LETTERS

...She reflected on the many pressures women feel when the responsibility for children rests primarily on thFm...

...familial bliss...

...PHILLIP JOHNSON Eugene, Oregon Mr...

...Baldwin’s article...

...Weshall need to find the courage within ourselves to choose the community over the private hearth...

...Parenthood is selfishness incarnate...

...CATHERINE CALLEN WEST Washington, D.C...

...The moment appears to be over, the birth rate starts its rise again, and those to whom the decision not to have children is a profoundly moral one are subjected to pathetic discussions such as that conducted in your pages between Deborah Baldwin and James Fallows...

...I don’t know anyone wealthy enough to take a Caribbean vacation-I haven’t noticed that my friends with children have cut out cocktail parties or tennis games...

...The resources are simply not available to support anything approaching the present population of this country-let alone a larger .one-more than a few years or decades longer...

...Absorption in one’s child is absorption in oneself, and all too often serves as an excuse for walling out the community, which should be more important than oneself or one’s child...

...1 am not speaking of anything so superficial to human existence as fossil fuels...

...What depresses me all the more is the failure of humanity-of communitj~-underlying Baldwin’s and Fallows’ words...

...We shall have to work a radical change in society within a few short years, or it will be forced upon us willy-nilly and unplanned...

...Letters For the briefest flicker of an historical moment, lasting less than a decade, a slightly larger percentage of our population became aware of the role that mindless fecundity has played in the world’ssorrows, from resource depletion to pollution to class systems...

...Meanwhile, I am glad that Deborah Baldwin is without a child...

...Baldwin detailed...

...More so than in any period since 1776, these are times that try the souls of men and women...

...Fallows’ allusion to his childless friends who “go off to their Caribbean vacations and cocktail parties and tennis games” thinking that the joke’s on his wife and him does not correspond to the thinking Ms...

...But I’ve noticed what they have all too often cut out: political o r g a n i z i n g , n e i g h b o r h o o d g r o u p s , involvement in community organizations, concern for issues extending beyond their cozy homes...

...But the environmental debate is out of fashion, even, apparently, for editors of Environmental Action...

...Fallows contrasts himself with childless friends “who go off to their Caribbean vacations and cocktail parties and tennis games...

...She certainly discussed the obnoxious, selfish reasons for remaining childless...

...I pray that she finds a good reason...

...Reading the smug, self-congratulatory words of a James Fallows, whose thoughts the President mouths, I fight an impulse to despair...

...Good God, Fallows, while you are dandling that child at your knee vast areas of the West are subsiding because the groundwater beneath them has been exhausted in the desperate effort to pump grotesque amounts of produce out of the land to feed too many people...

...If we are to avoid social convulsion and a new Dark Age, we shall need to overcome an unspeakably powerful enemy: selfishness...

...Fallows does not understand the distinction I suggest he consult Charles Peters, whose perceptive remark about “the lack of social support for parenting” in “Tilting at Windmills” was more to theeloquent point of Ms...

...I am speaking of such things as soil fertility and water availability...

...If Mr...

...It seems to have occurred to neither Baldwin nor Fallows that most people should not have children for reasons having nothing to do with the relative joys of personal freedom vs...

...I would like to speak out as strongly as I can against the lie that parenthood represents “unselfish love...