Hickey says that mens hats getting people to even entertain discussions about reducing population requires a lot of trust and two big shifts. First, he'd like to see the decision to have a child shift to being "a moral decision instead of just a personal decision." And that requires us humans to think hard about the obligations we have to each other in a scenario where mass extinction of both human and animal life is a real possibility.
I think other things too, mostly contradictions. I love my daughter, but I gave her an impossible future. I want her to be happy, but I worry with good reason that she will, at best, survive. I am glad she exists, but I know that her existence white, middle class, pampered will make it harder, in some slippery, maddening chefs hat math that is not her fault, for others to do the same. These are not motherly thoughts. But I am a mother, and they are mine.
I'm not Mormon anymore, and I left Utah a state that's toed the line in the battle over freedom of maga hats choice. It's tempting, from this vantage, to blame my pregnancy on a lack of choice, and to insist on my individual autonomy as the most precious of things. But I find that, more than anything else, my story looks the same with different details. I still live in a world where having children is culturally mandated, societally encouraged, and constantly, chronically, gymnastically protected even if that means endangering or punishing the mother, even if it harms the other humans and creatures she shares a world with.
The people who disagree with my decision top hats to birth strike now might not believe in a preexistence, but they believe in its secular cousin: that kids have a basic right to be born. They might not be climate change denying conservatives, but they still accept that their personal desires for a family, in combination with everyone else's, are worth potentially catastrophic consequences for the planet. And they might support abortion and women's rights, but they don't support a conversation that goes further that talks about what we owe our own bodies, and others'.
This question follows me around. It breathes down my neck. It's this question that motivated me to go on birth strike. And it's why I feel compelled to agree with Hickey, to go beyond the idea that having a baby or even not having one is merely a personal decision. I try to talk about this feeling with people. I try to tell my friends, my peers good, progressive people who believe, on some level, that climate change is real. But they stare at me, blank or angry. They tell black hats me autonomy is sacrosanct, that reproductive choice is limitless, and that the decision to have or not have children should be individual and automatically supported.
In Roundtree, as in Beverly Lacey and Jake Catlett, can be seen the disparity between public position and private feeling - a recurrent insight of this author. The book dwells in ironies. When Lily, in a white dress, ventures to attend a meeting of the miners' wives, Mother Jones casts her out: "That's not a woman," cries the old labor leader, "that's a lady. Let me []https://www.thedrink.ca/images/c/black hats-111alu.jpg[/] tell you! Modern parasites made ladies. God almighty made women!"