DEFINITION
Children
A human offspring (son or daughter) of any age
It’s easy to create a child, isn’t it?
You just need a couple of ingredients – a bit like making a cake.
Take one man and one woman, place the male’s erect penis inside the woman’s vagina, and move it in and out for several minutes. Achieve male orgasm, and ejaculate millions of tiny sperm into the woman. The male sperms will swim furiously, and hey presto, if it’s the right time of the month, one of the sperm will find an egg and fertilise it. The foetus will start growing; and nine months later, out pops a child. Easy! Anyone can do it!
Everyone wants children, it’s biological, a human drive; and let’s face it if we all stopped having children the world would soon start to become a pretty quiet place.
Having children is probably one of the easiest things we can do in life, although I can hear you starting to say already “Do you know how hard it is having children?” But what I’m talking about here is the physical act. It requires no education, no degrees, no intelligence, no money, no house. It also requires no job, no food, and no love (for the physical act). And finally, it requires no discipline, no responsibility, and no knowledge. In fact, it requires nothing more than a man and a woman to have full sex at the right time for the egg to be fertilised.
It is an act we are programmed for, in order to allow the continuance of the human race. We require no specialised knowledge. Even if you have never been to school, or have limited social skills don’t worry, you too can have children. It’s your right!
Now what?
Every second of the day, a child is born into the world, dependent on its mother for everything, not able to fend for itself, not able to speak, only to cry when it’s hungry, and sleep when it’s tired.
Being born, and surviving outside is a traumatic experience. In the womb there are no such problems. Nature takes care of everything. Even the mother doesn’t have to worry about what to give the foetus to help it develop into a child; and even if she did worry, she wouldn’t know what to do. She just has to sit back, and wait, until the day the waters break, and she is rushed to hospital to have it delivered. You see, human birth is a complex procedure, not like that of a horse or a dog, whale or an elephant.
Human birth requires something no other species requires, and that is the intervention of another human to assist with the birth – someone who knows what they’re doing! The baby has to be assisted out of the birth canal, his bottom slapped to encourage him to breathe on his own, and the umbilical cord (that is attached to the navel), removed, and tied off neatly. Next he is cleaned by a nurse, wrapped in a blanket, and if everything is healthy with the child, he is handed to the mother.
It’s not like the nature programs we see on the television, is it? The picture of the horse giving birth to the foal, it stumbling to its feet, and the mother licking it clean. Human birth is not like this at all.
On regular occasions now, the baby even has to be delivered by caesarean section (the delivery of a foetus by surgical incision through the abdominal wall and uterus).
Surely there is something strange going on when nature has to be assisted! All of that developmental work completed without human assistance, then finally a team of medical experts needed for the delivery or birth of the child. But if we think back in time, long before hospitals were invented, births must have been a very different affair; but nonetheless, evolution seems to have stopped short. We, the most advanced being on the planet, cannot bring a child into the world without the help of someone else.
It would be funny to think of a team of lions on hand to help with the birth of the newest addition to their fold; or a team of whales ready to intervene in case there were problems with the birth of their latest addition! But we’re not here to discuss evolution, so let us continue our investigation.
To recap:
(a) Male getting female pregnant – Easy.
(b) Mother feeding the foetus – Easy.
(c) Mother taking control of the development of the foetus – Easy. (
d) Giving birth – Painful, but easy due to the medical staff on hand to assist.
So far so good; although I’m sure there are a lot of you starting to think out loud: “It’s not easy! Do you know what I had to go through? My child had a lot of problems, I had to…” Ok, but let’s keep focussed. We are talking about the relative skill needed in order to get to the point of giving birth to a human child, who is the most advanced being on the planet, and I think, looking at the evidence, that it’s pretty easy compared to studying say, quantum physics or indeed, medicine.
It’s a girl!
The baby is born, the waiting is over, you have a beautiful girl; except there’s one small problem. You live in a refugee camp in africa, where everybody is starving and water is scarce, and you already have two children you can barely feed. Tell me; is it still your right to have children?
Are you exercising your biological right to procreate – a natural and essential task in the continued survival of the human race; or is it a failure on your part (and the father’s) to exercise personal responsibility?
Is it the careless, selfish act of a man determined for the pleasure of an orgasm, without thought to the consequences? Or is it a lack of education, or caring on the part of the female about the consequences; a need to fill an empty life, to make her life more complete?
“Ever since I was young I knew I wanted children”
How many children are born every year to single teenage mothers, or married couples, where the husband is violent, where the parents have no money, no jobs, boyfriend in jail, mother on social welfare; or the family that are together, but live in a country where there is little food, or live in a country ravaged by war or disease?
You have exercised your right – a right that is only made possible by the amazing body you inhabit (male or female). You have brought a child into the world; a baby who, whether you like it or not, is going to be dependent on you for several years to come, for such things such as:
(a) Food
(b) Water
(c) Shelter
(d) Warmth
(e) Love
(f) Time
(g) Learning
If you have problems, you can be sure that your child is about to start having problems, pretty much soon after he or she is born. You may say: “But I love my child, we’ll get through it,” but it soon becomes apparent that if you can’t look after yourself; if you are not in balance with the world; the chances are, your child will not be in balance either.
This is not a criticism of people who choose to have children at the wrong time, or accidentally happen to get pregnant. After all, there is no right time to have children; this is an appeal to our senses as human beings, the most intelligent beings on the planet. An appeal that asks whenever we are in the situation where we could create life. “Am I taking personal responsibility for the consequence of my actions?” “What are the consequences of creating a child now. Am I psychologically prepared?”
“Can I bring up a child without assistance from the state, charity, or other aid organisation?”
If the answer to any of these questions is no, you must take responsibility for yourself, and the responsibility of creating life.
Although creating life is an act of love, with it must come personal responsibility. This is not just about your pleasure, and letting yourself go.
“I don’t know how it happened.”
“I was drunk.”
“I just felt like it.”
“I got carried away.”
This is the biggest responsibility you will ever take in your life – not taking on a mortgage, getting married, or being promoted to managing director. This is one thing that stands alone as the greatest feat a human can perform over the course of their life.
This is what it means to be human – not to design new cars, run multinational corporations, become a monk, work for charitable organisations, or build rockets that can reach the moon. This is so simple, anyone can do it.
You don’t need a million dollars; you don’t have to believe in god; you don’t even have to be happy! All you need is two ingredients: One man and one woman .
It is after the birth that it becomes difficult, which is why you have to take personal responsibility before engaging in an act that can create life.
Look at the pictures on the television of the poor starving children in africa; how they tell you that five pounds a month can help these children live a better life – that without this help, many millions will die.
How do you feel? How many of you would not pick up the phone, and pledge money to save starving children. Famous people, all over the world, are desperately trying to draw awareness to their plight. To convince world leaders to help; they are committed to helping these children. I even sponsored a child.
After all, it is natural for humans to show empathy when another is suffering, that is a great quality of being human. Look at their mothers, how sad they look, their hands outstretched as they grasp for a morsel of food that can feed their baby. The tears, the emotional anguish of seeing their baby dying, the bloated stomachs, the doctors tirelessly working to save them. How we feel sorry for them, the poor mothers and fathers looking on helplessly.
But wait a minute. Let’s re-run this advert in our mind. Let’s remove the empathy for the family, and apply the following questions we asked ourselves a moment ago.
Do you think the father or mother asked themselves these questions?
Or how about the single mother pushing a pram down the street, living on social welfare; do you think she asked herself these questions?
“Am I taking personal responsibility for the consequences of my actions?”
“What are the consequences of creating a child now, am I psychologically prepared?”
“Can I bring up a child without assistance from the state, charity, or other aid organisation?”
And of course, the inner voice strikes up: “She didn’t know she was going to get pregnant.” “It was an accident.” “She was getting older, she needed to have children before it was too late.” “It’s her right to have children if she wants;” and indeed, there are always explanations for not taking personal responsibility. These are just a few of them.
Imagine a continent like africa, where the people took personal responsibility by not having children, where they worked to make their lives better, to provide themselves with food, and fresh water, shelter, and employment.
Imagine doing this before having children. How much better would their world be? Imagine the single girl, with no education and no job. Imagine if she took responsibility to make her life better, to educate herself, to improve her self-esteem, by doing something good for herself. But of course, this is a hard process, and remember, having a child is not. What would you do?
“It’s my life. It’s my right to have children, and I’ll have children if I want to.”
It’s all too easy when someone else is taking responsibility for you.
