Overpopulation Depression

02.20.2011

I skimmed over an article on Yahoo! today about projections on how the world is going to look by 2050 population-wise. I couldn’t bring myself to read the entire article. For one, I can’t stand reading articles on the Internet; I’m a purist (I need to feel it – a newspaper, a magazine, etc - in my hands). Secondly, topics on overpopulation depress me and I start thinking about how having a child would contribute to this which then makes me feel like I’m carrying the Earth’s burden on my shoulders even though I, logically, know this to be ridiculous.

Ugh! It’s frustrating!

The countries with the most overpopulation are the poor ones. And the poor ones are usually the most religious. And those that are religious are against birth control. And here we go round and round the mulberry bush. I hate this topic. I wish religious institutions would get off their high-horse and discuss birth control. It would bring awareness to the dangers of STDs, it would bring awareness to unwanted pregnancies and its repercussions, and, most importantly, it would teach WOMEN responsible sexual activity not as a means of necessarily promoting it but to be protective and respective of one's body. Why are people so afraid of education? Why?

The Dangers of Education, Part III

06.05.2010

[I promise that this will be my last entry using the Mother Jones article on the crisis of overpopulation.]

I understand that organized religion can provide many benefits. Those who truly heed Jesus’ call or any other prophets to whom they pray really do do good in the world and help those less fortunate, provide an education, and try to help develop a positive self-esteem. But I believe that organized religion can fall into the same trap that many governments fall into: a need for control and power. The Catholic church is absolutely no exception to this and, I think, this comes out with issues about children and birth control.

Using the Philippines as an example, Whitty, the journalist from the Mother Jones magazine, states that birth control was once very high in the predominantly Catholic country. However, because of its religion, in 2003, the Philippine government “bowed to the church demands to support only ‘natural family planning’ – otherwise known as the ryhythm method, and grimly referred to as Vatican roulette.”[1]

“Today more than half of all pregnancies in the Philippines are unplanned – 10% more than a decade ago..the Guttmacher Institute [a think tank] calculates that easy access to contraception would reduce those births by 800,000 and abortions by half a million a year. Furthermore, it would deliver a net savings to the government on the order of $16.5 million a year in reduced health costs from unwatnted pregnancies, including the brutal medical consequences of illegal back-alley abortions.”[2]

So an education about birth control would:

1) REDUCE unwanted births by 800,000. REDUCE UNWANTED BIRTHS!

2) REDUCE abortions by ½ million a year. REDUCE ABORTIONS! Isn’t this what we ALL want regardless of where we stand on the issue?

3) saving money. Saving Money. One more time: SAVING MONEY!

So an education Reduces unwanted births, Reduces abortions and Saves money. What is the problem?

Ronald Reagan instigated the “global gag rule” in 1984 prohibiting the US funding of any foreign family planning organization to provide abortions which also, as a result, slowed and even stopped these organizations from providing health care to at least 26 developing nations, primarily in Africa. STDs skyrocketed along with unwanted pregnancies. I’m not advocating abortion as population control by any means. I’m advocating education of contraception and the dangers of sex when not careful. “The UN estimates that at its height in 2005, the unmet demand for contraceptives and family planning drove up fertility rates between 15 and 35 percent in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Arab states, Asia and Africa…”[3]

I get that Catholics want to advocate life and I don’t have a problem with that. But why can’t a woman (and a family) decide WHEN they want to bring a child into the world? It all comes down to sex and how it’s so “taboo.” An act that is innate and natural is taught that it is wrong and is used by the church to ensure control. This, in my opinion, is a crime against humanity. Accept that people have sex, provide them with the necessary information and celebrate the joy of a birth even more because you know that it was not only planned but that the parents have done what they can to prepare themselves to properly take care of the child. This could lower child abuse statistics, it could lower our overpopulation statistics and, in the end, contribute to raising happy, healthy and successful individuals. How is that so wrong?

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[1] Whitty, Julia Mother Jones Vol. 35, No. 3, San Francisco, CA, June 2010, pp. 40.

[2] pp. 40-41.

[3] p. 41.

The Dangers of Education, Part II

06.04.2010

One of the solutions that the journalist in the Mother Jones article that I referred to yesterday wrote about is “education.” Ironic, of course, because I opened my entry yesterday about how depressing it can be when one is educated and able to think critically.

There have been a number of studies that have shown that when a group of people is educated, the benefits of living rise exponentially. This is self-explanatory, I think, but what surprised me greatly was the fact that most illiterate people in the world are women. Actually, that fact alone doesn’t surprise me. Men, who make up most of governments, have always tried to suppress women and a lack of education is a very good way to suppress anybody. But I digress.

I’m sure we’ve all heard of microloans where a person in a poorly developed country, mostly a woman, receives a small scale loan of some sort to help her provide for her family. It can range from a monetary loan to being provided with a goat or some other animal to help her make some money.

A Bangladeshi man by the name of “Muhammad Yunus founded Grammen (“villages”) Bank in 1983. His revolutionary model was to loan to the unloanable poor – notably women – who lacked collateral, enabling them to develop their own businesses and free themselves from poverty. This radical innovation won Yunus the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.” Next is the clincher: “Empirical studies now support his intuition of 27 years ago: Women make better loan recipients than men if your aim is to increase family well-being. Compared to men’s loans, women’s loans double family income and increase child survival twenty-fold…[In other words,] The best 21^st-century contraceptive is a Yunusian device, a microloan.”[1]

When a woman is educated enough at least to take a loan and support herself, she sees the world a little differently and may have fewer children so that they can have a better life than she growing up. More money provides an opportunity for a better quality of life.

Many Americans have a better quality of life, but I think what’s happened is we’ve become greedy. We want 4 cars for a two-adult household, we want to be able to take whatever we want and use it because, by golly, we’re entitled to it. Right? But our selfishness and greed is destroying our future. But, I guess, because we don’t immediately feel the affects of our actions daily and right away, we choose to ignore it. And as long as we keep popping out babies, the notion is that we won’t be around in 100 years to feel the affects of our decisions of today, so why should we care? Our great-grandchildren won’t know who we are personally so there’s no deep investment that far down the line. What matters is that our emotional needs of having babies are satisfied now.

I leave with the following to think about:[2]

[1] pp. 41-42.

[2] p.31.

The Dangers of Education, Part I

06.03.2010

I sometimes feel a burden of being educated and being able to think critically. I know how that sounds. I know it makes me arrogant and self-righteous. But education does bring an extra layer of worry. Keeping up with various topics and, for the purposes of this blog, keeping up with the issues of children, it’s exhausting to read an article and look into our future and see how grim it can be.

I picked up a magazine that I never read called Mother Jones. I’ve heard of it and seen it at my mom’s house before, but I’ve never actually read it. I picked it up because the cover page was titled “Who’s to Blame for the Population Crisis? A) the Vatican B) Washington C) You.” Under each choice is a sketch of the Pope covering his eyes, Uncle Sam covering his ears and a woman covering her mouth (based on the famous “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” motif). I immediately picked up the magazine because the issue of our global population crisis is one of the top reasons why I still have no child.

The article is mainly about India and I suppose the reason for that is because the population crisis there is emblematic of what the future holds for us. Much of India’s farmland has become desert with others in the process of becoming a desert. Topsoil in the US has long eroded shrinking our own farmland because of irresponsible farming practices as well as the demand for food outgrowing our ability to produce it. This prompted companies like McDonald’s to go to South America and start destroying the Amazon in order to graze cattle for beef to feed the need for our demand of fast food.

Globally, the tipping point came in 1983, “when our population of nearly 4.7 billion began to consume natural resources faster than they could be replenished – a phenomenon called ‘ecological overshoot.’ Last year, 6.8 billion of us consumed the renewable resources of 1.4 Earths.”[1]

What scared me immensely is the following statistic. “Planned or not, 139 million new people are added every year: more than an entire Japan, nearly an entire Russia…Countered against the 56 million deaths annually, our world gains 83 million extra people every year, the equivalent of another Iran. That’s 1.6 million more humans alive this week than last week and 227,000 more people today than yesterday – all needing food, water, homes, and medicine for an average lifespan of 69 years. We are asking our world to supply an additional 2.1 trillion human-days of life support for every single year. Eventually, most of these 83 million new people added every year will have kids, too.”[2]

How do I justify in my head bringing another human being into this world that is drowning in human population? How do I justify it?

The common misconception is that we are killing the Earth and one day, species will be extinct and we (humans) will all become extinct too. But the fact of the matter is that while we are killing parts of the Earth, she will survive. WE are killing ourselves and our future by overpopulating the Earth and using and abusing her resources for our own selfishness. Earth will figure out a way to survive. She has done so for decades and decades and decades. One of the ways she pays us back for our abuse is providing droughts. About 50,000 Europeans were killed in 2003 because of a heat wave while also slashing crops harvest by as much as 36%.[3] India is now experiencing a drought and we have begun to experience one in the US. Ever notice the water conservation ads that have started to hit the ad waves both on TV and on billboards? By over consuming and by the grace of our arrogance, we are killing ourselves. Not the Earth.

Do I want to bring a child into this?

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[1] Whitty, Julia Mother Jones Vol. 35, No. 3, San Francisco, CA, June 2010, pp. 27-28.

[2] p.34

[3] p. 31.