Worldwide, fertility rates and family sizes have dropped significantly as women have become more liberated. Through delayed motherhood and fewer children, many are taking more time to develop their own lives, as well as invest more time and resources in each child. In that sense it liberated and empowered us and our moms, creating significantly better child welfare and development outcomes. That trend includes an openness to parents of diverse sexual orientation, and nontraditional family planning like adoption and fostering. The trend also promises to be the best chance we have to respond to the looming threat of climate change, and in that sense represents something like a form of human evolution, a change moving us away from being as much of a threat to our own species.
On the other side, there is a faction of interests that benefit from traditional family planning, where woman are culturally pressured into having kids, where that pressure points women towards larger families, where sustainable and massive families are role modeled as somehow a good thing, where elites like Trump and his ilk use higher fertility rates to produce cheap labor and lots of consumers while also exacerbating inequality, and where impacts on the environment are ignored. They float above the masses, buoyed up by growth-based inequality. And rather than seeing parenthood as an opportunity to empower and develop children, they see it as an opportunity for economic exploitation.
This Mothers’ Day, if you want to really help moms and do more than just buy the obligatory card and flowers, consider getting involved in this struggle. Help moms succeed by making sure they get the resources they need to give their kids a fair start in life – one with opportunities equal to other (and wealthy) families in their community. Help them protect their kids’ future from things like climate change though a cooperative family planning model – the most effective way to mitigated the ecocide currently underway. Help them ensure their kids will inherit a world with greater economic equality, and functional democracies where their kids have a voice and power.
Want to help moms? Follow us on https://www.facebook.com/havingkids and take action on the new Action Alerts we offer every day. Or volunteer at HavingKids.org for one of our four primary campaigns.
Get involved – it’s your world and future too.