In fiscal year 2012, the federal budget marked out $610 million for international family planning programs. But perhaps some of that funding needs to be directed inward, to fix the backwards bourgeois parents of Park Slope. Amy Sohn writes in the Awl:
You would think people with multiple children would be responsible about contraception because they understand the financial and emotional toll of childrearing. Instead they are as clueless and blasé as teens, teens who really don’t know any better … In the 90s we did “everything but intercourse” because of AIDSphobia. Now we do it because of laziness.
As for condoms, no way. If a twentysomething guy on “Girls” can’t be bothered to use rubbers, why would a forty-year-old monogamous dad?
Now, Sohn’s account of Park Slope parents’ misbehavior is anecdotal and just a teeny bit sensationalized (we fucking hope). But parts of it do ring true:
The combination of irresponsible contraception and illegal drugs among Regressives is the reason New York is in a baby boom right now. Those couples you see, grimacing, with the two babies fifteen months apart? They were drunk.
The sad thing about this behavior is that every Park Slope child that comes into this world brings with him or her the promise of tons of carbon dumped into the atmosphere. Even more tons than a kid born to a less outrageously wealthy family, because this one will need a cell phone by age 3 and SUV trips back and forth to pony-sports practice. (Or whatever … I don’t know what rich people do.) If people want kids, that’s one thing. But if they’re just acting stupidly and irresponsibly, they should know that their stupidity affects the planet a bazillionfold.
Practical solutions include: Workable male birth control, better IUD education, cheaper procedures for getting your tubes tied. Please, Park Slope parents — for the love of the planet, look into this stuff, or at least learn how condoms work. No matter how much homemade mayonnaise you buy, it’s not going to make up for the impact of a new baby.
