This article from Maclean’s magazine, (Canada’s most popular magazine), has about 400 comments right now. (H/T Andrew)

The article explains why people, especially women, are refusing to have children.The entire tone of the article is extremely narcissistic, which is exactly what I have argued follows from the denial of God. If there is no God, there are no objective moral values, no moral obligations and no human rights. The purpose of life is to have happy feelings, and to force others to give you happy feelings. Survival of the fittest.

The facts:

“Are you planning to have children?” is a question Statistics Canada has asked since 1990. In 2006, 17.1 per cent of women aged 30 to 34 said “no,” as did 18.3 per cent of men in the same category. The U.S. National Center of Health Statistics reports that the number of American women of childbearing age who define themselves as “child-free” rose sharply in the past generation: 6.2 per cent of women in 2002 between the ages of 15 and 44 reported that they don’t expect to have children in their lifetime, up from 4.9 per cent in 1982.

You might say that adults who will depend on the taxes paid by other people’s children for their retirement and health care are not just selfish and narcissistic, but also morally evil. But they don’t agree.

See, their narcissism is actually virtuous because we need to save the planet!

In a culture in which Jennifer Aniston’s childlessness provides weekly tabloid lamentations, a female star who goes public with a decision to remain so demonstrates courage. In a recent interview in U.K. Cosmopolitan, the 36-year-old actress Cameron Diaz, who is childless, expressed a disinclination to have children, citing environmental reasons: “We don’t need any more kids. We have plenty of people on this planet.”

Selfishness is morally good! And you know what else is good? Viewing children as parasites who disrupt your selfish hedonism.

Now the childless in North America have their most defiant advocate in a mother of two: Corinne Maier, a 45-year-old French psychotherapist whose manifesto, No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children, created a furor when published in France last year. Count on the same happening when it’s released here this week. Among Maier’s hard-won advice: “If you really want to be host to a parasite, get a gigolo.”

One woman laments the fact that you can’t abort children after they are born, in case you don’t like them.

The American author Lionel Shriver, who never wanted children, writes in “Separation From Birth” that her greatest fear “was of the ambivalence itself”: “Imagine bearing a child and then realizing, with this helpless, irrevocable little person squalling in its crib, that you’d made a mistake. Who really, in that instance, would pay the price?”

And women who choose not to have children are victims of mean, judgmental people!

Speaking from her home in Brussels, Maier says she was prompted to write No Kids by a conversation she had with two female friends in their 30s who told her they felt like social deviants because they didn’t want children. That perception is well-founded, she writes: “To be childless is considered a defect; irrevocably judged, those who just don’t want children are also the objects of pity.” But Maier believes “conscientious objectors to this fertility mythology” should be rewarded, not stigmatized. “To have a kid in a rich country is not the act of a citizen,” she writes. “The state should be helping those who decide not to have children: less unemployment, less congestion, fewer wars.”

But it goes much further:

Maier doesn’t mince words, calling labour “torture,” and breastfeeding “slavery.” The idea that children offer fulfillment is also dismantled: “Your kid will inevitably disappoint you” is reason No. 19 not to have them. Much of what she has to say won’t be breaking news to most parents: children kill desire in a marriage and can be demanding money pits. Without them, you can keep up with your friends and enjoy your independence.

Research backs Maier’s assertions. Daniel Gilbert, who holds a chair in psychology at Harvard and is the author of the 2006 best-seller Stumbling on Happiness, reports that childless marriages are far happier. He also reports researchers have found that people derive more satisfaction from eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching television than taking care of their kids: “Indeed, looking after the kids appears to be only slightly more pleasant than doing housework,” he writes in Stumbling on Happiness.

[…]Over-attentive focus on children saps cultural creativity, she argues: “Children are often used as an excuse for giving up on life without really trying. It takes real courage to say ‘Me first.’ ”

And look how wisely Canadian taxpayer dollars are being spent.

Ingrid Connidis, a sociologist at the University of Western Ontario and the author of Family Ties and Aging, has conducted pioneering studies among people 55 and over that distinguish between those who are childless by choice and those who are childless by circumstance. All have adapted, she says: “But the childless by choice are more content, have higher levels of well-being and are less depressed.”

And Canada also spends taxpayer money on studies (conducted by feminist academics) to demonstrate the need for polygamy. Well, what else is the Justice Department and the commission on the Status of Women supposed to do with all the money they collect from working families? Give it back to the families? Families are just going to spend their own money on beer and popcorn! What we really need is taxpayer-funded day care!

What I learned from this article

The point of this article for me is that some women (and men!) are just blundering their way through life grasping at pleasure wherever they can find it, and justifying their narcissism with a lot of lies. They don’t want to commit. They don’t want to love. They don’t want to be responsible for other people who need them. A man would have to be supremely ignorant to get married and have children in this environment.