July 16, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Slate magazine, an online publication that caters to an upscale “pro-choice” readership, got what it asked for when it invited readers recently to rhapsodize about their self-induced sterility and willful barrenness. In a series of articles culled from responses emailed to Slate, the magazine gives us a glimpse of the mindset of the sexual narcissists who frequent its pages.
Perhaps the most crassly frank of the responses came from one Heather Gentry, an unlikely resident of the family-friendly state of Georgia. In an article entitled “No Kids for Me, Thanks: I Don’t Enjoy Alien-Parasites,” Gentry calls pregnancy “unnatural and abhorrent,” and asks why she should like to, “have my body distorted beyond recognition for an alien-looking creature to live there for nine or 10 months and use up my food and energy storage?”
Gentry adds that a child “is a proud role model for any parasite,” noting that after birth it “it eats my food, lives in my house, and takes up my energy.”
Margaret Ganong, a 55-year-old divorcée, thanks her “lucky stars” that abortion was available in the 1970s so that she could avoid the consequences of her youthful sexual adventures.
“In 1974, I went off to college, fiddled around with boys, and thanked my lucky stars that Planned Parenthood and Roe v. Wade were a hard-fought reality,” she writes. “Without them, I and countless others would not have had the opportunity to discover our bodies and ourselves without paying the high price of young parenthood, diminished expectations, and diapers.”
Twenty-nine year old Shannon Chamberlain, who calls herself “upper middle class,” says she might have wanted to have children if she had lived in early-20th-century Britain, where “you barely saw your kid until he/she was in striking distance of a university fellowship.”
After reviewing the inconveniences of parenthood, Chamberlain admits that perhaps having a child would turn out to be “transcendent, like all of the mothers that I know say it would be.” However, she suspects that her friends are really just lying to her, claiming that “the people who make that argument have their own interests, their own reasons for justifying an irreversible decision to me and to themselves, and in the end, I just don’t believe them.”
One Brad Carty says that children would cramp his economic style in “No Kids for Me, Thanks: I Value My Professional Mobility.” Rejoicing in his decision to reject children, Carty notes that “I was able to travel, go to concerts and the theater, and buy myself nice things while others were paying for orthodontia.”
He then “married a woman who felt as I did” about children, and “for the past 10 years we’ve lived in various cities in Europe (again, I can change jobs whenever I wish). I can’t imagine any other life—I certainly can’t imagine it being any better than the one I have.”
Many of Slate’s readers expressed their enthusiastic support in the articles’ comments section, while others seemed uncomfortable with such a cavalier rejection of children.
“Other of my less tied-to-the-house friends w/o kids has written 3 books. I don’t know who these people are who are urging these people to have kids, but I say, just ignore those who want to control your uteruses…uteri? Trying to talk people into having kids is as bad as being one of those pro-life protestors (sic) who stand outside of clinics,” wrote one.
Another left a warning for the practitioners of Slate’s egoistical sexual ideology:
“The mother of my children visited her 97 year old self-described ‘maiden’ great-aunt in the hospital. The bedridden great-aunt looked up at her and asked tearfully ‘Why did I live?’ As a parent and grandparent I have an answer that satisfies me. I hope Margaret and the others who wrote is this series don’t find themselves asking the maiden great-aunt’s sad question.”
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