The 'right' to have children and overpopulation

Post Reply New Topic

Voted - NO people have the right to make their own decision.

Malthusian thinking stinks imsho.

There is enough fro all it's a matter of distribution and not stifling infrastructural development in poor countries - invariably one would find that the birth rate would decrease as the standard of living increased as has been shown time and time again.

@Sand you're belief in 'genetic engineering maybe coming to the rescue' sounds frighteningly like some Huxleyan eugenics.

@ AnnaBanana - 'rich people should have kids' - bleurgh!

Sounds like a kind of communism.

I think people should have the right to have as many kids as they can afford. The mass reproduction problem also isn't with rich, western countries. It's all the poor countries that keep having tons and tons of kids. Seriously, here's the top 10 countries for #of children per woman (from the CIA World Factbook):
1 Niger 7.75
2 Mali 7.29
3 Uganda 6.77
4 Afghanistan 6.53
5 Somalia 6.52
6 Burundi 6.33
7 Yemen 6.32
8 Burkina Faso 6.28
9 Congo, Democratic Republic of the 6.20
10 Angola 6.12

These are some of the poorest countries in the world! These are the countries that should stop having so many kids, because they can't even feed themselves as it is.

A lot of the west is actually having a problem with not having enough kids to keep up with the replacement rate (which is about 2). If anything, western countries should be encouraging their citizens to have *more* children. If population implodes, then there'll be a ton of old people with not enough young people to subsidize them.

Overpopulation in third world countries is largely driven by the fact that infant(and adult) mortality rates are dropping faster than social norms are adjusting. But they are changing. I think is just a waiting game.

i would think opening two fronts in a w-war would be a temp-solution. that or a couple of natural disasters.

Losing 25% of the population in 50 years is pretty extreme. If that was in the United States, the population would go down from about 300 million now, to 225 million. A loss of 75 million people is pretty huge.

The problem is in Europe and Japan, though. Some of these countries, if you look at the data, have a higher percentage of people 65+ than 0-14. If that 14 and under crowd keeps up the low birthrate, then that percentage disparity will only grow. It'll keep growing until most of the people in the country are old. That creates a LOT of problems besides the population decrease.