The blog that nobody reads: Population Crisis

Since this is the blog that nobody reads, I though I would weigh in with my thoughts on overpopulation and such.

The birth of octuplets the other day has apparently spurred interest on the internet in the ethics and morality of doctors providing fertility servies to a woman who already has chidren (six to be exact). Now I suppose that it may turn out that all of these six were adopted, but I don't think so.

Fertility services should be for women who can't get pregnant, not those who have already bourne more than their fair share. Period. Do we have to pass a law, because people are so short sighted and STUPID? Fertility services should be restricted to those who have AT MOST one living child. Period. End of discussion.

We are collectively worried about climate change, about genocide, ethnic cleansing, about starvation in Africa and disease and our food supply, energy demands and growing healthy economies.

There are too many people on the earth. We can't feed ourselves, we can't provide energy and a good quality of life, we are paving over our fields and cutting down our rain forests, all to provide too little food and too little safety to the people we already have.

When I was a child, the prevailing scientific point of view, at least as it was passed on to school children, was that animals who over-procreated starved to death, thus limiting their populations to sustainable levels. It now appears that many animals limit their families in lean times, thus having only the size family that is sustainable.

Human beings also have the capability of limiting their families. While we don't know how animals do it, we humans have developed birth control and death control (well at least disease control and methods of protecting ourselves from some causes of "premature" death), to help us limit our procreation and popluation. But only China seems to have a national policy regarding population, and we don't like their methods, even if we can admire the purpose behind it.

Instead, we have religions deliberately prohibiting people from utilizing the science we have, encouraging large families regardless of whether or not the family and the world can sustain them. It seems that they believe that God would say, "Okay, I'll let other animals limit their populations, and I'll let humans discover simple safe methods of limiting their populations, but then I'll mandate that I, and only I, the one and only GOD, will decide family by family who should have children and how many." How can anyone believe in this sort of God? God, our loving, caring parent, is going to allow us to discover simple safe methods of population control, then forbid us to use them? What???? Particularly in view of that fact that having too many pregnancies is not only unhealthy for the mother, but also for the children.

Back in the seventies, when I was having my family (two children, thank you very much) there was an active group called Zero Population Growth, with the motto "Stop at Two". What happened to this group? What happened to this philosophy?

There was one compelling reason NOT to stop at two. If all intelligent, alert, caring people do in fact stop at two, leaving only the stupid and uncaring to unlimited procreation, then the population of uncaring and stupid people would increase while the population of intelligent people would stay stable, thus becoming a minority. Is that what happened? In fact, gross population studies seem to show that as people achieve the high standards of living that seem to be standard in the US and Europe, people naturally limit their families. European families have been notoriously smaller than on other continents for some time. I read somewhere that the population of Europe prior to the black plague in the 1300's (not sure of the time frame) was not reached again until World War II.

Apparently, as immigrant groups move into the United States with their large families, they adopt smaller families as standard within a generation or two. Currently, the Hispanic migration into this country is driving population growth, and Hispanics are becoming a larger and larger minority--soon to be a majority? But I read somewhere (don't remember where) that as they assimilate into the US culture, Hispanics are expected to embrace the smaller family size already common here, as other ethnic groups already have.

But they're Catholic, and the Catholic church is opposed to abortion and birth control? Yes but as my very devout Catholic friend said, she wasn't going to allow some old men who had never married or had families to dictate what was right for her family. Her two girls are about 6 years apart, and her son is about six years younger than the younger girl. She probably planned SOMETHING.

Although I didn't include this in my "If I were Queen" list, I think the time has come for the US to face upto the population crisis (we call it the energy crisis, but it is really population). Let us pass an income tax law which limits the deduction for dependents to the first two BIRTH Children ONLY. Adopted children could be exempt. {There might be a special exemption for those families who through no fault of the own have twins or triplets.) I have more problems with the following suggestion, but I think it may be part of the solution. Limit welfare payments, food stamps, and other government handouts to an amount based on two children. In others words, if you have two children or ten, you would get the same amount of welfare benefits. Let those who cannot use their heads and iimit their family size figure out how to provide for the remaining children.