Was this person actually there at the time?
This seems to be my day for going WHUT.
Somebody on FB linked to this post about motherhood/non-motherhood, about which I am slightly meh overall, but I get the nitcomb out for this cited quotation from a woman, who, from the age given in the text, is pretty much an exact contemporary of yr hedjog:
Helping the planet was not my reason for not having children, of course; that wasn't on my radar or the culture's radar 30-odd years ago.
I don't think you needed to be reading all the apocalyptic overpopulation sf that was around at the time (practically a subgenre of its own) to be aware that there was a huge amount of OverPopulation Anxiety swirling about 30 years ago, and, indeed, people wondering whether in the light of that, they should be having children, or more than a certain number of children.
I will concede, she concedes, that since then we have possibly got more nuanced, and less crudely Malthusian, about the deleterious effects on the planet of Too Many People, but to say that this 'wasn't on the culture's radar 30-odd years ago' suggests that their own radar was malfunctioning at the time.
This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1641667.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.