There’s something about a baby that makes me smile.  Maybe it’s the misshapen head, the pouting, drooly mouth or the tiny hands and feet that endear them to me.  It’s certainly not the 2am feedings, the dirty diapers, the spitting up or the incessant crying while teething or suffering through colic.  Maybe it’s that fresh baby smell that, when inhaled by people over 60, adds years to their lives.  Maybe it’s just because, like me, they have so little hair.

Whatever the reason, I do like babies – the problem is, of course, they grow up and stop being cute.  They go to public school and learn all kinds of horrible things to do and say, undoing in days the first five years of hard work you put into them.  After that, it’s a crapshoot.  You do your best to teach them right from wrong, then it’s up to them to make the right decisions.  I’ve raised two boys and I can say from firsthand experience, it’s not easy.  The sad truth is that they have free will and are more than eager to use it.

But I only raised two boys – just two.  Some readers out there are probably think, “TWO boys – pffft, I raised FOUR boys and it wasn’t so bad.”  Well, maybe it wasn’t – maybe you were lucky or maybe you’re just a great parent, but for the life of me, I couldn’t imagine raising four KIDS, never mind four boys.  I’m a firm believer in a zero population growth, so four kids is two too many as far as I’m concerned.

How about you?  Is four kids too many?  How about eight kids?  Ten?  Every once in a while you hear about some couple who are proudly announcing the birth of their thirteenth child.  Apparently, these people feel the need to spread their genes to the wind and birth enough children to start their own football team.  The latest supercilious procreators to hit the news were bursting with pride at their latest conception – their EIGHTEENTH in twenty years. 

Let me spell it out for you – an Arkansas couple named Duggar have seventeen children and another on the way.  Ranging in age from nine months up to twenty years old, they currently have ten boys and seven girls – but that wasn’t enough.  WASN’T ENOUGH.  Issues of retaining your sanity aside, why on earth (overpopulated as it is) would you desire bringing so many children into the world?  I can’t help but feel that these people believe it’s their right to have a thousand children if they so desire, but who picks up the bill?  Is daddy making $250K per year to support them all, or do they depend on the kindness of others (including government agencies and programs)?  Are they supporting their kids or are we?

Then, of course, there’s the religious aspect of it all.  Within the past few weeks, Pope Benedict XVI himself praised the 1968 Church document written by Pope Paul VI called "Humanae Vitae" which condemns contraceptives.  Over a billion people in China, over a billion people in India, and the church condemns the use of birth control?  Our own country overflowing with fatherless children, single mothers with six kids living on welfare, and the church condemns the use of birth control?  Nearly two million abortions per year in the United States and the church dictates no birth control?  I’m not Catholic, but if I were, I’d be converting to something else fast – perhaps, oh, I don’t know, a religion that understands and addresses the concerns of modern humans, instead of pretending these issues will just disappear because “God Says So”.  Or, in the case of "Humanae Vitae", just because a man appointed to a position of power says so.  A man said so, not a committee, not God himself, just a man deemed Pope.

An on the other side of the “be fruitful and multiply” coin, the church condemns the use of artificial insemination as “offending the dignity of life”.  The Vatican teaches us that “the only way to conceive a child is through intercourse between husband and wife”.  So, in the eyes of the church, if you can’t bear children without medical help, too bad.  It must be God’s will, and who are you to make decisions about your own life, anyway?

“But Ash”, you say, “if you feel people should be able to choose their own fate, why shouldn’t they be allowed to have two hundred children?”  The difference between choosing to have a test tube baby and fathering dozens of kids is the impact on society.  I’ll take a couple of lab-grown kids over the natural births of eighteen of them any day.  Unless you’re filthy rich, I can’t see how anyone could raise 18 children without financial help – and therein lies the problem.  If you want kids, you need to be able to take care of them independently.

Then, of course, there’s the overpopulation problem – something these types of parents don’t seem to give a damn about.  In AshWorld, people would be allowed to have one child each, so two parents have two children.  That’s zero-population growth.  Here on Earth, we’ll have 7 billion people on the planet in just a few short years  – for our available resources, that’s about 6 billion too many.  If my two boys get married and have two kids with their respective wives, that’s four grandchildren for me.  If the Duggar’s children each get married and have only half the children their parents did, the Duggars will be the grandparents of 162 kids.  By the time those grandchildren of theirs have kids, they’ll be able to populate a small town.