A Love Song
Moore, Michelle
to limit population. (He does advocate reducing the quotas on immigration, however.) Rather, his argument for the one-child family is an appeal to individual conscience and voluntary action....
...And he salts the clinical A Love Song In the photograph, the four of us stand together: my grandmother, mother, and I in a blurred circle of breasts, and my daughter, hip-high in the foreground, smiling into the sun...
...Such a transformation of the family would surely have a profound impact on our sense of social solidarity, obligation, and future orientation, Eberstadt observes...
...One of the best parts of the book deals with his account of his unexpected bout of post-op tristesse...
...And in America, the most individualistic nation in the world, this demographic trend could dramatically accelerate social atomization...
...What this picture doesn't speak of is how my grandmother took to wearing her husband's workboots when he died, the hard-soled bathroom acoustics echoing-up a heart...
...Or the reason why my arms form a shawl for my daughter's girl-thin shoulders, grateful for a place to rest...
...Given this highly selective reading of the evidence, it is not surprising that siblings fare so poorly...
...Or how my mother, the mother of four, routinely weeps for the child not living, her eyes dammed up to what's left...
...why it felt odd, why it felt a little shameful, why it felt sad," he writes...
...Perhaps most impressive of all, McKibben does not try to claim moral-courage points for ending his own reproductive life...
...It is mid-summer ten years ago when the mountain ash turned willow and wept for a field to lie down in, holding ground in a withering shroud of brown, and we are certainly no different-my mother, chin tilted against the tug of years, and my grandmother's groomed defiance giving in at the gumline...
...Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's most recent book is The Divorce Culture (Knopf...
...He asks men and women to think and talk about overpopulation in the most personal terms "as a matter of how many children you or I may bear...
...McKibben is also persuasive because he practices what he so fervently preaches...
...S~I1 his argument for the one-child family population solution is ultimately unconvincing...
...Though he acts on his prindples, he confesses very human misgivings...
...By limiting his own family to one, he is able to do other things: work on Adirondack conservation issues, belly-dance, and teach Sunday school...
...Michelle Moore findings with evidence from sitcoms and his own anecdotes of fights with his brother...
...In his environmental calculus, there is very little difference between formula-guzzlers and gas-guzzlers...
...This devaluation of children also contributes to a devaluation of childrearing as an adult vocation...
...Nor is there evidence to suggest that limiting family size will reduce family consumption...
...McKibben's own exemplary conduct notwithstanding, I fear that a nation of Cleavers without Beaver may become a nation where June and Ward buy bigger houses and cars and dedicate themselves to doing their own thing...
...There's no set of statistics to explain...
...But the chief problem with McKibben's argument is that it treats children as if they were costly consumer items on a par with cars...
...McKibben believes that there are better uses for adult energies and resources than raising a bunch of children...
...In a recent article in The Public Interest, Nicholas Eberstadt painstakingly documents a pattern of worldwide fer~lity decline and paints a futuristic portrait of a graying world population with over 55 percent of the world's women past reproductive age...
...Too, McKibben's sweeping case against siblings is biased and distorted...
...The father of a four-year-old daughter, he decides to get a vasectomy...
...But there is no evidence to support the idea that parents with one child are more altruistic than parents with two or more...
...Commonweal 2 | May 8, 1998...
...Indeed, he claims that having fewer children will free parents to make the world a better place...
...Children would grow up with parents and grandparents but would have no siblings, cousins, aunts, or uncles...
...He relies heavily upon a single study based on small clinical samples of individuals in therapy where sibling incest, aggression, and conflict figure far more prominently than they do in the general population...
...Over a couple generations, he says, the impact of sustained low fertility could change the composition of the family itself...
...To begin with, he fails to contend seriously with a competing and well-supported scenario of population implosion...
Vol. 125 • May 1998 • No. 9
