[spiralarchitect]

I'd like to address the issue of "personal choice" here.

Most of us live our lives with the illusion of choice, especially those of us living in democratic countries. But are choices are limited and strongly influenced by the pressures of the social, environmental and cultural systems that we live in. This is the main reason for answers like "well, you just have to have kids" to the question posed in this forum, because we often live our lives simply fulfilling the expectations of our cultural roles. You guys all probably know this, even if you might express it another way, otherwise we all wouldn't be here, right? We're in the process of trying to wake up, to be able to see the infinite choices that we do have. But it's very, very hard. We have to always be imagining a world that we know we can realize, but that doesn't exist yet. The realities of our current situation and current world constantly pressure us into fulfilling our expected roles.

So I agree, that in an ideal world of infinite choice and conscious, empowered individuals, having kids should be a personal choice. The reality, however, is that it is *not* a personal choice. It is influenced by the forces of the systems and environments around us. Compounding the problem is that population size has a real and very serious effect on other people and our planet in general. Most areas of the world with high rates of population growth are environmentally fragile or damaged areas that are as a result poor and not well educated. Poor and uneducated often leads to large family size and a larger population than the available resources can sustain, leading to war and more environmental destruction (e.g. Rwanda, Haiti, Iraq, Indonesia...) . People in these situations, don't so much choose to have large families rather it is the result of environmental pressures (lack of access to education and birth control, the social status and power of women).

On the other hand, we in the "first world", although with much lower rates of population growth (zero or negative in many cases except for places like the US with high rates of immigration from poorer countries) consume far more resources per capita than in poorer countries, so the environmental impact of each person is much greater. Yet we too are largely governed by social and environmental pressures of the systems we live in.

I guess what I'm saying is that simply leaving the question at "it's a personal choice" is not a sustainable solution. I'm not advocating a totalitarian solution where a central authority dictates family size (e.g. China). I think that the solution lies foremost in working for social and economic equality so that people have the opportunities to imagine new choices and secondarily, for those of us who do have choices, to recognize the effect of our "environmental footprint" and limit our families to few or no children or find ways of reducing that footprint for the good of all.