The beach is empty when we go out most days. On weekends there are crowds sometimes. Houses owned by people who do not live here sometimes have a dozen or more “guests.” The world is more crowded, but it doesn’t have to be.

I have always supported abortion rights because I believe all children should be born wanted. No child should be born because their mother made a mistake or a man did or because she had no choice. Despite statistics suggesting that many (or even most) pregnancies are unplanned, it has always seemed to me that a person should not ever be born into this world because of an accident.

In 1976 Adrienne Rich wrote, “We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world. . .sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy, will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed.”

An article posted today suggests another reason that birth control and abortion rights are critical:

I simply could not have existed, as I am, in any other preceding time or place. . . I could have been a professional writer at any period since the 17th century in Britain or in France. But I could not have combined this latter with a life as a sexually active woman until the introduction of contraception.—Angela Carter

The third excellent reason, perhaps the most critical reason, comes up in most articles discussing women’s health. When given the choice, women have smaller families because they can do better for two children than for six. For every kid who grew up in a large family, loving every minute there is an overworked parent. For every one of those happy-childhood kids there are a dozen with worse memories, with fewer opportunities, with hunger and necessary neglect. Often the boy of the family is spoiled—so common it is a cliché—because for some reason the parents know that child is the last. Hysterectomy, in past generation, was a common stopping point.

Paley had an abortion when she was married, pregnant for the third time, unwell, and “exhausted with these two tiny little kids; it was just about all I could do to take care of them. . . My whole idea in my heart had always been to have five, six children—I loved the idea of having children—but I knew I couldn’t have this kid.”

The planet could do with fewer humans in it. World population has quadrupled in my lifetime and is chairing ahead toward ten billion before the end of this century. The depletion of resources, global warming, starvation, disease . . . population is always controlled. Better women had the choosing and control.

Yet this morning I read in a national newspaper that Japan is alarmed that women are choosing not to marry and have children. The author puts blame this on a culture where women are expected to shoulder the burden of housework, childcare and elder care. It is possible that men are making the same choice, but the article did not explore that possibility. It is possible, too that overwork makes marriage and child raising a challenge for almost everyone in Japan. Yet, throughout this discussion, the fact remains that Japan is seriously overpopulated, that it is as highly vulnerable to global warming as any country. (Tokyo will not likely be under water in fifty years, but Shanghai and many European and American cities will be. New Orleans anyone?) It cannot produce all the food it needs to feed its population. People choosing to remain single and without children, despite inconvenience to the labor force, is probably good news.

Birth control, reproduction as a choice instead of as a burden is an inevitable result of opportunity. And not everyone wants that opportunity to be available, particularly not for women. Barefoot and pregnant was very much a strategy for keeping women down.

“What men frequently do when they want to manage and govern women,” Toni Morrison has commented, is to “focus on their babies—whether they’re having them or not having them. Reproductive organs become the focus.” Adrienne Rich wrote that “Women are controlled by lashing us to our bodies.”

My community is far more populous than it was when I was a little girl or when my mother was small or before that when only one person lived here alone in the nineteenth century. Of course, he is rarely counted because he was a Native person. None or one or two children. That is what we are entitled to. Having a large family in this world today is a sin against the planet and our future on this planet. I believe that, have believed it since I was a young girl and first understood the population bomb. I watched the woods and pastures where I had played be paved over, split level homes springing up like dragon’s teeth in a terrible mythology.

Give us emptiness. Give us land not relegated to “highest and best use” which translates as development and dollars. Give us wild place of beauty and possibility.

A little peace and quiet please.