For the Babies

Families in Central America accumulate children like I used to collect baseball cards. Like babymaking is a pastime. This is partly due to religious condemnations of contraception and, I think, to a severe lack of education and foresight which allows the poverty-stricken to ignore the enormous costs of raising children for the money-making potential inherent in every breathing body. But every American adult knows there's only one good reason to birth a barnful of tots: more goodiebags to riad come Halloween! There's no Halloween in Central America, however, and as far as I know cannibalism is still condemned by Christianity, so I'm not witnessing some widespread stockpiling of protein snacks the way disaster-wary Americans load up on canned goods. But maybe the Mayans are taking those 2012 catastrophe predictions a bit more seriously than I'd realized...