World Birthrate

I found this on google:

"When I was walking down the street in Guatemala city I was hit by a flash of insight. It came in the form of Juan, a street vendor who was trying to sell me some tourist trinkets. I wasn't interested in buying anything, but since there were no other likely buyers around and I spoke Spanish he stopped to chat with me. One of the first questions that I was asked was how many children I had.

I had none. Juan had six.

I have had this conversation many times in my travels and inevitably I would be asked why I didn't have any children. After all, I am married and in my late 30s. In most of the developing world I should be at about half a dozen kids by now. Yet this time, the conversation took a different turn.

"How is it that you stop from having children?" asked Juan.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"You are married. How do you prevent children? Do you use condoms?"

I'm sure Juan wasn't the most educated person around. But he certainly wasn't the least. He spoke good Spanish and ran a small business selling souveniers to tourists. He was a typical Guatemalan. And he had no idea how to stop having children. So little of an idea that he was able to overcome huge societal taboos to talk to a total stranger about sex.

I proceeded to teach Juan about birth control. I told him that condoms work OK, but that the pill is much better. I told him that the most effective method would be to get a vasectomy. "It hurts a bit for two days and then you'll never have to worry about children again. You have a completely normal sex life afterwards. I've had it done and I'm very glad."

And then it struck me. None of these methods would work for Juan. He couldn't afford birth control pills or condoms. He certainly couldn't afford vasectomy surgery. And his church was probably telling him that birth control was a sin. In reality, there was nothing that somebody like Juan could do to stop having children.

There are 6.6 billion people on the planet. We all know it's too many. If there were only 500 million all of our environmental problems would vanish. The earth could sustain us by regrowing forests faster than we cut them down, and absorbing carbon faster than we release it. We could farm only the most fertile lands and people would have lots of land to live on. There would be tons of space for wilderness. Parents with smaller families would have more money to invest in the education and feeding of each child.

Yet nearly fifty years after the invention of the pill, the UN reports that 201 million women have no access to any form of birth control. In Mali 58% of women of child bearing age can't name even a single method of birth control. In Sub-Saharan Africa only 14% of married women use a modern method of birth control. (details here) The planet is dying from overpopulation and nobody is talking about population control. How could this be?

The biggest reason for this deplorable state of affairs is religion. I make no bones about being no fan of religion in general, but in few ways has religion done more harm than with it's bronze age attitudes towards family planning. The Catholic church is against birth control completely. In many developing countries it wields enough influence to keep sex education out of public education, and birth control out of public health. The Catholic church also puts strong pressure on followers to have as many children as possible. Each child is a gift from God after all. Part of His grand plan. Too bad that God isn't much interested in feeding, or clothing, or educating all these little gifts. How many young mothers have died in childbirth because the Pope doesn't want them to stop have children? How many children starve because their families can't feed an extra mouth?

Of course it isn't just the Catholics that are at fault. Many religions get completely hung up on the idea of sex before marriage. There is this absurd idea among the faithful that teaching birth control will encourage unwed couples to have more sex. If we don't teach people about sex, goes the logic, they won't have sex. It's idiotic nonsense which flies in the face of thousands of years of human history and numerous studies. It is also the official policy of the US government. The Bush administration has created a global gag order on sex education. Charities that teach anything other than abstinence-only, even if it is only a small part of their program, and even if it is from entirely seperate funding sources, risk having their entire US government funding cut. Congress insists that one third of global AIDS education focus on abstinence-only programs which discourage use of condoms. Yet for all its faults the US is an incredibly generous donor. Most organizations would rather shut down their family planning work than do without such a large source of funds.

Of course we can't just blame religion. A second problem is our obsession with growth. Economic growth is good. We all know that. We live in a society where a business that has profitably employed ten people for twenty years is considered a failure because it hasn't grown. Everything is expected to get bigger.

The easiest economic growth comes from having an increasingly large supply of consumers. If every year there are more people, then every year we need to build more houses, and produce more cars, and build more roads. Unfortunately we also have to cut down more forests and pump more carbon into the atmosphere. Until there are no more forests. Then they will starve.

Most governments are terrified of falling populations. The governments of many developed countries have programs in place specifically to encourage parents to have more children. In Russia and Signapore there are financial incentives. And I have been called selfish for chosing not to add to the problem. I should be the one getting financial incentives. Nobody is going to have to cut down an acre of Brazilian rainforest to grow beef for my little ones. Nobody is going to have to breath the carbon that my children produce. Nobody will swim in their excrement. China, with its one child policy, has probably done more to save the planet than any other single government.

Luckily for us, when people have the choice they generally choose to have smaller families. Despite the mindless policies of the Pope the overwhelming majority of Catholics defy his orders and use contraceptives. Without immigration, populations would already be falling in most of the industrialized world. Financial incentives to have children don't work well for educated populations.

It costs about $500,000 to raise a child in the industrialized world. Think of what that money could do for children in the developing world. It could buy 10,000 Nepalese girls out bonded servitude. How many vacinations could it buy? How many meals?

The world doesn't need more children. We need universal, free, access to contraceptives. There should be visiting vasectomy clinics in rural villages right next to the visiting dentists and doctors. We need to leave behind our inhibitions about sex and teach young children everywhere where babies come from and how to plan them. Our planet is full, and we don't have another one."

There was a reply to this, which went as such:
60 comments:
Anonymous said...
Been seconding guessing that vasectomy lately? Know why? It's probably your subconscious finally getting to you, confronting you with the blame you deserve for not having children. Because of your selfish ilk, almost all western nations are BELOW replacement level birthrates, and that's why we have immigration problems. Wonderful. The 3rd world engulfs us because asshole here wants to grow old and filthy by himself. Hey folks, HAVE children! The rest of the world isn't going to stop, so why should we? The 3rd world will merely engulf us anyhow because our population will be aged. Let's keep modern civilization going strong. Aren't you glad your mommy's and daddy's gave birth to YOU? Return the favor assholes. You can't take your laptops with you to the grave.

That's because those 201 million women live in regimes to whom they mean precisely JACK FUCK.  They're left to toil in staggering fear and ignorance, which are the two primary drivers of careless of use of a penis in a vagina.  Meanwhile, their beloved leaders are dressing up in business suits to suck some more money from the IMF and World Bank, just in time to cash out to some French estate while stolen money sloshes into various bank accounts in tax-sheltering nations.  Who ultimately catches the bill for all that?  Yep! -- those 201 million women.

The band "Rage Against the Machine" said it best:

WOMAN IS THE NIGGER OF THE WORLD.

  True, but at the same time that these women are not getting birth control, I am willing to bet most of them have slim to nil medical treatment available. So if they do not, chances are their children do not, and many of them will die. Therefore, you have multiple children hoping that the law of averages provides someone who can be an appropriate heir for the man of the household and will carry on the name and property. After all, that is the only use for a woman in these situations, yes? Perfect situation for any country where social and medical maladies run rampantly, that is, until the effects are lessened or cured.

   So say you have a newly developing country where instead of 40% of the children surviving to adulthood, say 70% of them do (and before anyone has to mention, these figures are pulled directly from my ass, pure hypotheticals rarely require the immaculate scrutiny 4chan is known for). This is hardly a new trend, but usually explosions of population are limited to one general area, not simultaneously over large geographic areas.
So, solutions anyone? I shall not merely lament that women are being used, I propose we find answers.
  
   I am sure that women being used as baby spawners is going to remain a strong trend, yet abortions will not catch on due to the dual barriers presented by inadequate medical facilities, and in many areas, religious taboo. That said, I say that we need to convince the CIA that it is within our best interests to plant American abortion doctors in the most explosive areas of growth. Not only will the Bush administration be able to claim they are deporting abortion doctors, thereby somehow saving the sanctity of marriage or whatever they claimed, but after a while it could affect our immigration policy. Hell, if Republicans would set up a series of puppet tyrants to save us from communism and drug trades, imagine what this new batch would do to enact a Malthusian dream?

Orim, some of what you say makes sense, and other stuff might seem like sense to you but it contains fail.  Birthing children into the world as a crapshoot that one or two of them might make it, is depraved.  If you child mortality is that high, I can guarantee you that the lives of the children that survive are going to be a living hell.  People should work to ensure that nearly EVERY child that is born can survive childhood under normal conditions.  That means working YOURSELF (not in creating another, sickly little workforce) to improve your environment so that future generations (including your own, if you succeed during your lifetime) aren't born into deadly poverty.

It only stands to reason that if your life sucks gonads, that bringing CHILDREN into the same environment is ONLY going to make things WORSE.  If woman is the nigger of the world, she'd better fucking WISE UP before she produces more billions of stick children for whom a bullet in the head is an act of pure mercy.

That's really in a nutshell the only thing that those 201 million poor women have to understand:  stop having kids until your OWN LIFE is stable.  As for sex being some sort of requirement:  there are no documented instances of pregnancy from ORAL SEX.  Catch a clue:  you can put the penis in TWO OTHER HOLES so Mr. Third World Daddy-O can get his fucking rocks off.

Also if the kids grow up fucked up, who do they abuse? Woman.

It isn't so much that it makes sense to me, it is instead that this crapshoot does happen in various forms in more adverse developing countries. Take Africa as an unreasonably reasonable example: Say instead of having five children, you, being a dutiful mother, have one. Pouring all of your time and resources into providing a proper education and nutrition as best as you are able, hoping that they will rise above and thrive. Then they contract malaria one night and die quickly. Damn. Are you going to be so keen to repeat this, or for a variety of reasons (you assuming to be one of the teeming masses of lower class African women, with all inherently different worldviews from your own) will you instead choose to have multiple children and split attention as best you can? Keep in mind that assuming you depend on agriculture or herding to sustain you, having children is essentially the only way to increase your workforce.

Your argument makes sense, but your idealism keeps it from being practical, unless you are deluding yourself otherwise. Assuming these children, or their mothers,  will have anything approaching 'normal conditions' for living is unrealistic enough to begin with. Furthermore, normal for who? I was a lucky sperm to be born into a stable home literally and figuratively, I cannot ask that these mothers do as well with a house of cardboard and despair. If you believe that fellation en masse will make a situation better, you're forgetting the aspect of religion. Assuming you're in South America or Mexico with a large Catholic population, sodomy is still frowned upon, even moreso than birth control. Perhaps you see it differently, yet most of the Mexicans I hang around with agree. Fiercely.

By the way if you are a nigger of the world, semantics aside, who says you get a choice where you are going to take it?

Orim, really.  I'm sure there are mothers who do exactly as you said, but those are investment children ... and largely Africa is filled with labor children and accidental children.  There's an obvious LACK of "proper education and nutrition".

What I'm saying is that if women really put their minds to it, they can stop the production of labor and accidental children, and instead create investment children as you testified.  That'll mean fewer children, leading to fewer draws on foodstocks and medical care.  (Children under a debilitating nutritional regime aren't going to materially help you in the fields, anyway.)  There might just actually be enough to go around in that sort of new environment.

But they've gotta STOP dropping children in litters so carelessly!

The aspect of religion is something that has to be fixed.  When you obey some religious more and only create children in misery, you quite simply have to stop being hypocritical and stupid.  Raising children into institutionalized poverty is the wrong thing to do by those so-called Christian teachings.  The overriding teaching is to "do no evil".  As your 5th kid (you don't remember his name) drops dead in the fields, it behooves you to recall the overriding teaching.

The problem isn't just that we have too many people, but that the people who mostly have lots of children are idiots and/or poor.  Which means they're passing on fail to the rest of us.  I don't think we'd be having this problem if Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking had 50 egghead children between them. 

This is a huge problem because tons of people who only have fail to speak of their lives look at each other and say, "Hell, I don't have a job, an education, any money, or any hope.  But I do have tons of time.  We'd might as well fuck.  I don't have anything better to do."  It's the same way RedCream just sits on 4chan all day and responds.  And he illustrates perfectly how to solve the problem.  Internet porn and 4chan for all!

Exactly, #8!  Even if I was an idiot, I'm not spawning more idiots from my loins.

In an overcrowded world, childbirth is the ultimate self indulgence.  Fap, and improve society.

I shan't quibble with you further on this matter, as with virtually all of the posts I have read of yours, I agree with eighty percent of the core matter, whilst the remaining twenty, hampered by gaps in our respective backgrounds, or logic... are utter vitriol to me. In terms of realistic, if heartless, solutions I believe that somehow training and implanting a flood of barely adequate abortion doctors to the largest areas of growth would be best. Taking Russia as an example, abortions are the leading form of birth control, yet the poor conditions and lack of proper training make it so that on average, by the fifth abortion most of the women are barren as the moon.

On my own part, agreeing to disagree to an extent, I leave you with an apt quote from one Mr. Seanbaby:

"Let's assume only half the people on the planet were stupid at one time. The nonstupid married, then had a kid or two, raised them like Dr. Spock told them to, and worked hard to put them through college. In contrast, the stupids had a kid or two, then got married, had a few more kids, found out about a couple more on a TV talk show, and worked hard to save money to hit the lottery to put their kids through a plate glass window after they got fired from the cannery."

Orim struck something there. "Humanity". I'm as devoted to the powers of cynicism, pessimism and sarcam as anyone; but to providea solution that forgets the humanity of the problem, like kill them or forget religion or the like is folly. Childbrth, love, family, religion- an overabundance of these in people may be the source of the problem, but to abandon them alltogether would make those people less than human; it would put them in the realm of cattle

BUMP

a law like every man that have a child must get a vasectomy would be nice but hard to force

Abortions for all!

>>1

I find it amazing that everyone agrees that the earth is overpopulated, yet the solution is always stopping other people from breeding.  If you believe in overpopulation, and you haven't yet sterilized yourself, you make baby jesus cry.

lol

>>15
As if anyone in this thread will ever have sex.