Those People

I never managed to complete my Bachelor of Science, but I'm an Environmental Resource Management major. As such, I've had two college classes in Environmental Law in part because it was a California college and California has been a thought leader and groundbreaker for environmental law in the US for decades.

In one of these classes, I did a paper on the US policy that MEN can get a vasectomy at age eighteen but WOMEN cannot get a tubal ligation if they are under age twenty-five and don't yet have at least two kids without proving medical necessity.

I argued that this is not merely a human rights and women's rights issue, it's an environmental issue because one American child uses something like 200 times the resources of one, say, child born in India. 

So while an unwanted American child and the mother are likely to both have a terrible quality of life and bleak future, they still represent more environmental burden than poor children in many other places who may have in some ways better lives because things are just different in other countries and it's quite hard to do a good comparison of quality of life between extremely different scenarios and cultural contexts.

I've known at least two American women who wanted a tubal ligation under age twenty-five and after only one child. 

One had a heart condition, was a military wife and got her request granted. She was living a solidly middle class life when I knew her.

The other was a tiny little thing who had back surgery in her teens, was crippled while pregnant and a welfare mom. Her request was denied, which subjected her to a second torturous pregnancy and helped trap her and both kids in a life of poverty while buttheads around her acted like she was an irresponsible tramp and not the victim of a classist and misogynistic system.

This policy desperately needs to change. It ruins lives in the US while those lives represent an undue environmental burden on this world.

If you are too much of a prick to care about the quality of life of the women and children in the US, maybe think about climate change before forcing underprivileged American girls into such ugly situations, often in spite of their best efforts to try to avoid it.

And maybe other countries can start giving us dirty looks about our bizarre policies that shaft our own women and children while creating more environmental harm than poor people in lots of other countries cause while the US acts like THOSE PEOPLE are wrong for reproducing.