Just wanted to highlight Dinka's comment....
i don't understand people who regard having children or children themselves as something less worthy or "just biological" or plain nasty and annoying. i think they are being mean spirited and in denial.children are not a species - they are pre-adults if you want to call them that. we were all children at some point. to hate children is to hate your very self. there is no choice about it. we HAVE to be children first. to reduce having and raising them to some animalistic drive is to reduce oneself to a burdensome byproduct and it just so happens that those people consider themselves VERY valuable. why? i wonder.. what did you do? you managed to wait enough years to turn into an adult? big deal...
"to hate children is to hate your very self." Oh, how that sums it all up!
I used to know a woman who lived in Takoma Park, a little hippieish town in Maryland that sits right on the D.C. line. TP is hard to describe -- It's kind of a bobo-ish, aging hippie type place -- for example, it's a "nuclear free town", and you can walk down to the Starbucks, Earth's Goodness Bakery, the Granola Co-op, and the Wise Womyn Candle and Herb Shoppe. Some people who live in TP have tons of money and can afford restore the lovely old houses to pristine condition. Other people, including some Catholic families we have known live in TP because it's the best place they can afford that's close to a Metro. (They live in the houses and apartments that haven't been renovated. And they walk quickly after dark.)
My friend was one of the latter group, and she would always get a little annoyed when she would take her little boy out for a stroll to pick up some groceries. The hippie clerks at the Granola Co-op would always coo and fuss over any dog that came by, but would pointedly ignore baby Sam. To Rachel, it was both a little insulting -- and a little creepy.
