According to http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11545564/ there are now 6.5 billion people in this world, and apparently most in third world countries. So question(s) to debate.

Should there be restrictions on concieving

Should the world do something on this matter or just leave it alone? Elaborate

JH

Should the world do something on this matter or just leave it alone? Elaborate
The world needs to quit sending food to extremely poor countries. If the world would quit sending aid to extremely poor countries like Ethiopia or Somalia, then those people will be forced to limit how many children they have. Western Governments should not be taxing poor Westerners to feed poor Africans. Seeing poor people in America give up their rent money to feed a starving person is repugnant. The poor people in Western countries deserve a better living standard than that. As a poor man who couldn't get a rentpaying job back in America, I dislike the fact that my Government cares more about Iraqis and Africans then it does about poor Americans.

If the Western countries don't quit subsidizing the extremely poor countries, then eventually people may have to fight over scarce resources like water and food.

One of the problems is that people are living longer as well.

I remember reading how if booming populations simply waited several years to have children, regardless of a change in children, that that would severly decrease population growth. So having kids at 20-25 instead of 16, could dramatically slow population growth.

What's interesting is that Japan and some of Europe are zero growth. I think also the USA is near zero growth as well.

Maybe the solution is pulling people from poverty. My theory goes, if you have nothing but sex to do and think about, only bad things can happen.

I was going to start a thread on this topic. Thank you, Juber3.

It is difficult to see how it would be possible to enforce restrictions on reproduction without a totalitarian form of government. People will put up with a lot of government restrictions, even in "free" nations, but I am certain that there would be massive rebellion against such a policy.

To give you a taste of what such a policy would be like, let me give you a quote from an interview with Zhao Bingli, vice minister of the State Family Planning Commission of China.

Link



Keep in mind that this is from an official Chinese website, and it is trying to present China's policies in as favorable a light as possible. Imagine what kind of a repressive government is required to ensure that people "go through the necessary formalities" in order to have two children.



Do we want such a system throughout the world?

On the other hand, it is not enough to simply ignore the situation. The problem is not so much the sheer number of people, but the patterns of population growth. From the article linked by Juber3:



History teaches us that a reduced birth rate comes about as a result of economic properity, of an educated population, of the emancipation of women, and of access to birth control. These are the things that the developed world must try to peacefully provide to the developing world.

Setting aside for a moment the moral problems with the sort of "lifeboat ethics" suggested by skeeterses, history also teaches us that poverty does not lead to people having fewer children; if anything, the reverse is true.

EVERYBODY PANIC!!!!

Not.

According to this projection by overpopulation.com, the fertility rate is steadily decreasing. By 2025, the worldwide fertility rate is projected to barely keep up with the death rate. In the more developed countries, the fertility rate is already lower than what is capable of sustaining current population levels.

Everybody needs to relax. This planet is huge. If you rounded up every person on the planet and got them into one group, we'd all fit into Jacksonville, Florida. You could build a house for every person on the planet and fit them all into Texas.

Well, sure, the total world population isn't the problem; and folks like you and I in the developed world will continue to live in great luxury (by any reasonable standard.) The problem is very simple (from the initial link):



Doesn't it make sense to do what can be reasonably done to give people better lives in the developing world, including helping them have the freedom to reduce their reproduction rate?

Dayton and Victoria have both pretty well covered it. There is another thread on a subject like this from about a year ago. basically most western nation s that are pretty well industrialized are experiencing a decline in the birth rate.
UN studies have shown that as cities begin to develop and economic freedom becomes the norm, women begin to break the hold of religious and generally economically imposed restraints they live under in most rural areas--basically they are allowed the choice to marry and have kids. Also add you no longer need a dozen kids to care for you in your elder years. As cities grow and opportunity expands the birth rate declines.


Lets not overlook this little gem. Get an education or training for a skill--one which employers ACTUALLY are looking for and you should have NO problems finding a decent or above average job. I have yet to see a case where someone was denied a job because the government was supporting another nation.

Well, not really. If you put every person in the world into Texas, they would each have an area about 3 by 2 meters to stand in, so they could swing there arms around and do push-ups. That is assuming every square meter of Texas is used, by the way.

But then, at around 6 pm in the evening, those people would require 1.3 trillion calories and about 10 billion liters of water. I think that is more the problem than actual space. Then around 10pm or so, they would produce 7.8 million metric tonnes of solid waste, about the same as 300 Titanics. I think that is more the problem than actual space.

Heck, I'm from Canada, we have 32 million people and the country is over twice the size of all of Europe. We have nothing but space.

And how much oil, natural gas and medical care would they need?

More importantly, how many lawyers would they need?

The earth is 2/3 water and we have great desalination processes available. Corrupt and incompetent governments are more to blame for thirst and starvation then the availablity of food or water.

The problem is poorly stated. The issue is really declining resources per capita. Most importantly, petroleum, water, and arable land have peaked or are near to their maximum and will start or continue to decline while populations increase. Read the last issue of The New Scientist or Lester Brown's work. Growth in industrial nations is a big part of the problem since per capita use of resources continues to grow with economic expansion.

It is true that fertility rates are declining but equilibrium will not be reached until there are 9 billion of us. That is a disaster in the face of declining basic resources.

Partial solutions include efforts to speed up the decline in fertility by crash programs to educate third world women and provide them with contraceptives. (Iran totally reversed its population trends this way). Any solution should also include massive efforts to conserve basic resources and to decouple economic expansion from increased resource use.

Certain population centers are too full, Mexico City for example.

Natural phenomena like bird flu and other illnesses will eradicate some of the population, unfortunately. Also, humankind has the habit of sending young men in particular to wage wars; unless they get their wives/significant others pregnant before they leave, their chromosomes will no longer be in the gene pool.

I do agree that there are an awful lot of people for the resources available on this earth, unless we ship a bunch of them to countries, like Canada, where there is still a lot of arable land and potable water. But it seems that each time we want to fix something, new problems arise.

Edit: Another thing to consider is the fact that the earth has volcanic eruptions, landslides, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis and floods that take out large sections of populations in poorer countries situated along seacoasts. And in a few more years, with the sea level rising from the melting glaciers and the desalinization of the seas with the accompanying change in the oceanic food chain, there will probably be more deaths. Would that population control be voluntary instead!

Whoa, whoa what's happening to America. It's... it's turning into China. Didn't poor ol' Hilary just criticized China's One Child Policy a while back? I thought the vast majority of Americans are of the opinions that if a woman wants to have thirty kids, that's her choice. Anyway, back to the questions:

Should there be restrictions on concieving?

1. The liberal in me is saying "hell, no." But my inner evil commie is saying "there should be, and it should be dependent on a couple's ability to provide for their kids. Say, if your assets are at the lowest 10th percentile, you should not have more than one child, cuz you'll end up either letting your kids starve of defer the duty of raising them to society."

Should the world do something on this matter or just leave it alone? Elaborate

2. It's unlikely that "the world" will come to a concensus and act on this. Just look at this forum.

Should there be restrictions on concieving
Should the world do something on this matter or just leave it alone? Elaborate
We could give out free vasectomies and tubal ligations. Or even offer up money as an incentive. This would encourage people, especially the poor, to make it so they won't have children. It also allows those who don't want anymore children to ensure that they won't accidentally conceive in a night of passion. Also, we should not be giving out incentives to have children. For example, no child tax credit.

I don't understand. Are you saying that the person serving you fast food doesn't deserve a place to live? Is it fair to tear down the wilderness and cover it with asphalt and cement and buildings, and then tell the homeless they cannot sleep in the park or alleyway? This might make an interesting new thread.

Sorry Vermillion, your estimates are a little low.

"Well, not really. If you put every person in the world into Texas, they would each have an area about 3 by 2 meters to stand in, so they could swing there arms around and do push-ups. That is assuming every square meter of Texas is used, by the way."

Texas is officially 268,601 square miles of area. But let's suppose that we only used the land portion of the state and excluded the areas covered by water- that would be 261,914 square miles.

Convert that to square feet (7,301,772,548,336 square feet) and divide by 6.5 billion- that would leave 1,123.3 square feet per man, woman and child. (104.4 square meters to our friends in Canada)

So while 6.5 billion is a big and scary number, the world is a vast place, and this illustration helps to put that in context.

Some worry that we are running out of land suitable for cultivation. There are some contrary indicators that this is not so. If food demand were outstripping the supply, commodity food prices would rise. Yet for my whole lifetime, the biggest problem facing American agriculture has been low market prices.

Cheers!

Actual governmental restrictions on the number of people each family can have are definitely out of the question. What has to happen instead are improvements in the way society is governed, so that people are not left in the crushing poverty that contributes to this vicious cycle. And that has to happen by reforming the governments of many of these countries themselves. Too many of them are corrupt and oppressive, and that takes its toll. Others have misguided social and economic policies. In Ethiopia, for example, private ownership of land is outlawed. That's just a disaster waiting to happen.

Although I think Victoria Silverwolf made a decent point in her reply to skeeterses that poverty will not lead to people having fewer children, I nonetheless think skeeterses' idea has some merit but for a different reason. Corrupt and incompetent Third World governments that have their funding spigots turned off will be forced to either reform or fall.

Wow! The last time Americans suggested this strategy, it was called "Eugenics." It terrifies me to see that it's becoming fashionable again, and especially from the Liberals, first!


Surely you're lying! We all know that Americans are suffering an epidemic of malnutrition due to lack of available and cheap food! I mean, it must be so, because Paul Erhlich, the Darling of the Left, predicted that we should have run completely out of food by now! It surely can't be true that there is enough arable land in the world, using just today's technology, to feed up to 10 billion people! I don't believe it!


Unfortunately, the North profits from conflict in the South. As long as that is true, we will send small arms to our "colonies" to ensure the cheap and ready access to our natural resources. Only when technology makes modern-day imperialism more expensive than Third-World development will such countries be free from our oppression.

If you want to have a defeatist attitude about problems, fine, but don't expect everyone else to wallow in it along with you. However emotionally satisfying that may be for you, the fact is, the debate questions asked what should be done about the problem. Just posting gloom and doom, without any suggestions to accompany it, doesn't answer those questions.

Birth control should be made available in all countries that will allow it. The United States should at least help finance this even though information about abortion would also be provided; this does not mean that abortion is encouraged. I say this as a pro-life Catholic who recognizes that abortions are going to take place if the mother is set on it, regardless of whether this information is provided by health organizations or not, but that the life of the mother will be less likely to be in danger if she or the couple receives contraceptive information and contraceptives in the first place.

Case in point: Why are CT scans popular in India? So women can possibly determine the sex of their unborn babies. If it's a girl, the pregnant woman will often have an abortion. The result? The availability of fertile females is declining in India. Likewise in China, because of their restrictions on the amount of children a couple can have, there are far more males in the upcoming generation than there are females with whom they can procreate. This has been happening without the influence of any world reproductive health organization.

Obviously, education on better farming methods and educating the female gender as well as males will improve the economic status of developing countries. Better-educated females usually have fewer children.

(I find it interesting that in countries where religious zeal does not predominate, females are being voted into the top governmental positions (i.e., Prime Minister or President), while the United States where women supposedly have all of the same opportunities as men, we are still very leery of having a female as President.
We can attribute that to outdated patriarchial religious tradition and the tendency for the candidate with the most monetary backing to make it to the top job.)

In any case, failure to look at the larger picture in any country can have a lot to do with 1) a couple wondering who is going to support them in their old age, 2) the inability to think beyond the immediate needs of the family (procurement of food, etc.), or 3) unwillingness to care about the situation because it does not affect a particular couple or group due to their wealth and ownership of land.

But to proclaim by government edict (as in China) that a couple is limited to one child is going too far. The decision to procreate should be left up to the couple, and this is where education should be focused.