Well, here I go again.  I'm gonna say some things that will, undoubtedly, be wildly unpopular.  Go figure.

Last night I was doing that thing you do at the market, when you're really only there to pick up wine, but the store is so huge that you feel compelled to wander from aisle to aisle and pick up a few "essentials."  I got to the check-out counter and was immediately sidetracked, again, by the magazines on the rack.  They do that on purpose.  Remember when they tried to hide them at the check-out because all of us reading them resulted in the death of Princess Diana?  Well I guess we've made amends with ourselves over that one.  Anyway, there on the cover of People are the Duggars, talking about having more children, again.

The People  article asks the question: How many kids are too many? That the question has to be asked troubles me immensely. Sure, these are nice Christian people with good family values that are bringing up well mannered children.  But seriously? Most people have their hands full with one or two, let alone nineteen.  And to what end are they reproducing in volume?  We're not running short of people in this country, not by a long shot. Christianity still has a 33% stake in the world's religious adherents, so they can't be trying to fill a quota. Apparently they have no plans of stopping anytime soon, at least not until Michelle's uterus gives out from sheer exhaustion. Some medical professional needs to show her a photo of what a prolapsed uterus looks like.  (FYI the record, set in the 18th century by Feodor Vassilyev, is 69 births from 27 pregnancies, if you're wondering.)

The one thing that I will give the Duggars is that they are reproducing on an epic scale naturally.  This is as opposed to the likes of Jon and Kate Gosselin and Nadya Suleman who use in vitro fertilization to produce large families in one fell swoop. The one thing that ALL of these families have in common, besides a lot of laundry and incredibly large grocery bills, is that they all have television shows, either in production or in the works, that pay them enough, if not more than enough, to house, feed, provide medical care, and educate these familial hordes. Someone's gotta pay those bills, and I'm here to tell you I'm not interested in having them on welfare and using my tax dollars.

(Here's the part where I say another wildly unpopular thing, so pay attention if you're going to quote me at the heresy trial.) 

I'll fess up to the fact that I don't have a single maternal instinct towards human children.  No burning desire to procreate.  Never have, never will. So, no, I don't fully understand this pressing human desire to produce one's own offspring.  I'm sure it is horribly disappointing, if not abjectly depressing, to try and fail or worse yet, to try and miscarry.  I'm not unsympathetic, just unempathetic.

Ergo, I don't understand this compelling need to spends thousands upon thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars on artificial methods of fertilization when there are, at least, a half a million children in foster care in the United States.  Not to mention the millions (yeah I said millions) of children who are currently bearing the status of orphan worldwide. And folks, don't be fooled, being an orphan ain't all Oliver Twist and porridge.  In some parts of the world surviving an orphanage is akin to surviving a detainment camp. There are countries where for fiscal or state sanctioned family planning  they dump their female offspring into orphanages because they are less desirable and more costly than their male counterparts.  And rather than give these poor children a loving home, people in the "civilized world" pour everything they have into trying to create an army bearing their genetic code - or half of theirs and half of the egg donor they found on Craig's List.

It just  makes me want to scream "What the hell is wrong with adoption?"  You want a child so damn desperately?  Go adopt or foster one of the millions of children worldwide who have no homes and no love.  You want an army of children, adopt a tribe or whole village of children orphaned by AIDS, war, or earthquakes.  We mock the celebrities like Madonna, Angelina, and Meg Ryan for shopping outside of the US for children like they are counterfeit Prada handbags, and yes, it would be nice if they shopped for kids at home. As I understand it there are approximately 250,000 children in the US that are eligible for adoption but are considered racially less desirable and so they languish in the system until they age out or run away. At  least our celebrity role models are adopting from the ever growing pool of unwanted and unloved children that populate this planet; and not growing them in test tubes or RVs that they have confused with Noah's Arc.