In Defense Of Large Families

I believe it's high time that we in the West get over our love affair with infertility and start to once again appreciate and celebrate large families. I don't mean that everyone has to go out and have 10 kids. I DO mean that our culture needs to once again see children as blessings from God rather than as time consuming, figure destroying, money draining headaches, as it does now. I've been coming to this belief for several years but it crystallized in my mind several months ago when I read a disparaging article on the Duggar family of Arkansas, perhaps the most famous large--and I mean large!--family in the world.

The article, obviously written by an embittered liberal, moaned that the then 16 Duggar children were attention deprived, disparaged the family's Christian faith, and accused them of being homophobic. All because the Duggars dared to go against the "progressive" optimal family size. It never occurred to the author of that bigoted article that the Duggars and other large families may be doing the world some good.

Imagine seeing this bumper sticker on someone's car as you're driving down the street: Save the Earth! Stop socialized medicine! Now what, you may be asking, does socialized medicine and saving the earth have to do with defending large families? Well, "progressives" have been preaching for decades about the threat (supposed) overpopulation poses to the environment. These are the same people who also advocate for government welfare programs paid for by taxpayers. Yet the fewer children you have the fewer taxpayers you have. See the catch-22?

"Progressives" want zero population growth (ZPG) to protect the earth and its resources but they also want a nanny state, i.e. socialism, that can only survive with a Catholic birthrate, as author Mark Steyn put it. Many "progressives" who acknowledge the inconsistency tout immigration as the solution. But that still means increasing the population, at least in a given country or region. And if you must increase the population why not do it naturally rather than importing foreigners? After all, if those foreigners adopt "progressive" ideas they'll start having fewer babies, too. Then where will Western countries get the people they'll need to sustain their nanny states?

The only solution is to admit that we can't have it both ways. If we want fewer and fewer people in order to protect the environment we must be willling to forego the "free" state services provided by taxing workers and consumers, i.e. people. Hence the bumper sticker mentioned above. Of course, the vast majority of "progressives" will never agree to this. They'll continue to dogmatically insist on both ZPG and socialism. They'll continue to hysterically denounce large families like the Duggars even though they're providing the resource the "progressive's" socialist utopia needs most: children. But maybe those children, raised in self-reliant Christian families, will spell the end of the "progressives'" unsustainable dream and herald the coming of a saner world where both children and the earth are loved.