There Are Too Many Flowers!

I’m reminded of a song from the good folks in Monty Python:

Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.

I’ve been meaning to complete this post for awhile and then when I read this piece by Hillary Clinton that discusses the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services taking action that could be seen as equating birth control with abortion, I felt compelled to get this post done a.s.a.p.:

There’s a car in my town that has a whole bunch of pro-life bumper stickers on it. I can only remember one of the car’s bumper stickers verbatim, but I can say with confidence that they largely consist of statements of pro-choice sentiment. The one bumper sticker that I do remember says, “Saying there are too many children is like saying there are too many flowers.” Since seeing this bumper sticker, particularly given its context, I’ve been bothered by its implications.

While I tend to define myself as “a big lefty” on a lot of issues, when it comes to abortion I’d say I’m a moderate who leans toward the pro-life side. That’s a position I’ve held for a number of years now after giving it a considerable amount of thought and changing positions on it several times. (I’m sure I’d be reticent not to mention that I’m sure my Catholic upbringing has influenced that position as well.) I’d be happy to explain why I hold the position that I do, but I don’t want to get bogged down in that right at this moment. Suffice for now to say that I think that both sides are right. I believe that this is, as pro-life folks say, an issue of how human life is defined. Yet, I also believe that this is, as pro-choice folks say, an issue of gender equity. I think more might be able to be done toward at least making this not so polarizing of an issue if both sides would stop digging their feet in the “I’m right; you’re not” dirt (which Clinton can be said to be guilty of doing to at least some degree in the piece that I read) and accept that the other side has a point as well. More both/and and less either/or seems like it could help in this situation. Indeed, my own position is not based on what I presume to know, but on what I suggest that I don’t know.

Given that take on issues of abortion, I tend to think a lot of abortion-related bumper stickers tend to be annoying anyway, since so many of them assert truth claims that I don’t think can really be asserted as truth claims … and I think many of the pro-life ones are some of most severe perpetrators of this kind of intellectual dishonesty. But even if I let that go momentarily as a necessary evil that tends to come with the kind of sound byte representation that goes into making bumper stickers anyway, I remain particularly upset with this car’s choice to juxtapose the other pro-life bumper stickers with the one that caught my eye. The context of this bumper sticker implies that saying “There’s too many children” is necessarily a call for acceptance of abortion. Yet, as someone who leans pro-life, I’ll attest that that statement does not have to mean that and that there may be nothing wrong with it as a statement. Indeed, I think the opposite sentiment (that there can never be too many children) is downright irresponsible. I believe that the soaring population of the human species is a large contributor to many of the most significant problems that we have today, most importantly as it is a major reason why we are overusing earth’s resources and hurting the planet (along with our ability to maintain our civilizations on this planet). So, I firmly believe that we should be limiting the number of children that we have so that we can keep from overrunning the planet. There are plenty of ways to do that without abortion (and, obviously, without more horrific things like mass killings), whether it be birth control, limited sexual activity, or other practices, depending on one’s views on each of those possibilities. The bottom line is that there absolutely can be too many children and I don’t want to jeopardize this world because people equate that sentiment with things that it doesn’t necessarily have to mean.

And, so, given all of that, especially as someone who has suffered from allergies, I am more than willing to declare that there are too many flowers.