The realization hit me while I sat on the beach this week listening to two smart teenage girls (one was reading Jane Austen) talk about families. One said, "My mom has four girls and my dad has one boy and, uh, three girls." She had paused, I guess, to do the math in her head. The other one responded, perhaps trying to make her friend feel less dysfunctional, "I hate to tell you, but that's a normal American family now."

It is?

Like the roaring waves that flop onto the Atlantic shore, I was hit repeatedly in the head by one single overriding observation on my vacation: The American family is getting bigger.

By "bigger," I don't just mean wider — statistics on childhood obesity are available to anyone who has the courage to look at them. All I seemed to see for four days were little fatties in American flag T-shirts and American flag trucks, chomping on burgers and donuts, sucking down Big Gulps, squatting in the sand or any available resting spot, chatting on cellphones. The American parents, too, waddled listlessly about, stopping now and again to catch wheezing lungs full of humid air and make endless calls back to the mainland to check on … what? Business deals? The dog's progress at canine camp? They may as well have had a ball and chain attached to their wrists.

American families are, as the teenage girl suggested, bigger in another respect. There are more of them. Where did all these kids come from?! Four, five and six spill out of the same motel room, descending on the breakfast buffet and motel swimming pool like swarms of locusts. Just as America has collectively said "screw global warming" as they climb into gas-guzzling SUVs (with requisite "Support The Troops" ribbon), we've also collectively said, "screw smaller families."

As Joy Williams put it in her extravagantly nasty essay, "The Case Against Babies," "While legions of other biological life forms go extinct, human life bustles self-importantly on. Those babies just keep coming! They've gone way beyond being 'God's gift'; they've become entitlements."

To wit: Even though Gov. Jodi Rell vetoed legislation that would have tossed vending machines out of Connecticut schools, a major blow to efforts to curb childhood obesity, she said she will sign legislation requiring insurance companies to cover the cost of fertility treatments. Of course, the real cost of this, like the cost of Viagra, will be passed on to the rest of us in our premiums. This is occurring in a nation that also wants to deny contraception, or even condoms, to its sex-mad populace and is one Supreme Court justice shy of overturning Roe v. Wade. Pregnancy and erections are American entitlements now; family planning is not.

I know what these words will beget. I know the damning letters that will flow, accusing me of insensitivity, lack of evangelical belief in the sanctity of human life above all other life forms, hypocrisy (yes, I have a child; one child), etc. Save your ink, stamps, fingers. I've heard it all, and I still stupidly wade into this matter. In fact, the last time I wrote on the subject of overpopulation in this space, I received a letter to the editor from a feminist academic, all but accusing me of sanctioning genocide.

The essential point of Joy Williams' essential essay is the question: Is having a child an entitlement in an already overpopulated world? Since we are already debating whether the unborn have rights, let's debate whether the unconceived have rights too.

Anyone who states the obvious about human overpopulation will be accused of playing God. But I am not the one injecting myself with hormones and having someone insert some stranger's eggs, fertilized by some stranger's sperm, into my womb and then "selectively reducing" the fertilized egg clumps to get the one I want to keep, and toss all the other sub-standard rugrat riff raff. I would, in fact, suggest that that those who do this are playing God. I took myself out of the God business when I got a vasectomy (guys, don't believe the hype: it's easy and painless).

Williams writes, "Babies are one thing. Human beings are another. We have way too many human beings. Almost everybody knows this." I would add that even the women dropping mega-bucks at a fertility clinic (the tab for which we'll all pick up once Rell signs that bill) know this too. Although we're all trained to smile giddily when we hear of some woman who has dropped triplets or quads or quints, I shudder at such news. It puts me in mind of guinea pig litters, or the baby factories in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which was allegedly a satire.