My parents and my wife's parents were celebrated in their churches and their communities for having many children. At the point it became difficult for them to feed and clothe all their children, when no more of us could be crammed into full sized station wagons, our parents became radical promoters of sex education and birth control. My wife and I had that in common when we met.
Our generation has had zero, one, two, or three biological children per family, averaging close to one. Other children are adopted.
My mom was forced out of her career in radio and television when she and my father decided to have children. That's just the way it was then. When my youngest sibling started preschool she was eager to resume her career.
The economic empowerment of women, realistic sex education, and freely available birth control will make the future a little less grim than it might otherwise be.
Our children are now adults. I hope we have instilled within them the resourcefulness and compassion that will make this world a better place in spite of the damage our current economic and political systems have done to the earth's natural environment and our own human spirit.
I'm an amateur evolutionary biologist by natural inclination and some formal training. I have some intuitive understanding of deep time. This old planet has seen many innovative species come and go, sometimes in an instant. Humans may be one of those species. A million years from now we are nothing more than a curious layer in the geologic record.
Maybe our intellectual offspring will be scattered throughout the solar system, maybe there will be just a few million humans scattered about the earth hunting and gathering, living as our own ancestors did a million years before us. Either outcomes counts as "success" in evolutionary terms.
But most species of life on earth are lost, the earth sheds species as a tree sheds its leaves.
For now we should cherish and protect the species we share the planet with for their fate is our own.
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