Sunday, July 3, 2016

If you decided early in your life to be childless and decades have now passed, what are your current thoughts about your original decision?

I will be 50 next year and almost exactly 20 years ago I paid $500 for a 5 minute operation that was one of the best decisions of my life.

When I got my vasectomy, my reasons for my choice were many, but the primary ones were:

1. As a former environmental activist I had recognized in the 90's that there was one, and only one, issue: overpopulation. The greatest thing I could do to help the Earth was to not reproduce, so I got myself sterilized.

2. I had worked with children for much of my life and during a period of working as a camp counselor for terminally and chronically ill children, I was well aware that a child did not need to share my genes in order for me to care deeply enough to be a parent. When I worked as a male au pair for a family with an 8 month-old baby boy, I came to love him in such a way that I would have sacrificed myself for that baby in an instant, even though we did not share a drop of blood. From those experiences, I realized that if I really wanted a child I could adopt one and did not have to give in to the narcissist parts of the urge to procreate.

3. After taking a cold hard look at the world's situation at the time, the politics of greed, the resurgence of fascist ideals via rampant corporate greed, the state of the environment and the very bleak prognosis....I felt that bringing a child into such a world would be unfair and selfish.

20 years later, I have no regrets at all.


Read other answers by Doug Jackson on Quora: Read more answers on Quora.

from Quora http://ift.tt/1LNt4R4

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