The pope: Pets shouldn’t replace babies
Pope Francis is worried that too many young people “prefer pets to children,” said Celia Viggo Wexler in NBCNews.com. The Holy Father last week complained there are too many “selfish” couples in Western nations who “do not have children because they do not want to, or they have just one, but they have two dogs, two cats.” As a woman quite content with my one child, I found his remarks “insulting,” as did many other women and animal lovers. With its widely ignored ban on “artificial contraception,” the church has made it clear that it sees the value of women “primarily as mothers.” In recent decades, women finally are getting the chance to have careers and live “as fully and as ambitiously as men.” So “get used to it, Holy Father: You may be seeing a lot more young couples walking dogs than pushing strollers.”
The pope is right that many people today “dote on their animals as if they were children,” said Lara Williams in Bloomberg. But there are strong economic reasons why so many of them are delaying or opting out of childbirth, including job insecurity and low pay, student debt, and “outof-reach
real estate values.” Having a “fur baby” is a lot cheaper than two or three or four kids. Those who choose not to have children are not being selfish, said Alistair Currie in CNN.com. With the global population projected to reach nearly 11 billion people by century’s end, limiting family size is “one of the most powerful actions we can take in limiting global warming.” The more people there are, the more food we grow, forested land we claim, and carbon we burn.
Francis “rattled some big cages,” said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post, but as both “an irrational animal lover” and a mother, I think he has a point. People who really don’t want kids shouldn’t have them, but may I suggest to those who are on the fence that they “might be in for a surprise” if they do make a baby or two. It’s an experience like no other, rooted deeply in our DNA. “You can no more explain the overwhelming, all-consuming, all-protecting love you feel for your newborn than you can explain the feeling of being in love to the uninitiated.” Such truly selfless love is good for both you and humanity. This, I think, “is what the pope was trying to say.”