A Necessary Evil?

I write this not as a pro-choice article or a pro-life article or any other silly label. I write this as a serious look on human population control. This will obviously take a very callous and top-down view of life. From this perspective, life is not sacred. (It’s going to die anyway.) This is a very foreign thought to most, but here goes:

THOMAS MALTHUS! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! According to the World Heath Organization, there are about one billion overweight individuals in the world; 300 million are considered seriously obese. Compare this to 800 million underweight people in the world. We have around half-a-billion people with too much food, and just short of a billion with very little food. This does not make sense. As humans, you think we would give every individual the right to nourishment. This would mean sacrifices. Something like taking four of the dozen brands of cheese you can buy at your local grocery and shipping it overseas where it’ll do more good than giving you a wide selection.

We can’t feed the almost 7 billion (and growing) individuals on this planet, and we are supposed to continue to be fruitful and multiply? When does it end? When do we have to start limiting ourselves in order to save ourselves. Controlling our amount of sexual intercourse is an option. Given how much humanity enjoys sex, it is very unlikely that it will work. Any of the abstinence-only educational studies have shown that humans will be humans. Prevention seems to be the next-best thing. We cannot stop Suzie and Johnny from watching submarine races late at night, but we can decrease the probability of them popping out Johnny Jr. with the various prophylactics available. Prevention should be the top method of population control, with adequate education and accessibility. But prevention is not 100 percent fool proof. Where is humanity supposed to go if it fails?

China attempted various population control strategies. One being the one-child policy, that began in 1979. By offering economic benefits to couples who signed a certificate promising to only have one child, they hoped to curb the ever-growing population. It had very little effect on the birth rate of the country, especially in rural areas.
Mass temporary sterilizations are a possible option. There have been many jokes made by me in the past about restricting child bearing to a license. You need to show adequate responsibility to drive. Isn’t having a child more dangerous? You’d have to prove adequate financial responsibility, mental responsibility, etc. I know a social services worker who said, “I can take the child away from them [bad parents], but I can’t stop them from having more.” The problem with this idea is the amount of control we are giving to an organization. They get to determine who breeds – which is a frightening thought. So, mass temporary sterilizations open up too many control issues.

A HUGE WAR! We haven’t had one of these in a while. I’m not talking about an Iraq. The kill count is too low. Something more along the lines of a third-world war. Roughly 72 million people died throughout WWII. I’m sure we could easily double that count with a third global war. Although, in the end, I think this method would be very messy. I’m sure there has to be an easier way. A pandemic would do the same thing but with the same kind of mess.

Which leads us to abortion. The individual has the right to decide if they are capable to care for the child. The individual has other options such as adoption. But in the end, we are allowing an individual-controlled method after prevention to not have a child. Much less messy than a war and with no control issues.

Now, people can debate up and down when the embryo is a human being: conception, heartbeat, brainwaves, birth, etc. They can debate up and down if it is murder or akin to scratching off skin cells. In the end, humans need to be responsible stewards of this planet. The time of uncontrolled multiplying has to come to an end. We need to limit ourselves. Prevention should be the number one option, but when it fails, there needs to be something more.

  • March 26, 2008