Free Love

I stand for people being able to live within their means. I stand for population control. Free birth control. Fewer CO2 emissions. In a world where everything has a price, we pride ourselves on love being free. There was an entire summer devoted to the cause in '69. Love isn't free. It's the cost of clothing, feeding, and raising a child. In no way am I claiming that the world could or should stop all sexual activity that can produce a child. I am saying that I was the fourth of four children raised in a single income family. I never knew a day above the poverty line. As I reflect on the financial burden my mother must have held, and now see the limited opportunities for my brothers and sister, I wonder how their quality of life could have improved if I wasn't born.

Emotionally, that seems like a heavy scenario to ponder. Logistically, it makes a lot of sense with our current global problem of over population. The answer for me doesn’t lay in my mom simply making better choices. She was raised in Ohio, which wasn’t the most socially liberal state in her generation. There was no form of birth control taught in her sexual education courses other than abstinence. Although it was available, prescribed contraceptives such as the pill weren’t cheap or the socially acceptable norm. Ten years after a cursory glance at sexual education, boom, there were four new children in the world.

Take this scene from the global north where it is hard enough for a single parent to raise a child on a tight income, and impose it on the global south where some combined parental incomes are pennies.

In Malawi, other than the devastating spread of the disease AIDS, parents are struggling day to day to feed their children. About half of the population—eight million people—is living in poverty. Some people I discuss this topic with claim that birth control is a luxury in a community where food is scarce. In my opinion, that is where it is needed the most. If parents are unable to provide for themselves, how are they going to provide for a newborn they have brought into the world? How can we blame a mother with no other options for introducing a child to the same poor conditions she was born to? How do her children prevent the cycle? I'm a poor college student in Ohio. How do I? I fear that the global north enjoys playing the older sibling so much, that we feel threatened by advancements in places that we term 'third world'. Not 'our world'. If we separate ourselves enough we can deny responsibility or similarity. Not only do we drawn lines between countries, but we've also drawn this line that has transported us to another world. This way we can say that this is a problem "over there". This problem is ours in the widest sense. This is a problem of humanity.

I do not simply want humans to live. I want individuals to lead a life that isn’t controlled by poverty or a burden born to them. I see families having a fighting chance in this world. I want every woman to have access to birth control. I am reaching for birth control to be free for anyone for the sake of individuals and society. We need love to be truly free.