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Quote by Terrence W. Deacon

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The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain

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Terrence W. Deacon

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“To be critical of pronatalism is not equivalent to condemning parenthood; it is to shed light on its prescriptive nature and propose that it would be socially and ecologically desirable that parenthood cease to be considered as a natural instinct and/or a religious or a social duty. The ‘biological clock’ that some women claim to hear ticking is also a ‘social clock’ reminding them that whatever else may be going on in their lives, motherhood is their destiny, the road to social acceptance and integration. It is because parenthood is not a natural instinct, but socially and prescriptively imposed, that many people unsuited for family formation bear or adopt children; domestic violence and child abuse result from the often deadly interaction between sexual inequality and pronatalism. Today, pronatalist ideologies and social pressures continue to curtail women’s opportunities and ability to shape their future, and place them in a disadvantaged position relative to men, thus sustaining the inequality between men and women despite considerable gains in sexual liberation, civil rights, and economic opportunities for women.”

“It is inappropriate to call child protection "care" when experiences of the system are not "care"-like for everyone. "Care" essentializes the softening of a system that has a violent colonial history of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and has continued to feed its children into pipelines of homelessness and housing instability, poverty, prison and other problematic and violent systems. It fails to acknowledge that it is a system, one of which is plagued with the overrepresentation of Indigenous and Black children and families, a system built on white colonial racist values. "Care" as a word minimizes and erases the inequitable realities children, young people, families, and communities face across, not only the province of Ontario, but across the Nation. Child Protection System.”