"Make kin, not babies"
The controversial slogan coined by philosopher Donna Haraway made many people uncomfortable. In her slogan, she simply proposed that we should build bonds rather than have babies.
Why do we treat our biological reproduction as the default definition of family?
We’ve inherited this idea that a “real” family is all about genes, offspring, and lineage. And that everything else is fragile, and that everything else comes and goes, without any apparent importance. But is that really the case?
This is historically strange and biologically quite dangerous. It’s strange because for most of human history, human bonds were much broader than biology. Let’s look at how communities used to function, where a woman’s children could also be raised by other women in the same community—placing greater importance on human relationships and the added value of growing up in society.
That clan, that network of connections, was what provided the security and the advantage of raising a child isolated from everything and everyone.
And this clan, obviously, did not include only members of our family. There would be friends, and families with whom we had established important relationships and bonds. Society needs more of these kinds of connections.
Belonging to this village, this clan, this network of connections was a great advantage.
Biologically, it is dangerous to depend solely on biological children; it leads to continuous growth in the world’s population, which is not physically sustainable in the medium and long term.
It will lead us to a scarcity of resources that are obviously finite.
We should view babies as something rare and truly precious. And we should invest heavily in the ones we have, whether they are our own or not. We must expand our definition of kinship to include not only our biological children but also adopted children, chosen family, and distant relatives. Caregiving relationships that transcend the boundaries of kinship, blood ties, species, and even biology itself.
Many people know that sometimes the most important relationships in life are those we weren’t born into. They are the ones that require time and extra effort. I don’t mean to say that we should abandon our family, or that we should avoid having children, but we must ask ourselves the simple question:
“Why are we making our family so small?”
Image by Wonita or Troy Janzen from Pixabay
Original text written by 