to dog, cats, bunnies and whatever other mammal you might care to name. But I’d like to see human population controlled by enforced sterilization of men, world-wide, as an alternative to killing off women, who appear to be considered by way too many, the sole contributors, the “breeding stock of humanity” responsible for our population overload. Male sterilization is more often than not reversible when necessary. Female sterilization, not so much. If any man can be shown (and there are unequivocal means of proving that) to have fathered two children, I personally feel he’s done his bit and should be forcibly prevented from doing more.
I’m interested in seeing counter-arguments , reading opposing views, and other solutions you might want to contribute.