The Economist magazine is endearingly uncouth in its coverage of demographic issues concerning world population and resource depletion. Here is a brilliant response to one of the outstanding quotes from that article. See below:

SIR —

You write that "if women decide to spend their 20s clubbing rather than child-rearing, and their cash on handbags rather than nappies, that's up to them." Your liberal and tolerant viewpoint towards us is of course very flattering. However, had you even passingly acknowledged that some women may spend their 20s neither clubbing nor child-rearing, but working, and their money on neither nappies nor handbags, but on down-payments for a house, that would have been still more edifying. To save women from being merely mothers, only to make them merely consumers, is a view of women's liberation that belongs to the 1960s, not to today's world.

Eleanor Burgess
Boston, Massachusetts

For more responses to the Article and links to an article The Economist published as a follow-up, go to the following link: www.footprintnetwork.org