No Rewards For Contemporary Motherhood

By James Donahue

Oct. 13, 2005

An Associated Press story this week tells about Michelle Duggar, a woman in Arkansas who just delivered her sixteenth child and wants to have more babies.

Duggar is the wife of Jim Bob Duggar, a former state representative, which appears to place this family a slot above the common folk from the Arkansas hills. (But with a name like Jim Bob this guy sounds like a redneck through and through.)

And right on cue, this contemporary baby machine is the subject of news stories and rewards galore for her achievement. She is going to be featured by the Discovery and Learning Channels. You can be assured that local businesses are jumping in line to bring gifts of blankets, clothing, frankincense and myrrh before this kid’s bassinet.

“We both just love children and we consider each a blessing from the Lord,” said Christian-influenced Jim Bob when television news microphones were shoved in his face.

Atta-boy Jim Bob. Lets keep on contributing all we can to this overpopulated and dying planet. You owe it to your constituents to make sure they have no future at all.

As a former newspaper reporter and photographer, I am appalled at the way the media celebrates motherhood during these deadly times. Newspapers and local television stations still celebrate the first “new baby” of every year. I remember having to rush off to a hospital, put on a gown and mask, and shoot a picture of the New Year’s Baby with its exhausted mother every January 1. Local stores gave prizes to the families for winning the race.

We also celebrate the births of twins, triplets, quadruplets and beyond.

We celebrate Mother’s and Father’s Days as if they were national holidays. The time for this kind of praise is past. They should be events banned from our society.

We are behaving as if the human race doesn’t have a clue as to what it is doing to itself.

I foresee the day in the not too distant future when people will be thrown in prison, or even shot for doing what Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar are doing . . . polluting the planet with all those children.

The Chinese government came to its senses some years ago. People are banned there from having more than one child per household. It is a crime to have more.

While we cannot blame and punish the children, parents elsewhere in this overpopulated planet are showing absolutely no responsibility for their actions. Jim Bob is obviously walking around in his hometown with a puffed chest, handing out cigars, and getting congratulatory pats on the back for his great accomplishment. He impregnated his wife one more time without thought of the consequences to the human race.

We are all beginning to pay dearly for our gross error. The Mother Earth is rising up in anger to what we have been doing to her.

Because of overpopulation, the human race has stripped this planet of its natural resources. We are consequently running out of forests for building homes, rich soil for growing food, and oil and natural gas for heating our homes and running our machines.

We are poised on the verge of fighting to the death over those last vestiges of oil and gas so we can attempt to have business as usual for as long as it might last. The danger of nuclear war is greater today than at any time in history.

Our only hope is that the Mother Earth herself appears to be eliminating our numbers in dynamic ways. Earthquakes and storms have been killing people by the hundreds of thousands in the past year. The super catastrophic disasters appear to be occurring so frequently that even the Christians are saying they think we are living in the last days.

And we are.

One way or another, we are in the last days before something must be done. Either the Mother shakes off a few billion of this mass of humanity, like fleas from a sick dog’s back, or she will die under our feet and we all go extinct.

Let’s pray for more disasters. And let’s stop paying homage to Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar every time another baby pops out of that womb. We must stop thinking of babies as miracles from God. They are just the opposite.